The hot hand in professional darts

Ötting M, Langrock R, Deutscher C, Leos-Barajas V. The hot hand in professional darts. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A. 2020;183(2):565-580.We investigate the hot hand hypothesis in professional darts in a nearly ideal setting with minimal to no interaction between players. Considering almost 1 year of tournament data, corresponding to 167492 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 form, and we use auto-regressive processes to model how this process evolves over time. Our results regarding the persistence of the latent process indicate a weak hot hand effect, but the evidence is inconclusive