Gary Anderson
Trina Gulliver
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Trina Gulliver leads 3 of 3 categories. Our all-time ranking places Gary Anderson at #6 and Trina Gulliver at #7.
The case for Gary Anderson
The purest thrower of his generation and the man who ended Phil Taylor's last realistic title bid. Anderson won back-to-back PDC world championships in 2015, beating Taylor 7-6 in a final decided in the last leg, and 2016, beating Adrian Lewis 7-5. He reached six world finals in all, including two BDO finals in 2010 and 2011 before switching codes, and lost the 2017 and 2021 finals to Michael van Gerwen and Gerwyn Price respectively. He also won the 2011 Premier League among more than ten televised majors. His throw is famously effortless — a short, fast release that other professionals openly envy — and at his best he is capable of scoring bursts nobody can live with, including a run of 180s in the 2015 and 2016 championships that remade the tournament's records. Chronic back trouble and an unconcealed distaste for the travelling circuit have limited his output rather than his ability.
The case for Trina Gulliver
The most decorated champion in the women's game and the most repeatedly dominant player on this list after Taylor. Gulliver won ten world championships — the first seven consecutively from 2001 to 2007, then 2010, 2011 and 2013 — reaching at least twelve world finals in a career that ran alongside her work as a carpenter and joiner. She was the inaugural Women's World Champion when the BDO introduced the title in 2001 and defined the event for more than a decade, adding a long list of Winmau World Masters, World Trophy and international titles among more than twenty televised and major championships. Her significance is not only the trophies: for most of her career the women's game had almost no prize money, no television and no professional structure, and she sustained a world-class standard anyway. Every subsequent breakthrough — Fallon Sherrock at Alexandra Palace, the PDC Women's Series, Beau Greaves — is built on the visibility she created.