World Trophy quality

Afternoon,

Oddly got a spike of a couple of hundred visitors a few days ago, oddly all from that hotbed of darts, Israel - got to assume that it's some sort of botnet, but if not, cheers for the impressions.

So I was listening to Alex and Burton's podcast yesterday running over the World Trophy (which also had an interesting interview with Mark Webster which is worth a listen), commenting on how it was decent quality and it's a shame that nobody bothered to turn up for it. It did look a bit of a rubbish venue and Barry's not exactly the entertainment capital of the world, but that aside, how good was the quality?

What I'll do in this post is compare it to a certain level of PDC event - the European Tour. I'll take the first round of each European Tour event (16 first to six matches) and compare it with the first round of the World Trophy (also 16 first to six matches). I'll then take the remainder of the World Trophy (15 matches, eight of them first to six with the quarter finals onwards being a bit longer) and compare to the second round of the European Tour (same format as round 1). So what I'm doing in the first instance is comparing the elite of the BDO (it's their entire top 22 plus ten qualifiers who, given they include the eventual winner, a previous Lakeside finalist, the current Scottish Open champion, isn't exactly a list of mugs) against a mixed bag of PDC players - this features none of the top 16 in Pro Tour rankings, and as they haven't yet been to the Netherlands, can feature some decidedly ropey home nation qualifiers and plenty of not even B-list domestic players. In the second instance I'm letting all the PDC players have one game only, while the BDO gets to have everyone with a win play and all the good players pad the stats for them by taking more than one of their matches.

Firstly, the opening round stats:

4 visit leg percentage:
Sindelfingen 8.72%
Jena 8.11%
Hildesheim 7.59%
Gibraltar 4.90%
Saarbrücken 4.86%
World Trophy 2.70%

5 visit leg percentage:

Hildesheim 52.41%

Sindelfingen 52.35%

Saarbrücken 42.36%

Jena 41.22%

Gibraltar 38.46%

World Trophy 36.49%

6 visit leg percentage:

World Trophy 89.19%

Hildesheim 88.28%

Sindelfingen 85.91%

Jena 83.78%

Saarbrücken 81.25%

Gibraltar 76.92%

Losing leg average:

World Trophy 85.18

Sindelfingen 84.23

Hildesheim 84.07

Saarbrücken 82.55

Jena 81.86

Gibraltar 80.78

Secondly, the European Tour round 2 vs World Trophy last 16 onwards:

4 visit leg percentage:

Gibraltar 14.29%

Hildesheim 13.87%

Jena 10.60%

Saarbrücken 10.53%

Sindelfingen 10.00%

World Trophy 9.43%

5 visit leg percentage:

Hildesheim 63.50%

Saarbrücken 57.89%

Gibraltar 55.19%

Sindelfingen 54.67%

Jena 49.01%

World Trophy 45.91%

6 visit leg percentage:

Sindelfingen 94.00%

Saarbrücken 90.98%

Gibraltar 90.91%

Hildesheim 89.78%

World Trophy 88.68%

Jena 86.09%

Losing leg average:

Saarbrücken 87.65

Hildesheim 87.63

Gibraltar 87.47

Sindelfingen 87.14

Jena 86.92

World Trophy 85.30

So in five out of eight stats, the World Trophy finishes bottom, and in a further one it finishes second to bottom. However, in the other two stats it finishes top! How can we explain that? I think it has to be the nature of the entrants - the BDO isn't good quality, but the make up of the World Trophy field is such that the chances of both players in any given leg both making enough of a hash of it to not finish in eighteen darts is fairly slim, whereas in the PDC, there's enough bad UK based and home nation qualifiers in the mix that they can run into each other fairly often, and them both messing up a leg can happen quite a bit. It's a similar tale for the losing average - if there's complete dross that qualifies for the European Tour, you're getting six legs worth of stats. The BDO losers will do the same, but they'll usually keep decent enough order - an average of 85 is around eighteen darts.

Busy PDC weekend, with European Tour 6 as well as the fourth weekend of the Challenge Tour, which may give us a better idea of who'll likely join Wayne Jones in gaining a tour card for 2018. Should be able to have betting analysis up for the Hamburg on Friday morning.