Ahead of this weekend's BetVictor World Cup of Darts, PDC Stats Analyst Christopher Kempf picks out the players who have excelled for their country in the Doubles format...
The World Cup of Darts is now a completely different event from the tournament it once was. Gone are the short-format singles matches - teamwork in doubles play is now all that matters.
Last year's winning Welsh team of Gerwyn Price and Jonny Clayton illustrated this principle well in 2023, as each player hit the winning double in 17 of their 34 legs.
But that's not to say that all teams need necessarily be so evenly balanced - many unseeded teams have historically been composed of a nation's one Tour Card Holder - its one representative in professional darts - and a local qualifier new to televised darts.
Regardless of whether a team is an established power like Wales or a relative newcomer, like Malaysia, who is the best doubles teammate in the World Cup?
For such an evaluation we can't just look at long-term averages - naturally, the usual PDC suspects Price and Michael van Gerwen appear at the top the table of active players' career World Cup doubles averages from 2013 to present, just as they do in singles matches.
Because of the delay between a player's turn at the board and his teammate's, a good third dart can demonstrate confidence and provide encouragement in the waiting time at the oche.
Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that the player with the highest third-dart scoring average is one of the four remaining players to have participated in every World Cup from 2010 to the present.
Simon Whitlock has the highest-per-dart average for the third dart of any World Cup player with more than 20 doubles legs played, as well as the 52% treble 20 accuracy with his last dart.
With three very different teammates sharing the honour of representing Australia over the past fifteen years, Whitlock has long adopted the role of team captain, giving Paul Nicholson, Damon Heta or Kyle Anderson the sense that the 2010 World Championship runner-up is in control of the match.
Even better than giving one's teammate confidence going into his next visit to the board is ensuring that the player will not need to come back at all.
No player has benefitted more from this skill than Rowby-John Rodriguez, who as the regular teammate of Mensur Suljovic has been relieved of the pressure to win a leg for his team more than 60% of the time when a leg came down to a third dart at double.
Latvia's Madars Razma deserves a mention also not only for his 53% last-dart double percentage, but for leading all regular doubles players in checkout percentage - a fact which will surely relieve his teammate and World Cup debutant Valters Melderis.
No other PDC event has adopted the team/doubles format since the World Cup's inception in 2010, and over time it has committed more to its difference from all other darts tournaments on the calendar.
Most PDC Tour Card Holders have no televised doubles legs to their names at all, and those few that do can count the number of doubles matches in which they've participated on one hand.
It's no wonder, then, that the four players who have fifteen years' worth of doubles experience - Whitlock, Suljovic, Brendan Dolan and William O'Connor - are, all other things being equal - the most valuable teammates to have.