Incentives, Performance and Choking in Darts

Abstract

This paper examines how within-match variation in incentives affects the performance of darts players. The game of darts offers an attractive naturally occurring research setting, because performance can be observed at the individual level and without obscuring effects of risk considerations and behavior of others. We analyze four data sets covering a total of 29,381 darts matches of professional, amateur, and youth players. We find that amateur and youth players display a sizable performance decrease at decisive moments. Professional players appear less susceptible of such choking under pressure. Our results speak to a growing literature on the limits of increasing incentives as a recipe for better performance.

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“…Interestingly, different observations found that darts players overall do not display the tendency to choke in important situations: when investigating the likelihood of winning one "leg" (i.e., fixed distance within a game that wins a point) of darts when the opponent exerts pressure on the performer (by threatening to win the leg in the next throw), players did not display decrements of performance 42 . Another investigation showed that darts performance would actually increase with pressure exerted by the opponent, and that players perform better under moderately high incentives to perform well 43 . Thus, the higher the pressure that was exerted by the opponent, the more likely that the performer finished the leg.…”

“…A darts match is usually played over a fixed distance (e.g., best of 11 legs). An in-depth explanation of the rules of darts can be found in previous reports 42,43,48 , and the exact rules are described in the darts regulation authority rulebook 49 .…”

“…The other commonly used performance indicator in darts is checkout percentage (CP) 43,48 . CP describes the percentage of a player hitting a double field to finish a leg, e.g., if a player has 40 points left, the player needs to score double 20.…”

Analysing a built-in advantage in asymmetric darts contests using causal machine learning

“…While they implicitly incorporated the BIA in their prediction, they did not intend to estimate causal effects. Ötting, Deutscher, Langrock, Gehrmann, Schneemann, andScholten (2020), andKlein Teeselink, van Loon, van den Assem, andvan Dolder (2020) discovered no or low performance decrements under pressure for professional darts players by looking at more or less pressure owing to varying importance of situations within a match. Substantial decrements among youth and amateur players are found by Klein Teeselink et al…”