The Top-10 Seeds at the 2022 William Hill World Darts Championship

by Roy Brindley, 30 November 2021

The conclusion of last week’s Players Championship Finals means the 2021 darts season is over. However, there are still more darts to be played this year as the William Hill World Darts Championship will begin on December 15th.

Concluding on January 3rd, the £2.5 million competition will be classified as the first event of the 2022 season.

Gerwyn Price is the defending William Hill World Darts Champion. ©PDC

With seven ranking televised majors played during 2021, there is plenty of available form to assess the merits of the leading players heading into the 2022 World Championships.

This may be a 96-player competition, but the history books show there is an overwhelming likelihood the eventual winner will be a top-10 ranked player.

Only once in the past decade has the winner come from outside of the top-10 seeds. On eight occasions the winner was a top-four seed. The past ten World Championship winners were seeded as follows: 3-7-1-20-1-2-4-2-1-2

Top 10 Seeds Form Pointers

Here we look at the form and merits of the top-10 seeds in the £500,000 to-the-winner competition along with the prices offered by the best betting sites for darts.

The defending champion won the Grad Slam of Darts in November but was a shock third-round casualty in last weekend’s Players Championship Finals. Overall, Price has been in great form throughout 2021 and will be buoyed by his recent promotion to World No. 1 status.

Peter Wright won the World Darts Championship in 2020 and has landed two televised ranking majors in 2021. ©PDC

Taking last weekend’s Players Championship Finals, ‘Snakebite’ would appear to have peaked at the perfect time. But the 2020 World Champion is brilliant or bad. Sublime in taking July’s World Matchplay and September’s World Cup of Darts, he played a stinker in the first round of the European Championship – losing in the first-round to the unknown Florian Hempel – and was also a first round casualty in the World Grand Prix.

Unable to win one of the seven major televised ranking tournaments in 2021, the Dutchman has also failed to make the final of a meaningful non-ranked televised tournament this season. This represents a remarkable loss of form. In 2019 the Dutch player won seven of the 12 tournaments that fall into one of these categories.

The three-time World Champion looks a shadow of his former self, yet bookmakers are reluctant to write him off. Interestingly he is in the same World Championship draw bracket as Peter Wright. Wright once went 16 consecutive matches without beating van Gerwen. He has won their last three encounters and five of their last seven meetings.

A shock winner of the UK Championship in March (behind closed doors), Wade has been an early casualty in most tournaments since. He has never made the finals of the World Championship in 17 attempts and has won just two televised majors in the past 10 years. From this viewpoint, he is difficult to fancy.

Dimitri Van den Bergh has kept his best form for the World Matchplay. ©PDC

Van den Bergh’s rise up the rankings suggests this 27-year-old is heading places. But the Belgian’s success in the 2020 World Matchplay (once again behind closed doors) boosted his winnings by £150,000 which equates to ranking points and accounts for his prominent seeding.

He reached the World Matchplay final once again in 2021 but hasn’t made a dent in the other four televised ranking majors he has played since. At a top price of 16/1, he is fifth in the betting which looks very short in the context of recent results.

Three times a beaten World Championship finalist and twice a winner, Gary Anderson has been dismissed by the bookies on the back of a miserable 2021. His averages and results have certainly been poor, but the Scotsman clearly loves this stage and if warming to the task in the early rounds, it is possible he could outperform his odds.

Aged 47, the Spaniard only joined the PDC tour in 2019 but made amazing progress and won the 2020 Grand Slam of Darts. Naysayers will point out that tournament was played without a live audience and his path to glory was ‘charmed’. He beat Lisa Ashton, Krzysztof Ratajski, Dave Chisnall, Michael Smith, Simon Whitlock and then James Wade in the final.

However, he was a finalist in the Premier League at the start of the year and posted his second televised nine-dart finish during that competition. Often unorthodox in his choice of checkouts, his maverick style will be entertaining at the very least.

Clayton has been a win machine in 2021. Playing four non-ranked televised finals, he has won The Masters, Premier League and World Series of Darts Finals. He was also a semi-finalist in the World Cup of Darts. In ranking events, he took October’s Grand Prix, was a quarter-finalist in mid-October’s Grand Slam and a semi-finalist in last weekend’s Players Championship Finals.

Beating Gerwyn Price 5-1 in the World Grand Prix final, he showed his ability to beat the very best on a major stage. During this competition, he recorded two 170 finishes. A repeat of this form would make him the man to beat over the Christmas period.

Michael Smith: A semi-final appearance in the Grand Slam is his best result of 2021. ©PDC

A good money earner (and ranking points) courtesy of a late run into a lot of competitions, remarkably Smith has only made two televised raking finals. He has never won a major televised tournament of any kind.

Since October he has been a first-round casualty in the World Grand Prix, European Championship and World Series of Darts Finals. There was hope with a semi-final appearance in the Grand Slam of Darts but last weekend he only won one match in the Players Championship Finals.

Aspinall burst onto the scene by making the semi-final of the 2019 World Championship and winning the 2019 UK Open. The rest of that season was disappointing, but he did reach the semi-finals of the World Championship again in 2020.

The last 32 months have produced just one appearance in a final – the 2020 Premier League – and a second-round exit of the recent Players Championship Finals was another disappointment. It makes him hard to fancy.

*Key Form and results are listed oldest to most recent

• DNQ: Did Not Qualify
• WD: Withdrew
• R: Round
• QF: Quarter Final
• SF: Semi Final
• F: Final
• W: Winner

Conclusion

Price and Wright have taken the last two World Championships and have been playing well enough throughout 2021 to fully justify their place in the betting. Sat at opposing ends of the draw, they could conceivably meet in the final.

Michael van Gerwen is desperately short in the betting. His odds are based on his incredible record and past results but rarely do players rediscover their form quickly. At such a short price he is possibly one to lay on a betting exchange.