ANALYSIS: Steve Beaton's legendary career in numbers

Steve Beaton will put an end to his PDC career at the end of this year. The 60-year-old Englishman has been a familiar face on the darting scene since 1991, first with the BDO and then for many years with the PDC.

With Beaton's impending retirement, Raymond van Barneveld is the only remaining active PDC Tour Card holder who qualified for a unified World Championship before the formation of the PDC in 1993. Also, after Beaton's retirement, there are no more Tour Card holders born before 1964.

The more than 10,000 legs Beaton has played since the advent of statistical record-keeping indicate the retirement of a remarkable figure. Beaton's highest known averages in the PDC were recorded within a month of each other back in 2022. In August of that year, he averaged 110.41 in a match against Martin Lukeman at a Players Championship tournament. Shortly after, Jonathan Worsley too experienced the full force of Beaton's power. In a European Tour qualifying tournament that same year, Beaton averaged a whopping 118.19, the highest he ever recorded in competition, and won almost all of his legs in 12 darts or less.

The magnitude of these achievements would have remained unknown had the scores not been recorded on DartConnect, unlike the many hundreds of matches he played in four decades of darts. Beaton threw four recorded nine darters in his career. Only one was captured on video though, in a nearly empty room during the 2019 German Darts Open in a first-round match against Kirk Shepherd.

No opponent faced Steve Beaton more often in the Order of Merit era than Peter Wright, with Snakebite getting the better of things more often than not, winning 16 of their 30 encounters. In total, Wright played 280 legs against Beaton with only +2 leg difference. Beaton triumphed in their first six and last three encounters, indicating a consistency in his play that existed long before Peter Wright's rise to prominence in the PDC and could have continued long after Wright's crisis of form fifteen years later.

Even against the very best in the world, Beaton managed to make an impression. Notably, Beaton's incredible comeback win over Phil Taylor at the 2010 Grand Slam of Darts marked the darting The Power's only defeat on television that calendar year.

Even during his farewell season in the Pro Tour, Beaton achieved something he had never done in his career until then - back-to-back ranking victories over Michael van Gerwen. Beaton also retires after winning his only big stage match against reigning world champion Luke Humphries, a majority of his ranking TV matches with Rob Cross, but never having played a match against teenage sensation Luke Litter.

Beaton's greatest legacy will continue because of his consistency throughout his career. Beginning in 2009, when he was absent for a tournament in Canada, Beaton competed in 391 consecutive Players Championship tournaments and won two.

It is hard to imagine, with the deluge of talented players entering the darts world and then rapidly expanding, that any player currently active would remain dedicated enough to the game to qualify for the next 33 consecutive World Championships as Beaton has done.

While his rivals grew stronger and stronger over the years, Beaton remained among the best 32 players in the world; even in his senior year, he played well enough to keep his Tour Card, if he wanted to, in 2025. Therefore, his status as a professional will not be taken away from him when he retires. 41 years into a professional career - he will voluntarily surrender his Tour Card as a player entitled to another year on the circuit. As the PDC themselves say, "no player has mastered 'staying alive' quite like Steve Beaton."