Wade: right attitude

Wade has a great attitude to defeat as well and when things aren't going so well he just goes away and assesses why. Taylor tends to go away and practise for 10 hours instead of six, which can be counter-productive, while Barney will get more depressed than any player of his calibre really should.

Sid Waddell
Quotes of the week

LAS VEGAS DESERT CLASSIC
Live on Sky Sports
Tuesday to Sunday
Click here for live schedules

All eyes in the darts world are on the Nevada desert this week as the best on the planet battle it out Stateside.

And with Phil Taylor and Raymond Van Barneveld struggling in his opinion, the Voice of Darts believes James Wade could hit the jackpot in Vegas...

I remember being at the Leeds Irish Centre back in 1972, where people were serving pints from behind the bar with aprons and wellies and I'd never have dreamt that we would one day be going to Las Vegas!

This is the seventh Desert Classic, but I still get a great buzz from it and so do the players. It's got a different feel to it from other competitions and for some of the players it's still very much a holiday through darts.

It's great fun for us as well and me, Dave Lanning and John Gwynne have found ourselves a bit of a working man's club land at the back of a petrol station out there!

It's called BJ's and you get all sorts in there from truckers to celebrities.

They also sell an American version of Newcastle Brown Ale , which is called Shriner Boc and it's the nearest thing to the good stuff that I have ever tasted, but the best thing about BJ's is that it's the most reasonably priced place in all of Vegas, so we're looking forward to going back there.

Looking ahead to the tournament itself and it's very hard to say who out of the top 16 is going to win this, but I think that the player with the most confidence going into the tournament is James Wade.

In the last 12 months he has won three majors and really gained a maturity and for my money I think he has got to be the favourite. He has a great attitude to defeat as well and when things aren't going so well he just goes away and assesses why.

In that respect he is probably more mature than both Raymond Van Barneveld and Phil Taylor, even though they are both massively more experienced.

When things aren't going well Taylor tends to go away and practise for 10 hours instead of six, which can be counter-productive, while Barney will get more depressed than any player of his calibre really should.

On that basis I think Wade will be the one to beat going into the Classic, especially after his victory at the Blue Square UK Open in Bolton.

Condition

Looking through the rest of the field, Dennis Priestley is definitely on a roll. He is back after battling prostate cancer, but whatever his physical condition is, he's actually playing the best darts that he has since him and Taylor were duking it out in 1994-1995.

He recently won the Bristol Trade Centre Players Championship defeating Kevin Painter in the final 3-2 and one must remember that in the 2007 Premier League Darts, he was leading the field up to week eight. So if he comes to Vegas with a good attitude he will be one of the favourites I believe.

The sheer cruelty of darts was never more clear than at Bolton three weeks ago when within 25 hours Taylor had had a nine darter and recorded the biggest average in the history of the PDC, 114.5, only to get pipped by Barney.

But Taylor gets inspired by Las Vegas and that's why I think he will also be in the running. I remember the first time he won it there he was walking down the corridor and looking at all the big acts that had played in Vegas.

If you go to the middle of the Las Vegas Strip you will see something called a Jumbotron, which is a giant video on a clock tower. And on it you will see ZZ Top, Bruce Springsteen, The Beach Boys and yes you've guessed it, Phil Taylor now as well - not bad for the lad that used to make toilet chain handles for £54 a week!

I think Barney will also be there or thereabouts, because he likes this sort of tournament. He doesn't particularly enjoy the week to week waiting that you get in the Premier League Darts, so this should suit him.

John Part is another former champion - having won it in 2006 - so he will be in with a shout as will Adrian 'Jackpot' Lewis who dropped $70,000 on a machine in Las Vegas but couldn't collect because he wasn't 21!

Outsider

But my outside bet for this year's tournament and the guy who I think will really shine is Colin Lloyd. He was number one in the world four years ago before the rankings were based on money.

He's now number eight on the order of merit, but is really angry because he doesn't feel that he ever got the credit he deserved when he was number one. He's also on a good run of form, which is why I've picked him as my outsider.

Of the four other players that complete the 16, three of them are American and one is Canadian. I'm really looking forward to seeing Larry Butler, who I call the bald eagle because he has a big moustache, but has been bald since his mid 20's! Out of the three Americans he will be the one to watch.

I often get letters from old darters telling me words like 'stacker' were not in the darts vocabulary when we started in the 1960's and the truth is I've had to develop them since the tungsten revolution, which was around the time of the first darts world championship in 1978.

The tungsten revolution meant, for starters that you could get three darts in the 60 because they were much thinner, whereas before you were throwing cigars! Excitingly this meant that the attack on the 60 became far more sophisticated.

You had Priestley who threw them at an angle of about 20 degrees to the horizontal and then bumping them in underneath. Then along came Alan Evans who was good enough to throw three that went along the bed without touching and finally you had Taylor who did the opposite to Priestley.

Now I'm a huge fan of baseball and the Boston Red Sox and I was watching a game the other day and the commentator was describing the seven different types of pitches which is incredible.

But I believe if there are seven different ways to throw a baseball then there are probably about 27 different ways in which you can throw a dart! And that is the reason for all the new terminology.