The Hot Hand in Professional Darts

03/15/2018

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by   Marius Ötting, et al.

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We investigate the hot hand phenomenon in professional darts in a near-ideal setting with minimal to no interaction between players. Considering almost one year of tournament data, corresponding to 152,072 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 "hotness", 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, which provides evidence for the existence of the hot hand.