🎯Competitions

The sequence — 20, 1, 18, 4, 13, 6, 10, 15, 2, 17, 3, 19, 7, 16, 8, 11, 14, 9, 12, 5 clockwise from the top — is designed to punish inaccuracy. Every high number is flanked by two of the lowest, so a dart that drifts a few millimetres off the 20 lands in the 5 or the 1, and a wayward visit can score under 10. That arrangement is what makes darts a skill sport rather than a lottery: precision is rewarded disproportionately and near misses are penalised harder than a deliberately safe shot at a middling number. The design is traditionally credited to Brian Gamlin, a carpenter from Bury, in 1896, though no documentary evidence has ever confirmed it.

A nine-darter is a perfect leg: 501 checked out in the minimum possible nine darts. The classic route is 180, 180, then treble 20, treble 19, double 12 to finish 141. Alternatives include 167, 167, 167, each of treble 20, treble 19 and bullseye. John Lowe threw the first on television on 13 October 1984 and collected £102,000. It remains the sport's signature achievement, though it has become far less rare: professionals now throw several a season across the circuit, and Phil Taylor holds the record of eleven on television, including two in a single match in the 2010 Premier League final against James Wade.

The double-out rule exists to stop legs ending by accident and to place the hardest shot at the most pressurised moment. Without it a player could simply scrape to zero with any dart, and the finish would carry no risk. Requiring an exact landing in a bed roughly eight millimetres wide means that scoring your way to a finish is only half the job — the best scorers in the world convert only about 35 to 45 per cent of their double attempts in televised matches. It also creates the game's arithmetic: what you leave yourself matters as much as what you score, which is why professionals engineer finishes toward 32 and 40 rather than simply taking the biggest available number.

The throwing line, called the oche, is 2.37 metres (7 feet 9.25 inches) from the face of the board, measured horizontally along the floor. The centre of the bullseye sits 1.73 metres (5 feet 8 inches) above the floor, which puts it at roughly eye level for an average adult male — the height was standardised from pub practice rather than designed. Both measurements were fixed internationally by the World Darts Federation in the 1970s, ending decades of local variation in which distances were paced out rather than measured. A player may lean over the oche as far as balance allows but must not step on or beyond it, and the diagonal distance from the throwing point to the bull is 2.93 metres.

It is total points scored divided by darts thrown, multiplied by three — the sport's headline measure of scoring power. A casual pub player might average in the 40s or 50s, a good league player in the 70s, and a county-standard player in the 80s. A PDC Tour Card holder needs to average in the mid-90s to survive on the circuit. Above 100 in a televised match is a strong performance, above 105 is exceptional, and the all-time televised record is Michael van Gerwen's 123.40 against Michael Smith in 2016. Because the average includes the darts thrown at doubles, missed checkouts drag it down, which is why a player can average higher than an opponent and still lose comfortably.

Because the punishment for missing is smaller. The treble 20 pays 60 but sits between the 5 and the 1, so a slight drift costs almost everything. The treble 19 pays 57 — only three fewer — and sits between the 3 and the 7, so a miss costs roughly half as much. Over a long match, players who favour the 19s argue the reduced variance outweighs the lower ceiling. The counter-argument is that 180 only exists at the top of the board and a twelve-dart leg usually needs it. Most professionals score on the 20 by default and switch to the 19 when their darts are consistently dropping into the 5, which signals a mechanical fault rather than bad luck.