PDC Stats Analyst Christopher Kempf assesses the sport’s top ten stars – based on their last 200 legs played – ahead of this week’s Players Championship double-header in Leicester. #1 Averages – Luke Humphries#1 OChE – Luke Littler#1 Doubles – Gian van Veen#1 171-180 – Luke Littler#1 99, 101+ Checkout – Ricardo Pietreczko European Champion […]
PDC Stats Analyst Christopher Kempf assesses the sport’s top ten stars – based on their last 200 legs played – ahead of this week’s Players Championship double-header in Leicester.
#1 Averages – Luke Humphries
#1 OChE – Luke Littler
#1 Doubles – Gian van Veen
#1 171-180 – Luke Littler
#1 99, 101+ Checkout – Ricardo Pietreczko
European Champion Ross Smith has not historically produced the numbers needed to place him at the top of the Form Guide, but in Dortmund ‘Smudger’ defeated two players favoured to beat him on current form and brought himself back into the top ten in terms of both averages and OChE.
His signature win of the tournament – a 107 average in victory over a fellow European Tour champion in Luke Woodhouse – saw him win five legs by the end of his fourth turn at the board and hit 17 trebles in 23 attempts across three legs.
Smith’s case for future inclusion in the 2027 Premier League is not limited to his hoisting a second TV trophy this year; his 2.5 point increase in OChE brings him to #8 in the PDC and only two other players can currently outscore him in terms of 180s.
Two Welsh players separate Smith from an automatic berth in that tournament, and one of them (Gerwyn Price) lost to the Dover darter in a televised semi-final.
With Price suffering a 1.28 point drop in his averages in the second half of October, and Jonny Clayton winning legs less efficiently than the two-time European Champion, Smith is in a solid position to reach a career milestone in three months’ time.
Victory for Chris Dobey in Players Championship 32 secured a place for ‘Hollywood’ within the top 16 of the PDC, but more importantly for a player who had been eliminated in the first round of four consecutive TV tournaments, it demonstrated the sort of form needed to bring the man from Bedlington back into contention for the biggest titles in darts.
The last 200 legs have seen Dobey throw 90 maxima – second in the PDC and only five behind Littler’s tally – and also achieve second place in leg-winning efficiency with a 62.14 OChE.
Dobey claimed his third title of the year in style, dropping only 14 of 52 legs played and unleashing a 111 average on Krzysztof Ratajski in a 6-1 quarter-final demolition.
Dobey, Littler and Luke Humphries are the only three players in the PDC currently winning at least one leg in nine in 12 darts or fewer, and Dobey did so six times in his last 30 legs to further separate himself from the remainder of the PDC.
More play like this will certainly cure him of his TV losing streak, and pay dividends in later rounds of those tournaments.
Scott Williams’ performance last week may not have won him the Players Championship 32 title, but it did likely secure him the chance to win a much bigger prize through qualification to compete in Minehead next month.
Having not even reached a quarter-final across the first 29 events of the year, Williams’ final in PC30 and semi-final in PC32 earned him more than £16,000 and put him in a qualifying position for the Players Championship Finals with only two events to go.
After three whitewash wins in Den Bosch, Williams has improved his leg-winning efficiency more rapidly than almost any player in the PDC, and he now has an OChE rating that cracks the top ten in the PDC.
The man who beat him in PC31 – William O’Connor – was another PC32 semi-finalist and improved his OChE rating by seven points thanks to deciding-leg victories against Martin Schindler and Niels Zonneveld.
O’Connor’s more successful 2026 campaign will make him one of the top seeds in Minehead; it is a distinct possibility that these two players on the rise will meet again in an opening round clash.
*OChE (Ordinal Checkout Efficiency) explained:
OChE is a metric designed to evaluate the efficiency at which players convert their averages into legs won.
The statistic is the % of legs a player would expect to win on the ProTour, calculated from a weighted average of 4,5, 6 & 7 visit checkout rates.
Follow Christopher on Twitter @ochepedia