PDC stats analyst Christopher Kempf assesses the Cazoo World Darts Championship’s post-Phil Taylor era, which has featured four champions and some new rivalries on the sport’s biggest stage.
The 2017/18 World Darts Championship was an event of great importance in the history of darts, not least because it marked the 25th anniversary of the first staging of the event and the last before a major expansion of the World Championship.
Spectators at the 2018 edition witnessed Paul Lim's near-nine-darter, the unheralded Jamie Lewis' run to the semi-finals and the epic clashes between debutant Rob Cross and the two greatest darts players of all time.
But most importantly, after playing the 2,876th leg of his PDC World Championship career, Phil Taylor bid farewell to professional darts, leaving behind an enormous void in a sport he had dominated for so long.
The 2022/23 World Darts Championship reminds us that five years of the post-Taylor era have elapsed, allowing us a glimpse at the state of competition in the most important event on the calendar with no 16-time World Champion lurking somewhere in the draw.
A new Michael van Gerwen dynasty, supposedly announced by his romp to the 2019 World Championship title, failed to materialise. So let us consider the statistical leaders of just the last four World Darts Championships, looking at players with 150+ legs contested:
Averages
- 101.27 Michael van Gerwen
- 99.50 Michael Smith
- 99.28 Peter Wright
- 98.87 Dave Chisnall
- 97.33 Gary Anderson
Despite falling short in his first two World Championship finals, Michael Smith has emerged as one of the top contenders to reach his third.
Smith has put forth an average three points higher than in all other tournaments across his 398 legs played in contention for the Sid Waddell Trophy, which includes a 105.22 average in the 2019 semi-final - the second-highest in World Championship history for a match containing at least 35 legs.
Gary Anderson, the player with the fifth highest average, is the only player to have contested more than 500 legs since Taylor's retirement - with World Championship prize money comprising 75% of his Order of Merit income, Anderson's record of three semi-final appearances in four events has kept him in the top echelons of professional darts.
Van Gerwen has been by far the strongest performer, even if one were to ignore his 2019 title-winning effort. We are left to wonder what the 2022 World Championship might have looked like had two of the top five performers at Alexandra Palace not contracted Covid-19 and been forced to withdraw.
Last-Dart Double Checkouts
- 49.5% Callan Rydz
- 47.7% James Wade
- 46.4% Rob Cross
- 45.1% Gerwyn Price
- 44.8% Dave Chisnall
Obsession with averages can represent a sort of vanity in darts, especially due to the frequency with which the player with the higher average loses. On the other hand, there is no scenario in which hitting a double with the last dart in hand cannot benefit a player's effort.
The surprise 2022 quarter-finalist Callan Rydz, despite only averaging 100+ in one match in his World Championship career, has mastered that skill.
Over the past four tournaments, players overall have only managed to hit 36.5% of their last-dart doubles: Rydz is 13 points better than the average, and in 2022 managed 33 checkouts with 61 last darts at double.
James Wade's appearance at second on this list is a key attribute of his surprising endurance in spite of lower averages - against Ritchie Edhouse in 2020, he defeated a player with a higher average 3-0 in sets, in large part due to his perfect record on last-dart double finishes.
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