Form Guide: Super Smith staking a claim ahead of 2026 UK Open

Ross Smith’s Players Championship Five heroics have pushed him nearly to the top of the Form Guide, putting him in a good position to make a deep run at the upcoming UK Open.

Relative to mid-February, Smith has gained two points in averages and more than six points in OChE, putting him ahead of Gian van Veen and Chris Dobey, the player whom he had vanquished to claim his first title of 2026.

In so doing, Smith has compiled an impressive 90 maxima, his highest total in the two-year history of the Form Guide, putting him ahead of every player apart from Luke Littler.

He is one of only six players with an OChE greater than 60, and one of four with a doubles percentage greater than 45%. This puts him in elite, Premier League calibre company.
Due to the randomised draw of the UK Open, the odds of Smith encountering one of the five players enjoying better form than he are even lower than they would be in any other tournament, giving Smith his best opportunity in years to claim a second TV title.

Littler’s Premier League campaign is yet to ignite following a second consecutive loss to Jonny Clayton, even though Littler has maintained a near 12-point average in OChE.

Moreover, Littler is near his best form of 2026, with 111 maxima in 200 legs and a 70 OChE, which should make him nearly unbeatable by average PDC opposition. Why has he continued to struggle?

Though Littler is at the top of almost every statistical ranking in the PDC, he is not the leader when it comes to checkouts: the doubles crown belongs to none other than Clayton.

In their last meeting, Clayton hit six out of 12 doubles, an accuracy right in the mould of his last 200 legs (49.8%), while Littler struggled, hitting only three in 13 attempts.

Yet Littler remains the runaway favourite to capture another UK Open title: such is the case when one completes 62% of legs in 15 darts or fewer, and 94% in 18 or fewer.

Even a player hitting a majority of his doubles would struggle to keep up over a longer-format match, as would be the case in the later rounds of the UK Open, against such a player.

At least two Dutch players have appeared in the quarter-finals of five of the six Players Championship events this year, and accordingly four of them occupy places in the top ten of the Form Guide.

Most impressive of these has been Wessel Nijman, winner of Players Championship Two and an extremely efficient player in spite of his 96.53 average, and Gian van Veen, who has appeared in six finals just this year alone.

However, a surprise double-quarter-finalist on the floor in Leicester was Christian Kist – he is one of the most improved players of the past month, and now the 11th most accurate player on doubles.

With Nijman, van Veen and Kevin Doets all under the age of 30, the stage is set for a potential changing of the guard in Dutch darts.

With two impressive last-leg decider wins on his way to the final of Players Championship Six, Andrew Gilding has for the first time claimed the mantle of the #1 ton-plus checkout hitter.

In just those two matches, Gilding completed finishes of 126, 106, 100, 123 and 104, the last of which brought to an end Smith’s 11-game winning streak.

Combined with a 13th best doubles percentage, ‘Goldfinger’ has not yet found the Midas touch when it comes to getting his hands on a title because his scoring remains under the standard needed to compete with the likes of Littler and Gerwyn Price.

Only 50 maxima in 200 legs make it necessary to hit as many doubles as possible when going head-to-head against the Premier League stars, because those chances will be few and far between.

*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