Premier League Darts: Night 5

Here is all the analysis from my model before Night 5 of the Darts Premier League in Brighton.

Luke Humphries appears to be running away with it in the early stages of the Premier League. After picking up another Nightly win, he now is 98.0% likely to make the playoffs, averaging 35.9 points and wins the League Phase 51.7% of the 10,000 simulations.

Either of the Lukes now wins the League Phase 88.3%, and it looks incredibly unlikely that either does not win the league phase.

Michael van Gerwen is struggling slightly as he has failed to make the final once so far and saw his playoff probability drop from 70.6% to 65.2%, but as long as he continues to pick up points and players below him are not gaining significantly, then I’m sure he will be in the playoffs.

Chris Dobey is now the least likely player to get into the playoffs before Night 5, sitting at just 15.2%. That fell from 19.2% last week.

Since Gerwyn Price got a win, he has pulled away in Playoff probability, but there are still plenty of nights to go for the players below him to pick up points.

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 Humphries achieved around 48.4 points, while in his worst 5%, he achieved 23.3 or fewer points this is why we see his playoff percentage so high as his worst 5% of performances still get him almost to that magical 24 points for playoffs.

Also, here is the average number of Night wins achieved per simulation. On average, Luke Humphries is winning 4.0 Nights, with Luke Littler close behind on 3.8. Now we have two players, Nathan Aspinall and Chris Dobey, both on average, are picking up below 1.0 wins.

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 5, the average points of position 4 and the cut-off for playoffs was 24.5, with this ranging between 19.8 and 29.1 with 95% confidence.

This is a significant decrease from last week, as it was 24.9 points. We see this continuing as Both Lukes are continuing to pick up the majority of the points; there is less to go around.

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

Currently, 24 is the most common, happening in 18.4% of sims. The next most common is 25, happening in 15.9% of sims.

We have seen the trend here for a few weeks now, so when an expected player like one of the Lukes wins the Night with the players already on low points lose the Quarter-Finals, then we see the points needed for 4th come down.

Whereas if we get an outside winner for Night 5, like Chris Dobey or Nathan Aspinall then we will see the points needed for 4th go higher and the higher point tallys become more probable.

With that being said, I am giving my personal opinion on who I think will win each week. Last week I went with Luke Littler who made the Final, this week I’m going back to the man who I predicted before Night 1 to win the whole thing.

My Night 5 Winner is Luke Humphries.

If you got this far, thanks for reading and feel free to reach out to me on Twitter (X), @AaronWar_ for any suggestions on data you’d like to see in the Newsletter about the Darts Premier League!