Fix your problems or improve your strengths 2 - Electric Boogaloo

So I played with the binomial function on Google Sheets and it does exactly what I want it to do. If we take the assumptions that we did in the previous post, then if we assign a player a probability of hitting a treble 45% of the time, and a double 30% of the time, this is how often they finish a leg at certain speeds:

Now let's opt to give our player an extra 5% on the doubles:

That's a bit better, isn't it? Getting more than half our legs in under 15 darts and cutting our awful leg stat down to less than one in six. But here's the question - do we do better by improving our scoring? Let's give our player an extra 5% on treble scoring instead:

That's, oddly enough, quite a lot better again - we're now up over 55% of legs in under fifteen darts, although we do have about the same number of really bad legs, give or take a fraction of a percent.

What can we make of this? It's kind of obvious if you think about it - what percentage of darts that you throw in a leg of 501 are at trebles, and how many are at doubles? That should give you a clue - while giving yourself a better chance of hitting a double is nice, a small improvement in scoring power will allow you that many more shots that it more than compensates for it. It's all well and good if you go 100-100-100-100-69 and know that you will check out 32 with complete certainty in the next visit, but if your opponent goes 140-140-140-T19 first dart, he's got five shots to finish you off before you can even step up to try to pin double 16. He only needs to have a 13% checkout percentage to win the leg more often than not, a rate most pub players would be disappointed with.

What I can do is throw these stats into the master computer, and see how often different skill sets would win against each other - but that'll have to wait for another day. It was kind of amusing to see that Chisnall, who kind of inspired this piece, helped to knock England out earlier - not because his finishing was comical, three from five isn't bad at all, but because his scoring went to pieces, second leg excepted. Weird how that works out, isn't it?