As the countdown to the 2024/25 Paddy Power World Darts Championship continues, PDC Stats Analyst Christopher Kempf analyses players' career success in World Championship set-deciding legs...
There is no position of pressure for a darts player quite like a set-deciding leg at the World Championship.
It is one of the only situations in which a player can watch two legs he has just won wiped off the board when their opponent wins the set.
A player without the requisite mental fortitude to succeed in darts will begin to consider their missed opportunities rather than the leg and set ahead - this way leads to defeat.
For a player who won nearly 65% of his legs across a 25-year PDC career, Phil Taylor had a surprisingly weak performance in deciding legs, winning only 61.7%.
This was no great obstacle for Taylor, however, as 'The Power' was forced to a fifth (or 11th) leg in only 28.6% of career World Championship sets, as opposed to 39% for Michael van Gerwen and 41% for Gary Anderson.
Taylor could afford to drop the occasional tightly-contested set when he was likely to be recording plenty of 3-0 set sweeps in the same match.
Though Van Gerwen has now gone more than five years without winning a World Championship title, he is still performing well above par in the fifth legs of sets.
In his last two Alexandra Palace campaigns, Van Gerwen has won 12 of 15 deciders and is now one of only two active players with a winning record against the throw in the last legs of sets.
If Van Gerwen recalls the embarrassment of losing four deciding-sets in his first World Championship final with Taylor (Taylor broke throw in three of those legs), he has certainly put it to a constructive use.
One player who could not afford to wait for such wins was Rob Cross in his successful debut campaign at the Alexandra Palace, who stunningly won 11 of his 15 deciders in that tournament, while facing titans like Taylor and van Gerwen, and two-thirds of those in his seven total World Championship appearances.
Cross is one of only three players with significant numbers of deciding legs contested to have produced an average in those legs equivalent to a 15-darter pace, and the most invincible player of all in winning deciding legs on his own throw.
Kim Huybrechts is set to appear in his 14th consecutive World Championship in 2024/25. He is still looking to recapture the success of his 2011/12 debut in the PDC, in which he reached the quarter-finals of four ranking TV events in just over a year.
However, the Belgian holds an impressive 68.3% win rate in set-deciding legs - the highest rate of any active player who has participated in at least 10 World Championships.
Of the 266 legs which Huybrechts has lost in his World Championship career, only 13 decided a set. The extra income from the wins he has notched as a result - on average, £10,000 per match - have certainly preserved his seed status in previous years as well as his qualifications for other ranking TV events.
Another leading light of his nation's World Championship hopes is Daryl Gurney, who has appeared in nearly as many World Championships as Huybrechts, but has two quarter-finalist appearances to his name.
Nevertheless, a player with a career World Championship average in excess of 95 would aspire to much more, especially seven years after winning a World Grand Prix title.
Gurney's lack of success in his 56 deciding legs, winning only 36%, has hindered his career aspirations, and none more so than the final leg of the 2021 quarter-final, in which the eventual champion Gerwyn Price won both of the set-deciding legs of that match.
On the strength of only one appearance as a professional, Luke Littler is on course to demolish some deciding-leg records, thanks to his 105.69 average in the 19 deciding legs he contested in the 2024 edition of the World Championship.
Only his performance in the final, in which he lost four of five to Luke Humphries, let him down.
A four point increase from overall average to deciding-leg average would be the biggest in darts, if he is able to continue it, but judging from the success he has attained in his debut year and by his relaxed, unperturbed play in even the most stressful of circumstances, he will have no difficulty in doing so.
Follow Christopher on Twitter @ochepedia