Darts in : Scoring a visit · 449

A sport played on a target the size of a dinner plate, where the arithmetic never stops and the last dart is always the hardest. 501 up, straight start, double finish — 170 (treble 20, treble 20, bullseye) is the highest possible three-dart checkout 451 mm bristle board, 20 numbered segments plus a 25 outer ring and a 50 inner bull; the treble ring pays three times the segment

2.37 m (7 ft 9.25 in) from the oche to the board face, with the bullseye 1.73 m off the floor Nine darts — first achieved on television by John Lowe on 13 October 1984 for a £102,000 prize The PDC, founded in 1992 as the World Darts Council, and the World Darts Federation, founded in 1976, with member bodies in more than 70 countries

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.