"No advantage over older players": PDC statistician debunks age being darting factor using Littler and Beaton as example

External factors in darts such as age or even playing on home soil are often discussed but in the view of PDC statistician, Christopher Kempf neither are clean cut.

Writing in his latest column, Kempf also known as Ochepedia compared the averages of players who have reached World finals at differing ends in their career. Namely Luke Littler and Steve Beaton and came to the conclusion that the latter was just as likely to reach the final and win a title than the former.

"Age could plausibly be a factor in player performance - in almost all other sports, a 20-year-old player would be expected to surpass the achievements of both a 15-year-old and those of a 50-year-old, since younger players are still developing their talents and older players are struggling against the entropy of aging," he said in his PDC column.

"This is not necessarily so in darts, which has witnessed both a 17-year-old reach the World Championship final and a 52-year-old win the title."

"On this topic we can at least observe the performances of players representing a wide range of ages, from the aforementioned teenager Littler to the 60-year-old Steve Beaton. If there was a relationship between age and performance, we could see it.

"But the conventional wisdom is correct - young players have no advantage over older players, and vice versa, solely due to their ages. A linear model plotting two years' worth of Players Championship averages indicates a miniscule decline of 0.06 points in averages for each additional 10 years of age, with extremely low confidence that any variation in averages could be explained by such a factor.

"17-year-olds and 53-year-olds have recorded nearly equivalent averages in the past two years of floor events - the likelihood that a player will average 95 or more in Players Championship events is just as high whether a player is contemplating retirement or finishing their studies."

But whilst that darting myth was debunked, the opposite can be said for the potential that German players have an advantage on home soil.

"It makes sense that German players, who otherwise would need to fly to England and make arrangements for time off from their jobs for a multi-day trip to compete on the Players Championship circuit, would feel more at ease when only a short commute on the Autobahn would bring them to the oche.

"They might even feel a sense of patriotic honour in facing foreign opponents in their own country. Surely, then, German players' performances must differ on their home ground?

"The answer is, surprisingly, yes, but a negative one! German players actually have had a worse track record on their home soil than they have had in English Players Championship events.

"The 13 Germans who have contested matches on the 2023 or 2024 Players Championship circuit have a combined win-loss record of 70-99 on home soil (41% win rate), with only Ricardo Pietreczko posting a winning record of 17-11 and reaching a quarter-final in a single event on German soil.In English events, the German contingent actually win more matches than they lose (242 wins, 234 losses), and PDC veterans Martin Schindler and Gabriel Clemens join Pietreczko in having winning records.

"From legs won (46.9% in Germany, 50.5% in England) to averages (89.66 in Germany, 91.64 in England), in almost every statistic, the German players perform worse on home soil."