The Hot Hand in Professional Darts

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.

References in corpus (3)

• Hot Streaks in Artistic, Cultural, and Scientific Careers
• Surprised by the Hot Hand Fallacy? A Truth in the Law of Small Numbers
• Very Highly Skilled Individuals Do Not Choke Under Pressure: Evidence from Professional Darts

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Predictive Bayesian selection of multistep Markov chains, applied to the detection of the hot hand and other statistical dependencies in free throws
• Continuous-time state-space modelling of the hot hand in basketball
• A State-Space Perspective on Modelling and Inference for Online Skill Rating
• Can the hot hand phenomenon be modelled? A Bayesian hidden Markov approach