Trina Gulliver
Dennis Priestley
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Trina Gulliver leads 4 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Trina Gulliver at #7 and Dennis Priestley at #9.
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.
The case for Dennis Priestley
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.