Darts

Darts: Not Just a Bar Game

Darts is variety of games that are thrown at a circular hanging board on a wall. The darts term now refers specifically to the circular game surface. The dart board is made of small fibers and the outsides of the sections are lined with wire. On quality and top notch boards, the numbers that appear on the outside of the board are made of wire but can also be printed on the boards as well. In a standard game, the bulls eye is five feet, eight inches off the ground, which makes it eye level for a six feet tall person.

Many different and distinct designs have been used for darts over the years. However, the one that is used today is on a 20 numbering system, where the 20 is on top. This system was first used in 1899 so that the game would penalize for inaccuracies instead of rewarding them. If you look at the board and create a sample set of statistics, it can be easily found that more versions of numbers could penalize more but the current setup does a rather efficient job at doing this so it will not be fixed yet.

There are twenty numbered sections within a dart board. This means that in a regular game of darts that there are scores from one to twenty points. A game of darts is contested between two players that take their respective turns throwing two or three darts at the board. Starting at a set score, usually either 301 or 501, the game ends when a player reaches zero first and that is accomplished by adding up the numbers and subtracting from the starting number. There is a twist that if a player is at 5 or 6 for example, they cannot hit anything above the number that they are at because you cannot go below zero. Another version of this type of game is called “round the clock” where the game ends after the first player hits every space on the board once.

There are several professional organizations for the world of darts. The oldest is the British Darts Organization, which was founded in 1973. Another is the Professional Darts Corporation, which was formed in 1994 as a rebel group basically from the BDO. The PDC tournaments have marketed themselves as offering a larger purse to the winner of their tournament. However, both felt the benefits in late 2005 when Sport England, the sporting society of England, gave word that darts was going to finally receive its due and be classified as a sport. There are also serious conversations about have it as one of the demonstration sports at the 2008 Olympics where there are no medals but it is still on a competitive level. If it is seen as beneficial from the IOC, then it can be on a ballot for approved sports in the future.