PDC Stats Analyst Christopher Kempf assesses the top ten PDC stars - based on their last 200 legs played - going into the new 2025 season.
#1 Averages - Luke Littler
#1 OChE - Luke Littler
#1 Doubles - Ricardo Pietreczko
#1 171-180 - Luke Littler
#1 99, 101+ Checkout - Damon Heta
The 2025 season begins in much the same way as the 2024 season did, with Luke Littler at the top of the form rankings.
This time, however, he is the World Champion, and every other Tour Card Holder will be aiming for upset victories and superior stats against the teenager from Warrington.
He may not be in as dominant of a position now than he was after the Players Championship Finals - his lead over Gary Anderson is now just over three points in 200-leg averages - but by the standards of the Form Guide, this is still an enormous lead.
From any other player, 97 maxima over the 200 legs comprising his entire World Championship campaign would be an outrageous total, but he has repeatedly proven an ability to score more than 100 - at a rate of one maximum for every two legs.
His opponents will have the difficult task in 2025 of defeating a player who is scoring and finishing at a rate which would win him 67.6% of legs on the ProTour - no other player comes within 5% of that figure.
Anderson's disappointing whitewash at the hands of Jeffrey de Graaf does not erase the fact that he is the still the PDC's #2 player over 200 legs.
With Luke Humphries edging out Michael van Gerwen for the #3 spot, that leaves the World Championship runner-up having improved substantially from November in order to reach his seventh World Championship final.
Van Gerwen’s averages have jumped by more than two points during this period, but he is still well off the pace to win 50% of his matches against Littler as he did in 2024.
The consolation of having earned the second-largest ranking prize in darts will surely not be enough for a player who spent seven years as world number one, but with Littler breaking records at every turn, further improvement will be necessary to turn the tide in the World Series and Premier League.
The great December surprise was Callan Rydz's powerful run to the quarter-finals of the World Championship, which enabled him to jump more than 40 places in the Form Guide.
Over his last 200 legs, Rydz's average exceeds those of half of the Premier League, and his 77 maxima leave him in a tie for third in power scoring.
Other aspects of his game, however, suggest a potential fragility to his game outside of one memorable tournament run.
Despite winning more legs with a higher doubles percentage than Michael van Gerwen in the quarter-finals, Rydz has the 102nd highest doubles percentage of the new 128-player class of Tour Card Holders and an OChE rating much lower than those of other players with 95 averages.
Rydz will garner much attention in 2025 as the #14 form player in the PDC on the back of his World Championship heroics, but without more efficient checkouts, the big titles will continue to elude him.
Of the players who have secured their Tour Cards for the 2025 season, Connor Scutt - who just barely lost his Tour Card in 2024 - is the #8 form player in the PDC, thanks in part to his 102 average in the first round of the World Championship.
Behind Scutt is Germany's Niko Springer, a three-time Development Tour champion, who leads the way for Germany with a 93.68 average - but more importantly, an OChE rating which suggests that he wins legs at a rate like that of a player averaging 95.
Springer begins his adult PDC career as the German #1, and at the head of the largest group of German Tour Card Holders yet seen in the PDC, including PDC-title winners Max Hopp and Martin Schindler.
With so much continental talent now on display in the PDC, the pressure will be on the 24-year-old new #1 to bring home a first TV ranking title for Germany.
*OChE (Ordinal Checkout Efficiency) explained:
OChE is a metric designed to evaluate the efficiency at which players convert their averages into legs won.
The statistic is the % of legs a player would expect to win on the ProTour, calculated from a weighted average of 4,5, 6 & 7 visit checkout rates.
Follow Christopher on Twitter @ochepedia