In my dissertation in my final year at the University of Hull I had to use a lot of numeracy and spread sheet skills in order to translate Local Election results in a number of different electoral systems. Ever since the 12th May 2014 when this was handed in I have found no use for these skills whatsoever, until today. In the sport of Darts there is a common assumption, that the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) is better than the British Darts Organisation (BDO), the question however is how big is this gap?

In this post this question will be determined in terms of averages, I will acknowledge that this does not focus on how good these individual players are at hitting the doubles, but most darts fans would agree that looking at player averages is the indicator of the quality of each tournament and the gap this year has been pretty wide.

In the Preliminary Round the PDC average amongst winners was 87.495, in the BDO it was 80.205 a gap of 7.2925, amongst the loser the gap was a smaller 3.31375. In the Round of 32 (round of 64 does not exist in the BDO), the PDC winner average was 95.27375, in the BDO the same average was 88.93375 a gap of 6.34. Amongst those who were defeated the gap was 2.82125. In the Quarter Finals the average amongst those in the PDC who won was over 100, at 101.4575, in the BDO the average 94.0875, a gap of 7.37. Amongst losers the gap was even larger at 8.6075. Finally in the semi-final the PDC winner average was 102.295, in the BDO it was 95.595 a gap of 6.7. As can be seen the gap through this evidence, the gap is pretty large.

However, what is possibly more telling of the gap is the fact that no player in the BDO has had a 100+ average during this year’s championship, compare that to the winner average in the PDC which was consistently 100+ from the quarter-finals onwards. This does raise the question of whether a BDO player could realistically make the later rounds of the PDC World Championships. While the data on the face of it would initially suggest no, it is also notable that the data in the spread sheet would suggest that when a player has to raise their game and their average they tend to. Therefore, it is possible that if a BDO player had to play against a top PDC player they would probably have a better average as they would inevitably raise their game in order to compete. This probably also explains why BDO players have in the past been competitive or in Scott Waites’ case actually won the Grand Slam of Darts a few years ago.

It is also worth factoring the BDO Women’s World Championship, while at the moment the early round standard is low, with the average winner having a 72.22875 average, however in the later rounds these average get significantly higher. In the semi-finals the winners had an average of 86.025 and in the final Lisa Ashton had an average of 83.22, while Farron Sherrock had an average of 83.76. This suggests that these two women could probably survive the Preliminary rounds of the BDO World Championship, and be competitive in the first round, but would be struggling if they got any further. However, if Farron Sherrock continues to improve it is realistic to see her being competitive with the men in either code.

UPDATE: Can now factor in the BDO World Championship Final averages. Martin Adams the loser of the BDO Final had an average of 92.55, 8.14 points lower than Phil Taylor’s average of 100.69. The winner Scott Mitchell had an average of 92.61, 5.07 points lower than Gary Anderson. This is also in the updated spread sheet as seen below.

BDO PDC Darts comparison