Tomorrow night sees the official start of Christmas as the PDC World Championships get underway at the Ally Pally.
In the last three years we have imported darts bets on to the public bet tracker using a variety of data sources, including our x180s tool. We have attained a positive ROI in each of these years, ranging from 1.4% to 17.8%:
x180s tool
Most bets originate from the x180s tool where we attempt to model Most 180s (in match and in Session) and number of 180s using appropriate probability distributions. There can often be big edges in the Session 180s market, aswell as total 180s across the session.
Warning – in round 1 there are four matches a night. Three are known, and the last match is unknown. It is between a seed and the winner of the first match.
Through round one a session can be defined as three matches (Betfred, SportingBet, Coral, Ladbrokes) or four matches (Skybet, William Hill, Bet365 amongst others). The bookiebashing x180s tool will report Session totals based on three matches. Please make sure you are betting into an identical market.
9 darter
I can’t spake. I can’t spake. Have you ever seen the like????
Lets try and calculate the fair odds of a 9 darter in the tournament. Historically the “9 dart in tournament” market has been one of betting interest, as it can exemplify the concept of fav-longshot bias. Looking at it this year the “No” is not necessarily blind value – it all depends on what metric you use to estimate an expected number of 9 darters.
There have been 14 180s in the last 15 years of the PDC World Championships. This represents an average of 0.933 9 darters per tournament.
Using a mean of 0.933 expected 9 darts in the tournament, we can use a normal poisson probability distribution (use the static variable calc on the betbuilder) to calculate a probability of 60.7% of a 9 darter this year – equivalent to odds of 1.64.
However the chart below shows that 9 darters have gone through different periods of frequency – from none between 2017 and 2020 to five between 2021 and 2023. We can choose to look at the three and five year averages to see if this gives us any more insight:
- A three year average of 0.888 180s per tournament equates to odds of 1.70.
- A five year average of 0.863 180s per tournament equates to odds of 1.73.
- Looking at just the last three years, we had an average of 1.67 180s per tournament which equates to odds of 1.23.
Which metric do you think is most appropriate for the calculation? Here are the fair odds for 1, 2 and 3+ 9 darters based on the different metrics.
Current top price for 9 darters:
- 0: 2.5 (William Hill)
- 1+ 1.56 (Coral/Ladbrokes), 1.53 (Bet365, Betfred, Skybet)
- 2+ 3.0 (bet365)
- 3+ 5.0 (William Hill.)
