Why they rank here
The only player to win a world championship at the first attempt in both organisations. The Menace took the BDO title in 1991, beating Eric Bristow 6-0 in the final on debut, then joined the 1992 breakaway and won the inaugural WDC World Championship in January 1994, beating Phil Taylor 6-1. He reached six world finals in all, losing four of them to Taylor across the late 1990s, and won a Winmau World Masters among more than eight televised majors. Being the second-best player of the Taylor era is a thankless historical position, but Priestley's peak was genuinely close: he was world number one, he won the sport's biggest title in two separate universes, and in an era without Taylor he would plausibly have collected five or six world championships. He continued competing into his sixties, having also fought and beaten prostate cancer during his career.
Career profile
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Head-to-head
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