Which Is the Toughest Night of the Week to Play Darts?

 

If somebody had asked me this before I started looking at the numbers, I think I'd have said Saturday.

It seems logical.

Saturday is when you tend to get the bigger opens. Players can travel further, tournaments can run for longer and organisers don't have to worry quite as much about everybody getting up for work the following morning.

But nearly 9,000 tournament records in the Q4QS database suggest there's rather more to it than that.

Because while Saturday certainly produces some of the biggest and strongest competitions, the average grassroots tournament during the week can be every bit as tough – and sometimes tougher.

The rise of regular ADC Vaults and other weekday competitions appears to have changed the landscape considerably.

How I've Worked It Out

I wanted to avoid simply adding every Tournament Strength score together and dividing by the number of events.

There's a problem with doing that.

Imagine a Saturday containing loads of ordinary tournaments but also several enormous opens, qualifiers and elite events. Those huge tournaments can pull Saturday's overall average upwards and make it look as though the typical Saturday competition is stronger than it really is.

So I've looked at each day in three different ways:

Mean – the conventional average of all the Tournament Strength scores.

Median – put all the tournaments in order and take the one in the middle.

Mode – the most commonly occurring Tournament Strength, with the scores rounded to the nearest whole number.

I then take the middle result from those three measures to produce what I'll call the Q4QS Typical Strength.

You don't really need to worry about the maths beyond that.

The idea is simply:

Don't let a handful of unusually strong or unusually weak tournaments decide the answer.

And, as always, Tournament Strength is not a three-dart average. It's the Q4QS measure of the overall strength of a tournament field.

So Which Day Comes Out Strongest?

Here's what happened.

Day	Mean	Median	Most Common	Q4QS Typical Strength
Friday	59.15	58.79	61	59.15
Monday	57.67	58.88	61	58.88
Thursday	58.38	58.86	61	58.86
Tuesday	57.47	58.56	62	58.56
Saturday	60.27	58.43	57	58.43
Wednesday	56.83	57.79	60	57.79
Sunday	56.62	56.60	59	56.62

And I don't think the most interesting part is that Friday wins.

It's what happens to Saturday.

Saturday Has The Biggest Average

Look at Saturday's first number.

60.27.

That's comfortably the highest mean of the week.

So my original assumption wasn't completely wrong.

There are some seriously strong tournaments played on Saturdays, and the bigger events help push the overall number upwards.

But now look at the other two figures.

The median drops to 58.43.

And the most common rounded Tournament Strength is only 57.

That's quite a difference.

If Saturday were simply packed with stronger tournaments from top to bottom, I'd expect all three figures to be towards the top of the table.

They aren't.

Instead, the figures suggest something slightly different:

Saturday has a very high ceiling.

The biggest Saturday competitions can be extremely strong, and those tournaments pull the conventional average upwards.

But walk into a randomly selected Saturday tournament and it isn't necessarily going to be tougher than the competition taking place on a Monday, Tuesday, Thursday or Friday evening.

That surprised me.

Then We Get To Friday

Friday is almost the opposite.

Its mean is 59.15.

Its median is 58.79.

And its most common rounded Tournament Strength is 61.

There isn't the same enormous gap between the different measurements.

In simple terms, Friday doesn't appear to rely quite as heavily on a handful of monster tournaments to look strong.

Regular Friday darts itself is strong.

That's why Friday eventually comes out on top using my combined measure.

Its Q4QS Typical Strength is 59.15.

Monday Isn't Exactly An Easy Night Either

Monday might be an even bigger surprise.

Its conventional average is only 57.67, which wouldn't immediately attract much attention.

But the middle tournament scores 58.88, and the most common rounded score is 61.

Once those measures are combined, Monday reaches a Q4QS Typical Strength of 58.88 – narrowly ahead of Thursday.

That's enough for second place.

So much for easing yourself gently into the darting week.

And Look At Tuesday

Tuesday has another fascinating number.

Its most common Tournament Strength is:

62.

That's the highest mode of any day of the week.

It doesn't mean Tuesday is automatically the toughest day. Its mean and median are lower, which is why it finishes fourth on my combined measurement.

But it does show just how regularly decent-strength tournaments are occurring during the working week.

And I think there's a fairly obvious candidate for why.

The Weekday Vault Effect

The ADC Vault system – together with the increasing number of other regular local competitions – has created a huge weekday tournament scene.

You don't necessarily need a giant open containing 100 players to create a strong field.

Put 16, 20, 24 or 32 competitive players into the same venue every week and you can create a difficult tournament.

Then do it again the following week.

And again.

That's quite different from the traditional image of tournament darts where the biggest competitions happen at the weekend and weekday darts is predominantly local league darts.

There is now a substantial competitive tournament circuit taking place on ordinary evenings.

The numbers appear to be picking that up.

Saturday Versus The Working Week

I think this is probably the best way of describing what I've found.

Saturday is the big-event day.

If you're looking for some of the strongest individual competitions, Saturday is exactly where you'd expect to find plenty of them.

That's why its mean climbs all the way to 60.27.

But the working week has something different.

Consistency of competition.

There are Vaults, money-in-money-out competitions, round robins and established weekly series taking place night after night.

They might not have the scale of a major Saturday open.

They don't need it.

A relatively small room containing plenty of good regular tournament players can be an extremely difficult place to win.

Sunday Is Different Again

Sunday produced the lowest Q4QS Typical Strength at 56.62.

That doesn't mean there aren't strong Sunday tournaments – of course there are.

But across the database, the typical Sunday field comes out noticeably below Friday, Monday, Thursday and Tuesday.

That's another reason I think using more than the ordinary average was worthwhile.

Different days aren't just producing different standards.

They're producing different types of tournament calendars.

So What Is The Toughest Night?

If you're asking:

Which day produces the biggest tournaments?

I'd still have a very strong case for Saturday.

Its mean Tournament Strength of 60.27 is comfortably the highest.

But if you're asking:

On which day is the typical tournament toughest?

The answer from the Q4QS data is:

Friday.

And the margins behind it are tiny.

Friday – 59.15
Monday – 58.88
Thursday – 58.86
Tuesday – 58.56
Saturday – 58.43

There's less than three-quarters of a Tournament Strength point separating the top five.

So I certainly wouldn't claim that Friday night darts exists on another level.

The more interesting conclusion is that weekday tournament darts is every bit as competitive as the weekend.

Perhaps Grassroots Darts Has Changed

That's probably the biggest thing I take from this.

A few years ago, I suspect most of us would instinctively have associated the strongest grassroots tournament fields with the weekend.

And the big weekend open certainly hasn't disappeared.

But competitive darts is becoming increasingly available throughout the week.

The Vault system has been a major part of that, alongside independent competitions and venues building their own regular tournament calendars.

That creates something different from one huge Saturday field.

It creates depth.

Monday night can be tough.

Tuesday night can be tough.

Thursday night can be tough.

Friday night can be particularly tough.

And then Saturday arrives and produces some of the biggest individual competitions of the lot.

So perhaps the answer to the question isn't really that Friday has beaten Saturday.

It's that there isn't an easy night anymore.

If you turn up at a competitive grassroots tournament on almost any night of the week, there's a pretty good chance somebody in the room is capable of ruining your evening.

And looking at the Q4QS database, that now seems to be happening all week long.