"The PDC reached the point at which any Tour Card Holder can win a Players Championship": Statistician on open nature of ProTour

Today marks the fifteenth Players Championship of the year. Will we get a new winner again? After all, the fourteen previous Players Championships were all won by different players.

PDC statistician Christopher Kempf then makes a reflection. "If you were ranked in the 20s or 30s of the PDC Order of Merit ten years ago, it might have felt like the most important achievement you could claim was an appearance in the semi-finals or finals of a Pro Tour event, in which one would inevitably lose to Michael van Gerwen, Phil Taylor, Gary Anderson or another TV titan.

"With fewer ranking events on the calendar than there are in 2024, it must have been all the more frustrating to see the usual suspects gobble up all the trophies.

Indeed in 2014, they did. Along with Robert Thornton - at that point the world number nine - those three players claimed ten of the first 14 Players Championship titles on offer, while Thornton won 24 consecutive matches on the circuit between April and May.

"The road to ProTour glory, even for the top players, is now littered with more dangerous opponents than ever before. No player has won more than 13 consecutive matches, and the player with the most Tour Card-era PC titles, van Gerwen, has not even appeared in a final. Has the PDC reached the point at which any Tour Card Holder can win a Players Championship? Limited records exist from 2014, years before the PDC-wide adoption of DartConnect. What statistics we have, though, suggest that it is much harder to win even one's first match in a Players Championship event."

"The mean first-round losing average in 2024 is 88.33 (a nearly three point increase over a decade), and those losing players throw 30% more 12-darters than they did in 2014.The top three players in the world have lost six times in the first round through the first 14 events of the year, and the Players Championship circuit has already seen 76 losing averages exceeding 100 thrown by 45 different players."

"A majority of the 14 champions, moreover, are players who have never won a ranking TV title - these are not necessarily the same players one would expect to be in regular contention for the biggest prizes in darts. The Players Championship finals held thus far in 2024 have, in addition to the 14 unique winners, featured another eight unique finalists for a total of 22."

"One in six PDC Tour Card Holders - as well as one player who doesn't hold a Tour Card - have already appeared in one of these finals.

"That is without World Champions Michael van Gerwen, Rob Cross or Gerwyn Price appearing on the list - though between those three they have made 24 failed attempts to win a title. This streak - and the competitive parity which it represents - ought to give more players than ever confidence that, on the proper form, they too can become a PDC title winner."