Darts in : The oche and the throw

Phil Taylor, 16 (two BDO, fourteen PDC) between 1990 and 2013 Darts compresses elite sport into an area smaller than a dinner plate. The scoring surface is 340 millimetres across, the treble 20 bed is roughly 8 millimetres wide, and a professional stands 2.37 metres away and hits it three times in a row often enough that a 180 barely raises an eyebrow. Everything else follows from that geometry. There is no defence, no contact and no way to hurry an opponent; there is only your own arm, a fixed target and a running subtraction from 501 that must land exactly on a double. Few sports expose a competitor so completely, and none does it in such a confined space.

Darts is also, quietly, one of the most international minority sports in Europe and Asia. The Netherlands produced two of the greatest players in history and treats the game as a mainstream television property; Germany fills arenas for European Tour weekends; Belgium, Austria, Wales and Scotland punch far above their populations; Japan and South Korea sustain an enormous soft-tip machine culture that feeds players onto the professional steel-tip circuit. Add a women's game finally receiving structure and prize money, and a teenage world champion in Luke Littler, and the sport's audience is younger and broader than at any point in its history.

The standard professional game is 501. Each player starts on 501, throws three darts per visit, and subtracts what those darts score from the running total. The first to reduce the score to exactly zero wins the leg — but the dart that takes the score out must land in a double, either one of the twenty double beds around the outer rim or the 50 inner bullseye, which counts as double 25. Reaching zero any other way, dropping below zero, or leaving exactly one is a bust: the visit is void and the score reverts to what it was before the throw.