PDC Stats Analyst Christopher Kempf ranks PDC players according to the calibre of opponents in matches won and lost...
The Holistic Order of Merit Enhanced Ranking (HOMER) is a ranking system devised to measure and account for important factors in the game of darts:
1. Players receive ranking points for winning any PDC ranking match (including qualifiers for those events), and always receive 0 points for losing a match.
2. The base number of ranking points available to the winner of a ranking match doubles with each successive round of the tournament.
3. The final of the World Championship has twice the ranking impact of the final of any of the other six TV ranking events, four times the impact of any European Tour event final, and eight times the ranking impact of any Players Championship final.
4. Ranking points are totaled over the span of one year, with matches losing 1/365 (0.27%) of their ranking impact for each day prior to the present day. For example, a match occurring 6 months ago will have 1/2 the ranking impact of the same match occurring today.
5. Players earn ranking bonuses for defeating players ahead of them on the Order of Merit, with a minimal bonus for defeating a player one rank above up to a maximum of double ranking impact for any player who defeats the world #1.
Damon Heta' haul of 418 points, gained from winning the Gibraltar Darts Trophy, represents approximately the maximum possible boost to a European Tour winner's power rankings.
Defeating the world number one and world number three in the final matches of a tournament is an incredibly rare achievement, and Heta has been rewarded for having done so with a 185-point ranking bonus.
The Australian has become the fifth highest HOMER ranked player through winning the title, ahead of Michael Smith and Gerwyn Price, without having moved up even one place in the Order of Merit ranking.
Following on from his World Grand Prix triumph as the HOMER #1, Michael van Gerwen must secure about 60 points every week just to prevent his point total from falling.
This is due to the attrition built into the system which eats away roughly 3% of a player's ranking points every 7 days - a player like Dimitri Van den Bergh, who lost his opening match in Gibraltar, surrenders 17 points in a winless week, leaving him ranked 7th.
Rob Cross, on the other hand, reached the semi-final for a net gain of 23 points, therefore surpassing the Belgian.
Apart from the points earned by the two finalists, the biggest achievement in moving up the power rankings belongs to Josh Rock, who defeated two top 10 players to reach yet another European Tour quarter-final.
He now ranks inside the top 25 players in the HOMER system with 228 points, making him currently the highest-ranked player from Northern Ireland in darts.
With four Players Championship events to be held at the end of this week, a minimum of 3500 ranking points will be doled out to the tour card holders - making this the last realistic opportunity of 2022 for most players to solidify their position on the leaderboard or chase a headline-making upset.