In his latest 'Stat of the Week' column, PDC Stats Analyst Christopher Kempf takes a look at the current Tour Card Holders who hit the most three-treble scores in the first visit of a leg.
The stat: Most maxima with the first three darts of legs.
The parameters: 2024 Season, Tour Card Holders only.
The caveats: 'Maxima' includes visits of 171, 174, 177 and 180.
Hitting a maximum with the first three darts of a leg is not only the best way to accomplish a checkout later in the leg - it also has an intimidating effect, lessening the chances that one's opponent will get there first.
On the PDC ProTour, players who throw second after their opponent lands a maximum average 99.06, but if their opponent scores anything less than 170, they average 100.15.
1.09 points is indeed not much, but in a game in which players normally cannot do anything to hinder their opponents' efforts, such an effect indicates that players are unnerved by an immediate show of force in a leg.
Across the PDC, players are only able to start a leg with a three-treble visit about 7.4% of the time, but three players nearly double that rate - Mike De Decker, Luke Littler and Gary Anderson - who get a perfect start to a leg more than 1 in 7 times.
Littler has begun 98 legs in his debut year as a professional darts player in this fashion - of the remaining 127 Tour Card Holders, only his Premier League rival Michael van Gerwen can claim to have scored half as many leg-beginning 180s and 177s.
Littler even has to his credit four 180s in legs throwing second that were hit in response to one of his Premier League opponents' maxima of their own.
Van Gerwen has achieved this once, while the remainder of the Premier League field has yet to issue such a powerful riposte.
On the day in which he won his maiden Players Championship title, Littler did it twelve times, including a 180 to start his final push in the deciding leg
However, it is 28-year-old De Decker who is more likely than any other Tour Card Holder to get a fast start to a leg.
Nearly 10% of Tour Card Holders only manage to throw a 180 in 15% of legs overall, but the Belgian talent lands a maximum in 15% of first visits!
Young players are surprisingly over-represented on this list. The two teenaged Tour Card Holders - Littler and Leighton Bennett - both outpace nearly every veteran of the tour as well as more established maximum-hitters like Dave Chisnall and Van Gerwen.
It is an indication both of their talent and their inability to be intimidated that they put so much pressure so early upon their opponents, but there is not necessarily any correlation between this statistic and youth.
Indeed, as Anderson approaches the twilight of his professional darts career, he still manages to throw more leg-beginning maxima than any other player except De Decker, as if he were the talented tyro with everything to prove and nothing to lose.
Nor is there a very strong correlation in this data with overall 2024 averages.
Stephen Bunting, in the midst of a torrid spring, averages north of 96 and is the sixth most likely to start a leg with a 180 or other three-treble visit, but Martin Lukeman, with a similar average, manages a leg-opening maximum only 6% of the time.
Bunting has had the more successful year for many other reasons, but Lukeman's opponents are less likely to feel under pressure as often as they would in playing Bunting.
In the final analysis, a maximum at any point of the leg is as advantageous as it is at the beginning of it, but most of the leaders in this statistic seem to be united by a certain fearlessness and shared raw talent.
And, if throwing lots of 180s to start a leg is not a determinant of success in darts, the players who do so seem to have this skill bundled in with a myriad of others.
Follow Christopher on Twitter @ochepedia