How many 180s did Kevin Doets hit in 2026?
531, spread across 49 events. The breakdown is 405 at the 34 Players Championship floor events and 126 at the 15 European Tour weekends — which is the whole of the 2026 Pro Tour calendar, with nothing skipped. The numbers come from the statistician TheRedBit, published on 6 November, and were picked up the same week by DartsNews, DartsKing and DartFreakz.
Smith’s 481 from 2025 had looked like a mark that would stand for a while. It went by fifty, and the player who passed it is not one of the names the sport sells tickets on. Doets has exactly one ranking title to his name, and it took him until this May to win it.
The record was won on the European Tour, not the floor
Here is the part nobody reported. Wessel Nijmanfinished on 527, four behind — and Nijman actually out-maxed Doets at the Players Championship events, 411 to 405. Doets’ entire margin, and therefore the record itself, came from the fifteen European Tour weekends, where he threw 126 to Nijman’s 116.
Four maximums over a nine-month season is nothing: one good leg in Hildesheim in May, or one dead leg in Maastricht in October, and the record book reads differently. Nijman’s 411 on the floor is a record of its own, incidentally. It beats the 370 Smith hit at the Players Championship events in 2025, so Smith lost both of his marks inside the same season, to two different Dutchmen.
| Stage | Doets 2026 | Nijman 2026 | Smith 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 34 Players Championships | 405 | 411 | 370 |
| 15 European Tour events | 126 | 116 | 111 |
| Pro Tour total | 531 | 527 | 481 |
One thing worth being clear about, because it is the first thing people get wrong with numbers like these: the Pro Tour is the floor circuit plus the European Tour and nothing else. The 34 Players Championship events and the 15 European Tour weekends count. Alexandra Palace, Blackpool and Wolverhampton do not, which is why a record of this size can be set by a player most casual viewers have seen on television perhaps twice. Our guide to the Pro Tour sets out what sits inside it.
The 2026 Pro Tour top ten
Six of the ten biggest scorers on the 2026 Pro Tour are Dutch, and four of them are in the top five. Chris Dobey is the highest-placed player from anywhere else, third on 473, and Kim Huybrechts is the only Belgian on the list. Smith’s own total fell from his record 481 to 360, which leaves him tied sixth with Luke Woodhouse.
Players Championship and European Tour events combined. Smith and Woodhouse are tied on 360. Source: TheRedBit, 6 November 2026, as published by DartsNews.
Dobey threw more 180s per leg than the record holder
A season total rewards two things at once: scoring power and turning up. Separate them and the 2026 list changes shape. Dobey hit 0.359 maximums per leg to Doets’ 0.357, so the best rate in the top three belongs to the man in third place, and Doets’ record is partly a function of volume — 531 at 0.357 implies somewhere around 1,490 legs of darts.
The same effect shows up in Nijman’s floor record. His 411 came at 0.346 per leg; Smith’s 370 came at 0.345. The rate barely moved. What moved was the number of legs it was applied to, which is a useful corrective to any reading of these tables as a straight ranking of scoring ability. Our guide to what a three-dart average actually measures makes the same point from the other direction.
| Player | Season | 180s per leg |
|---|---|---|
| Chris Dobey | 2026 | 0.359 |
| Kevin Doets | 2026 | 0.357 |
| Ross Smith | 2025 | 0.351 |
531 maximums, one trophy
Doets won Players Championship 13 in Hildesheim on 4 May, beating Woodhouse 8-5 in the final on a 100.61 average for £15,000 and a maiden PDC ranking title. That is the whole of his 2026 haul from 49 attempts. Nijman, four maximums worse off, won six floor titles and £160,500, and goes to Minehead as the top seed.
It is the oldest lesson in the sport restated with a very large sample. Maximums put you in position; doubles decide what happens next. Doets was also runner-up to Josh Rock at the Austrian Darts Open in Graz and runner-up to Jermaine Wattimena at Players Championship 27, so three of his best weeks of the year ended one match short.
The scoring did carry him somewhere, though. Doets finished third on the Players Championship Order of Merit, which counts floor prize money and nothing else, and that makes him the third seed at the Players Championship Finalsfrom 27 to 29 November, where he opens against Ritchie Edhouse. The top three seeds at Minehead — Nijman, Dobey, Doets — are the same three names as the top three on the 180 list, in a different order.
Wolverhampton first
Before Minehead there is the Grand Slam, which starts on Saturday at WV Active Aldersley and is the one big event of the autumn where none of this scoring counts towards the record, because the Pro Tour figure covers floor and European Tour events only. Doets is in it as a Players Championship winner, and the drawhas put him in Group C with Rock — the man who beat him in the Graz final — and Tommy Morris, who had no Tour Card when he won the last floor event of the season. Only the group winner goes through.
Doets has had one notable night on television already this year, when he knocked Michael van Gerwen out of the European Championship 6-3 on his debut in that tournament. A group of three in Wolverhampton is a thin margin for a scorer who converts at the rate he does. What remains of the season is on the 2026 calendar.