The Hot Hand in Professional Darts

TL;DR

This study provides evidence for the hot hand phenomenon in professional darts by analyzing nearly a year of tournament data with state-space models, revealing short-lived serial dependence in players' performance.

Contribution

It introduces a state-space modeling approach to detect hot hand effects in professional darts, demonstrating the existence of short-term serial dependence in performance.

Findings

Strong but short-lived serial dependence detected

Evidence supports the hot hand hypothesis in darts

Methodology can be applied to other sports

Abstract

We investigate the hot hand hypothesis in professional darts in a near-ideal setting with minimal to no interaction between players. Considering almost one year of tournament data, corresponding to 167,492 dart throws in total, we use state-space models to investigate serial dependence in throwing performance. In our models, a latent state process serves as a proxy for a player's underlying ability, and we use autoregressive processes to model how this process evolves over time. We find a strong but short-lived serial dependence in the latent state process, thus providing evidence for the existence of the hot hand.