PDC's stats expert takes a look at the numbers behind 'the greatest leg of all time'

Everyone probably remembers the insane leg in the final of the 2023 World Darts Championship. In it, Michael van Gerwen and Michael Smith both had the chance to throw a nine darter. After Van Gerwen missed, Smith struck perfection.

Both men had first thrown a maximum score twice before they were allowed to ain for that nine darter. But how exceptional is such a leg, in which four maximum scores are thrown? PDC analyst Christopher Kempf found out.

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"Give a professional darts player three darts to throw at treble 20 and for every 15 attempts, he will score 180 about once," Kempf writes on pdc.tv. "In the 2024 Premier League 660 180s were thrown across 1,106 legs, for a rate of about 0.597 180s per leg played. Unsurprisingly, legs with multiple 180s are uncommon. Only one leg out of every 11 in this year's Premier League contained two 180s, and most Premier League nights did not contain a leg with three 180s - there were only 12 overall."

With a 1/15 chance per visit that a player will throw a 180, the maths calculates the we would expect two players to throw a 180 once every 50,000 attempts in four consecutive visits. It has happened a total of 31 times in PDC history that four 180s were thrown in the same leg, only a handful of which resulted in a nine-darter. Far more common are legs where a player has a poor starting visit and then recovers with 360s in six darts.

"We know that players are about 12.7% more likely to throw 180s in visits following other 180s than in other circumstances," Kempf concludes. "Among those scorers, the elite 180 throwers tend to move on to the tournaments' final stages, which contain more legs and more opportunities to score four 180s. Even so, one leg in 5,000 makes for a long wait, far longer than for a nine-darter. It's a special treat for all darts fans when it finally recurs."

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