Premier League Darts: Night 1

Here is all the analysis from my model before Night 1 of the Darts Premier League.

Luke Littler is the clear favourite. He finished at the top of the League Phase in 50.1% of the 10,000 sims. Achieving the playoffs in 90.4% while picking up an average of 34.1 points.

Next is a close 3 pack between Humphries, MvG and Bunting. All 3 of them pick up between 24.7 and 27.8 points on average. You’d expect those 3 and Littler to be in the playoffs come all 16 nights have been played.

Nathan Aspinall comes in as the weakest player in the league with just a 1.4% probability of topping the league phase and just 21.8% of making the playoffs.

Next is the average points for each player broken down further. The “+/-” is the standard deviation of how each player’s points is distributed. Therefore we can use this to give our bottom 5% and top 95% confidence levels at how many points each player achieves.

What this means in simple terms is the best 5% of simulations Luke Littler achieved around 49.5 points, while in his worst 5%, he achieved 18.7 or fewer points.

This will be a great note for us to compare how well players do come to the end of the league to see which were the most overperforming and underperforming players. Plus we can check the model’s accuracy.

Also here is the average number of Night wins achieved per simulation. On average every player won at least 1 night, but this is unlikely to stay this way as the event continues.

This shows the number of points per position in the league. So regardless of who finishes where we track that position’s number of points.

Included here is still the standard deviation so we can get our confidence intervals. Currently before Night 1, the average points of position 4 and the cut-off for playoffs was 24.9, with this ranging between 20.5 and 29.2 with 95% confidence.

We can break this down further to see how often 4th place, whoever it is, finishes on what number of points.

Currently, 25 is the most common, happening in 18.8% of sims. The next most common is 24 happening in 17.4% of sims.

Somehow, in 1 simulation the number of points was 35! and on the flip side in 9 sims it was 18.

It will be interesting to see how this develops over the event.

Who will be the Premier League Champion?

My thoughts, Luke Humphries.