Darts practice drills: round the board, doubles, trebles, Bob’s 27, checkouts and counting

Six drills with a score: round the board, its doubles and trebles, Bob’s 27, twenty checkouts and Counting practice — what each drills and how it is scored.

Last updated: 22 October 2026

Throwing at the treble twenty for an hour is not practice, it is a warm-up with extra steps. A drill is practice because it has a score: it tells you today whether today went better than last Tuesday, and it makes you throw at the parts of the board you would otherwise avoid.

All six below are in the app, scored automatically, with the history kept — and all six are free.

Round the board

Start at 1 and work up to 20, then the bull. Any ring of the number moves you on — a single, a double or a treble all count. Count the darts it takes.

It is the drill that makes you throw at 11, 14 and 8, which is most of what makes it valuable. Under 60 darts is respectable; under 45 is good. The bull at the end is where the runs die.

Round the board on doubles

The same ladder, but only the double ring moves you on. It is slow and it is meant to be — twenty specific doubles in order, with nowhere to hide behind a lucky single.

This is the drill that moves a checkout percentage, and it is the one most people skip because it is not fun. Doing it twice a week for a month is visible in the numbers.

Round the board on trebles

The ladder again, trebles only. Purely a scoring drill: it is about landing in a band eight millimetres wide, twenty times, on numbers you have no muscle memory for.

Expect it to be brutal. That is the point — the twenty is not the only treble on the board, and a player who can only score on one number has one number to be taken away from them.

Bob’s 27

Start on 27. Throw three darts at double one: every hit adds the double’s value — two for double one — and missing all three subtracts it. Then double two, and so on up to double twenty and the bull.

The scoring is what makes it work. It hurts to miss, it hurts more to miss a big double, and if the score drops below one the run is over — which means the drill has real stakes and a real number at the end. Finishing all twenty-one doubles alive is an achievement in itself; the score you finish on is the thing to beat.

Bob’s 27 is genuinely frustrating and that is why it works. The pressure of a run you can lose is closer to a double for the match than any amount of calmly throwing at D16.

Checkout practice

Twenty finishes worth knowing, from 170 down to 8: the three bull finishes (170, 167 and 161), the classic three-darters (160, 141, 140, 121 and 120), the two-darters (100, 81, 80, 64 and 60), the bull itself, and the doubles that come up most (40, 36, 32, 20, 16 and 8).

Each number is a leg of its own: three visits to take it out, double out as always, and a visit that busts goes back to where it began. The app shows the route while you throw, as it does in a 501, so the drill teaches the checkout while it tests it. Play them highest first, lowest first or shuffled, and count how many come out. A run can stop where it stands (Finish here) and is kept: the summary says where it stopped, it counts as a run played, and only a run played to the end can be a best.

Counting practice

At the oche, working out what is left after a miss, and where to go next, takes attention away from the aim. This drill makes the counting automatic, away from the board. A checkout comes up; you tap where you would aim, the app throws the dart for you, missing the way a real arm does, and you type what is left. Then you call the next one.

Every call is judged against the standard route — the book dart, a dart that still leaves a finish, or one with no way out — and every count against the truth, so a bust trains the bust rule too. A run is ten numbers, from the doubles up to 170, thrown by an arm that averages anything from 40 to 100: a wilder arm misses more and leaves more to count. The score is the share of calls and counts you got right. The app notes how long each answer took, for your own record, and nothing ever runs out.

Making it a habit

Twenty minutes of one drill beats an hour of drifting. Pick the one that attacks your weakest number, keep the score, and compare it with last week rather than with somebody else.

Which number is your weakest →