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

Four practice routines with a score you can beat: round the board, the doubles and trebles variants, and Bob’s 27. What each one drills, and what a good number looks like.

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 four below are in the app, scored automatically, with the history kept.

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 twice the double’s value, 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.

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 →