In his latest 'Stat of the Week' column, PDC Stats Analyst Christopher Kempf evaluates the Development Tour players with the best checkout percentage when they have three darts at a double...
The stat: Checkout rate with three darts at a double amongst youth players.
The parameters: 2024 Development Tour events, minimum of 50 attempts.
The caveats: Player ages are current as of May 2024. The two Development Tour weekends held thus far in 2024 were more than two months apart.
The achievements of young players within the PDC's Winmau Development Tour would normally attract more attention to the extent that it provides a glimpse of stardom awaiting players several years down the line in their careers.
In the past it has done this; for example, reigning World Champion Luke Humphries won 11 Development Tour titles between 2017 and 2019.
However, now that prodigious 17-year-old Luke Littler has followed up five Development Tour titles in his first year of eligibility for that circuit with a run to the finals of the World Championship and a likely table-topping finish in the Premier League, many young players may feel disappointed in their efforts if they fail to match those exploits in their teenage years.
The bar has now been set so high for youth performance in darts that it seems, at first, that nothing occurring on the Development Tour can compare.
More than 500 players are taking part in the 2024 Development Tour, and even those players who come away from those events without cash winnings get a chance to improve skills that will be integral to future adult success within the PDC.
One of these is the ability to win a leg with three clear darts at double - when not their opponent but only their nerves can get in the way of putting a leg on the board.
Half of all legs are won on such a checkout; while the ton-plus finish is the more impressive demonstration of skill, it wins barely more than 10% of legs.
In order to survive on the ProTour, players should be aiming to checkout where one dart would suffice in two out of every three visits, at a minimum; the PDC average is 73.3%.
Only about 56% of three-dart at double attempts are successful on the Development Tour at large.
Of the players with enough attempts to gauge their accuracy in such situations, fourteen finish more than 70% of the time, and seven beat the PDC ProTour average.
This includes three players who do not currently hold Tour Cards - Poland's former UK Open quarter-finalist Sebastian Bialecki and teenage duo Bradly Roes and Charlie Manby
At the age of 18, Manby is already a more reliable finisher with three darts to win a leg in the 2024 season than Michael van Gerwen - as is Bialecki, though he remains more famous for becoming the youngest person to complete a nine-dart leg in a PDC televised ranking event.
Above these on the doubles leaderboard sits Gian van Veen, who at the age of 22 is already the most decorated Dutch PDC player, excluding van Gerwen and Raymond van Barneveld, in terms of number of PDC titles of any description.
Thanks to his 77% completion rate on these checkouts, Van Veen is currently #1 on the tour's Order of Merit and, moreover #11 on the Players Championship circuit, deftly showing that the same skills he has honed on the Development Tour are serving him well against elite opponents.
But only one player on the Development Tour matches Littler's conversion rate with three darts at a double, and in fact that player has substantially beaten the Warrington wonderkid on this metric.
With 118 checkouts from 143 attempts, Wessel Nijman is finishing nearly five out of every six times when faced with a checkout like 24, 32 and 40 - a rate on par with the best on the PDC ProTour.
In 20 of Nijman's 28 matches this past weekend, he checked out within three darts on every such attempt, hitting an (estimated) 43.3% of his doubles overall.
Given that Littler has only managed 77.6% conversion on three-dart-at-double checkouts on the ProTour, it seems that even he can find something to admire in the performances of his former Development Tour comrades.