Vault 18 came to an end on 16 August, bringing seven weeks of qualification to a close and setting up the next stage: the Regional Finals.
For the players who have made it through, the rewards are significant. There is serious prize money available, but perhaps even more importantly, an opportunity to progress towards the MODUS Super Series and the exposure that comes with playing live on Pluto TV.
That can open doors well beyond one weekend.
For this first look at the Regional Finals, I am concentrating mainly on the two areas I have covered most closely throughout Vault 18: the South West and Wales.
I am not making outright predictions yet. That will come closer to the Regional Finals themselves.
Instead, I wanted to answer a different set of questions.
How strong were the Vault events in each region? Which venues consistently produced the toughest fields? How do the final Top 32s compare? And does the regional table necessarily tell us who the most dangerous players actually are?
The results are fascinating.
Wales Has the Deeper Top 32
The clearest finding comes from comparing the actual Vault averages of the 32 qualifiers in each region.
At the very top, there is virtually nothing between them.
The five strongest averages in the South West produce a combined figure of 83.32, while the equivalent five in Wales come out at 83.48.
That is effectively level.
Move further down the field, however, and Wales begins to pull away.
| Field depth | South West | Wales |
|---|
| Best 5 average | 83.32 | 83.48 |
| Best 10 | 80.75 | 82.70 |
| Best 16 | 78.84 | 81.49 |
| Best 20 | 77.82 | 80.69 |
| Full Top 32 | 74.55 | 78.26 |
The contrast becomes even clearer when looking at the number of players reaching certain standards.
The South West has four players averaging 80 or more.
Wales has 11.
The South West has 15 players averaging at least 75.
Wales has 26.
So the story is not that Wales necessarily possesses a far stronger group of favourites.
It is that the Welsh field appears to lose much less quality as you travel through the draw.
That could make the Welsh Regional Final particularly unforgiving.
Henry Cooper Sets the Standard in the South West
If Wales wins the depth argument, the highest individual average across the two fields belongs to the South West.
Henry Cooper leads the South West rankings with a superb 87.22 average.
He finished on the maximum 320 points despite competing in only 12 events, making his qualification particularly impressive.
And he isn't alone at the top.
Gareth Griffiths sits seventh in the regional table but averaged 85.59.
Josh McCarthy is sixth at 81.66.
Robbie Martin, despite being only the 14th seed, averaged 82.40.
That latter number is particularly interesting when cross-referenced with the wider Q4QS database.
Martin is one of the strongest South West qualifiers in the wider data and arrives with a 10-0 recent record, including consecutive Vault 18 titles.
That immediately shows why simply following the regional seedings could be dangerous.
The South West Players Whose Seeds Could Be Misleading
The wider Q4QS data throws up several players who look considerably stronger than their Vault position might initially suggest.
Gareth Griffiths ranks extremely highly in the wider Vault-filtered Q4QS data despite qualifying seventh.
Robbie Martin is 14th.
Zach Quinn, with a 78.32 Vault average, qualified only 22nd.
Then comes perhaps the most eye-catching example.
Declan Cox qualified 32nd.
Last place in the Regional Final field.
Yet Cox has already demonstrated that his ceiling is considerably higher than that seed suggests. At North Star Club in Calne he produced a 103.66 average, while Josh McCarthy hit 100.20 at the same event. Cox went on to win the tournament.
That is not the profile of somebody you would necessarily want as the bottom seed in your section of the draw.
The South West may not have the same depth of 80-plus averages as Wales, but it contains plenty of players capable of producing very high-level darts on the right day.
Wales: Danger Almost Everywhere
The Welsh field looks different.
The eye-catching feature is not just the top of the rankings.
It is how many strong players appear deep into the 32.
The first 12 qualifiers all finished on 320 points, but even that does not tell the full story.
Some of the strongest statistical players are much further down.
Llew Bevan is only the 26th seed but averaged 84.39 — the highest average in the entire Welsh Top 32.
Keenan Thomas is 29th with an 81.38 average.
Luke Newport is 17th at 81.59.
Ryan Davies is 20th at 79.98.
Gavin Sterio is 27th at 79.46.
That is extraordinary depth.
It means drawing somebody ranked in the twenties in Wales offers no guarantee whatsoever of getting an easier match.
Connor Hopkins Leads the Wider Q4QS Picture
Cross-referencing the Welsh qualifiers with the larger Vault 18 database produces another significant name.
Connor Hopkins ranks second across the entire Vault-filtered Q4QS player pool.
He qualified fifth in Wales.
That demonstrates just how little the regional seed alone tells us about underlying playing standard.
And we already have evidence of his ceiling.
At Wattsville National Club, Hopkins produced averages of 98.92 and 95.94, while Stephen Cake hit 100.20 and 95.94 at the same event.
Cake eventually finished top of the Welsh Regional rankings.
Alec Small, another of the Welsh 320-point qualifiers, also appeared prominently in that same event and later won at Tredegar, where he produced a 92.02 average.
So the Welsh depth isn't merely the product of accumulated averages.
There have been plenty of high-level performances behind those numbers.
Points Do Not Tell the Whole Story
This is another important part of the Vault 18 picture.
Players competed in very different numbers of events.
That means points partly reflect performance, but they also reflect opportunity and volume.
Take the South West.
Henry Cooper reached 320 points from just 12 events.
Gareth Griffiths earned 212 from only eight.
Jamie Kay reached 208 from nine.
Compare that with some players who competed in more than 20 tournaments.
Wales provides an even more extreme example.
Alex Williams reached 320 points from only 11 events.
Stephen Cake also scored 320 but competed in 26.
Timothy Jones required 28 events to reach the same total.
None of this makes one player automatically better than another.
But it does highlight why points, averages and underlying Q4QS strength should all be considered together rather than treating the regional standings as a simple power ranking.
Which Region Had the Strongest Vault Events?
The tournament-strength export produces one of the more surprising findings.
I use a calculated Tournament Strength score in the Q4QS database. It is important to stress that this is not simply an average. Player strength and the quality of the field contribute to the calculation.
Looking across the Vault 18 series, Wales and the South West were actually much closer than the Regional Final averages might suggest.
Across the events I could confidently classify, the average Tournament Strength multiplier was approximately:
Wales — 1.085
South West — 1.081
That is almost nothing between them.
The median figures are similarly close.
So this isn't a case of Wales simply having much stronger Vault tournaments throughout the seven-week series.
The everyday playing environments in the two regions were broadly comparable.
The bigger difference appears when we get to which players accumulated enough points to form the final 32.
That is a much more interesting conclusion.
Lindsay Constitutional Club Leads the Way in Wales
When the venues are separated out, one stands above the rest.
Lindsay Constitutional Club, Cefn Hengoed
Across seven recorded Vault 18 events, Lindsay produced an average Tournament Strength multiplier of approximately 1.254.
Its strongest individual event reached 1.350, comfortably the highest figure I found across the South West and Welsh comparison.
The average Top-20 figure across its events was also around 67.82.
And the results data supports that strength.
Stephen Cake won there during Vault 18, producing 91.69 and 90.73 performances on the night.
Behind Lindsay, some of the other strongest recurring Welsh venues included:
Cardiff County Conservative Club
Brynmawr Social Club
PILCS Sports & Social Club
Mile End Inn, Swansea
Brynmawr is particularly noteworthy because it produced 14 recorded Vault events while still maintaining a strong overall field level.
That suggests sustained depth rather than one unusually strong tournament.
Sartan Leads a Strong South West Group
The strongest recurring South West venue was:
Sartan Club, Bishopsworth
Across eight events, Sartan produced an average Tournament Strength multiplier of approximately 1.235, with a best event of 1.305.
That makes it the South West benchmark for Vault 18.
Behind it came:
North Star Club, Calne
Elmore Football Club, Tiverton
Yeovil Labour Club
Indian Queens WMC, Cornwall
with Magpies Social Club, Stonehouse and Saintbridge Sports Club, Gloucester very close behind.
Again, this is useful context.
The South West doesn't rely on one strong pocket of darts.
There are competitive fields spread across Bristol, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Cornwall and Gloucestershire.
At Indian Queens, for example, Gareth Griffiths and Neil Meneer met in a Vault final after both producing 96.97 averages during the event. Griffiths also hit 91.84 in the final.
South West v Wales: What Have We Actually Learned?
There are three different comparisons here.
And they don't all produce exactly the same answer.
At the very top of the Regional Finals
Almost nothing separates the regions.
South West even possesses the highest individual average through Henry Cooper.
Across the full Top 32
Wales looks significantly deeper.
The Welsh field contains far more 80-plus players and very few qualifiers whose averages drop much below the mid-70s.
Across the Vault tournaments themselves
The regions were surprisingly similar in overall tournament strength.
Wales has the strongest individual venue in Lindsay Constitutional Club and a slightly higher average strength figure, but the difference across all events is relatively small.
That leads me to perhaps the most interesting conclusion of all.
The strength difference in the Regional Finals isn't necessarily because Wales had vastly harder Vault events.
It appears to be more about the depth of players who successfully emerged from them.
Some Seeds May Mean Almost Nothing
This is perhaps the thing I'll be watching most closely once the actual Regional Finals begin.
There are players buried deep in both rankings whose underlying numbers look far stronger than their seed.
In the South West:
Robbie Martin — #14
Zach Quinn — #22
Joe Bagguley — #27
Logan Symons Jr — #30
Declan Cox — #32
And in Wales:
Luke Newport — #17
Llew Bevan — #26
Gavin Sterio — #27
Keenan Thomas — #29
Dean Reynolds — #30
A draw involving some of those players could look favourable on paper while being anything but.
What Comes Next?
For now, I'm stopping short of predicting winners.
That will come closer to the Regional Finals themselves, when I'll look at the actual draws, recent form and the strongest routes through each field.
That is where the likes of Cooper, Griffiths, Hopkins, Cake, Bevan, Martin and others can be assessed properly as potential winners rather than simply interesting statistical profiles.
But one thing is already clear.
The jump from a local Vault night to the Regional Finals represents a significant opportunity.
There is prize money to be won, but beyond that lies the prospect of appearing in the MODUS Super Series, playing in front of a much larger audience and potentially opening doors that simply aren't available on an ordinary local darts night.
For 64 players across the South West and Wales, the seven weeks of Vault 18 have got them this far.
Now the serious part begins.
