Stats Analysis: Why Luke Littler’s Scoring Efficiency Is Redefining the Treble Standard in Darts
In darts, as long as a player consistently hits trebles, the distribution of those scores within visits is less important than it might seem. A flurry of 180s and 140s can easily make up for visits that miss all three treble targets — and vice versa, racking up maximums can prove meaningless if too many visits are stuck in the 60–100 range.
Ultimately, a player’s ability to tightly group darts within treble targets — and switch efficiently enough to avoid low scores like 57 or 58 — tends to correlate with their overall accuracy. But while fans are now used to seeing statistics for 180s and trebleless visits, few analyses explore how the two relate.
Neither metric alone gives a full picture of scoring effectiveness. Take two players with nearly identical maximum rates per leg: Joshua Richardson (0.238) and Krzysztof Ratajski (0.241). Their scoring styles couldn’t be more different.
Ratajski often opts for “alternative maximums” — 171, 174, and 177 — rather than repeatedly grouping three darts into the same treble. As a result, he doesn’t match the elite 180-hitters, but he compensates by minimizing poor visits: he’s one of just six Tour Card holders in 2025 averaging fewer than one trebleless visit per leg.
Richardson, by contrast, posts a similar rate of maximums but suffers from twice as many trebleless visits relative to his three-treble frequency — a much more volatile and less efficient scoring profile.
Still, both are dwarfed by the treble-hitting efficiency of the PDC’s true elite.
In fact, every 2025 Premier League participant ranks within the top 15 for the ratio of three-treble to no-treble visits — but only one player cracks the top five: Luke Littler.
Littler hits 0.53 three-treble visits (almost all 180s) for every trebleless turn. That makes him the only player on tour averaging fewer than two low-treble visits for every big score.
Here’s the kicker: Littler has played 200 more legs than Kevin Doets this year, yet he has fewer trebleless visits. He’s played 1.6 times as many legs as Sebastian Bialecki, a peer by age, but has nearly five times as many 180s to his name.
The gap between Littler and the second-best player in this metric is larger than the difference between second and twelfth place. Even if he were poor on checkouts (which he’s not), he generates so many extra scoring opportunities that he would still win the majority of his legs.
And while the darts world is still trying to wrap its head around Littler’s dominance, there are other impressive performances worth noting.
In last week’s Premier League, Luke Humphries delivered a stunning 118 average — driven by a streak of 18 consecutive visits where at least one dart found a treble. The average PDC player would expect around seven trebleless visits over the same stretch.
Humphries leads the tour in avoiding low scores, with just 616 trebleless visits in 659 legs — including only one score of 26 in 2025 (compared to six for Littler).
Yet despite this discipline, Humphries trails Littler and others in overall treble output. No amount of tidy scoring can make up for the sheer volume of 180s Littler produces.
In 2025, only Littler and Josh Rock have consistently reached checkout range after just nine darts in most legs. Rock, in particular, would be hailed as the next big thing were it not for Littler’s generational dominance. Rock averages 0.484 three-treble visits per leg and hits 0.44 maxima per trebleless visit, translating to an average score of 172 after nine darts — a staggering 15 points higher than any other Irish player.
But it’s Littler who stands alone.
He’s winning nearly 80% of his matches this year, thanks to a blend of consistency, groupings, and scoring density that’s unparalleled. In most matches, he scores heavily enough to create one additional double opportunity per leg — a huge edge in today’s competitive field.
And as his opponents have found, hitting 100% of your doubles doesn’t mean much if you’re only earning one dart at double per leg.
