Darts glossary: the words at the board, in plain English
Every other page on this site assumes you already know what a leg is. This one does not. Each word below is two sentences and a link to the game or the chart that shows it in play, and every one of them is a word this scoreboard actually keeps track of.
The board itself
- Bed One scoring area on the board: the big single, the thin treble ring, the outer double ring, or one of the two rings in the middle. Players say "the T20 bed" for the treble of twenty, and a game of Around the Clock is nothing but a walk through the beds in order.
- Double The outer ring of the board, worth twice the number it sits on, so the double of 20 scores 40. It is also the ring most games finish on, which is why the whole right-hand half of the checkout chart is a list of which double to leave yourself.
- Treble The thin inner ring, worth three times its number, so the treble of 20 scores 60 and is the highest-scoring bed on the board. Three of them is 180, and a treble is what turns a hopeless-looking score into a finish on the checkout chart.
- Bull and outer bull The middle of the board scores 50 and the ring around it scores 25, and the middle counts as a double in the games that finish on one. Both are targets in their own right: Cricket asks you to close the bull like any other number.
- Oche The line on the floor you throw from, 7 feet 9¼ inches back from the face of the board. Stepping over it is the one rule of darts that has nothing to do with arithmetic, and no scoreboard can catch it for you — not this board either.
- Wire and bounce-out The metal that separates the beds; a dart that lands on it either drops into a bed or comes back at you. A bounce-out scores nothing and is not a re-throw, which is worth agreeing before the first dart of a game of Killer rather than after it.
Words for a score
- Visit One turn at the board: three darts, thrown one after another, scored as one number. Almost everything a scoreboard says about a player is per visit rather than per dart, which is why a game of Count-Up is counted in rounds of three.
- Ton A visit of 100 or more. "Ton-forty" is 140 and "ton-eighty" is the maximum, and a board that throws tons regularly is a board playing a short game of X01.
- Maximum 180: three treble twenties, the most three darts can score. It is the number every player remembers and the one every scoreboard counts separately, this board included.
- Three-dart average Points scored divided by darts thrown, multiplied by three — so it is what a player scores in a typical visit. A pub player averages somewhere in the 40s, a good club player 60 or more, and a professional over 95; it is the number the whole roster of CPU opponents in X01 is built from.
- First nine The three-dart average over the first nine darts of a leg alone, before any of them has had to shoot at a double. It is the cleanest measure of pure scoring there is, which is why this board keeps it apart from the ordinary average in X01.
- Mark One hit on a number in Cricket: a single is one mark, a double is two and a treble is three. Three marks close a number, and everything after that scores.
- MPR Marks per round: the Cricket equivalent of the three-dart average, counting marks instead of points. Two is respectable, three means you are hitting a treble a visit, and it is the number this board ranks a Cricket player by.
- Scoring for somebody Keeping the numbers for a game you are not playing, traditionally on a chalkboard, which is why the person doing it is the chalker. It is the job this scoreboard was written to take over, so that the person who used to do the subtraction gets to throw.
Finishing
- Checkout The darts that take a player from their remaining score to exactly zero, also called an out-shot or a finish. Which darts those are is not a matter of opinion — there is one shortest route for each score, and they are all on the checkout chart.
- Leave What is left on the board after a visit, and the thing good players actually aim at. Scoring 60 to leave 32 is a better visit than scoring 63 to leave 29, because 32 is a double and 29 is not; the checkout chart is a list of the leaves worth having.
- Double out The standard rule: the last dart has to land in a double, or in the middle of the bull, to win the leg. It is what makes the last 40 points of a game of X01 harder than the first 400.
- Straight out and master out The two other ways a league finishes: straight out ends the leg on any bed at all, and master out accepts a double or a treble. Both are quicker than double out and both change which routes are worth throwing, which is why the checkout chart has a section for each.
- Double in The house rule where a player scores nothing until their first dart lands in a double. It can leave somebody sitting on 501 for four visits, so it is a rule for a long night rather than a quick game of X01.
- Bust A visit that takes a player below zero, to exactly one, or to zero on the wrong kind of dart. The score goes back to what it was before the visit and the turn ends, and every finishing game on this board — X01 most of all — has a bust rule of its own.
- Bogey number A score that cannot be finished in three darts however they are thrown: 169, 168, 166, 165, 163, 162 and 159. Leaving yourself one is the classic beginner's mistake, and the checkout chart names all seven rather than quietly leaving the rows out.
- Big fish A checkout of 170 — treble 20, treble 20, bull — which is the highest score that can be finished with three darts. Nothing above it goes out at all, so it is the top row of the checkout chart, and this board announces it by name when somebody hits it.
- Madhouse Double 1: two points, the smallest target on the board, and where a leg ends up when both players keep busting. It is the last row of the checkout chart, and a word said with sympathy rather than admiration.
- Nine-darter A leg of 501 finished in nine darts, the perfect leg, and the rarest thing an amateur will ever see in a pub. This board recognises one at every start score X01 plays — six darts from 301, twelve from 701 — and says so on the winner screen.
- Shanghai The single, the double and the treble of the same number in one visit, in any order. It is a scoring feat in any game and the whole point of the game named after it, Shanghai, where hitting one can win the round outright.
The night itself
- Leg One complete game, from the starting score down to zero. A match is almost never one leg: it is the best of three, five or seven of them, which is what "first to three legs" on a X01 card means.
- Set A group of legs, usually the best of five, with the match then being the best of a number of sets. It is the format televised finals use and one of the two X01 formats this board plays, and the reason a scoreline can read "4–3 in sets" while the loser won more legs.
- Throw and the bull-off The player who throws first has an advantage, so who starts is decided before the first leg and then alternates. Deciding it by each player throwing one dart at the middle is a bull-off, or, in every pub in the country, a diddle for the middle — which is a chip on the X01 setup card here.
- Cut-throat The scoring variant where points from a closed number go on to your opponents instead of to you, so the lowest score wins. It turns Cricket from a race into an argument, and it is the version a three-or-more-player board should be on.
- Life A player's stock of chances in an elimination game, taken away by an opponent's dart rather than lost by a bad throw of your own. Run out and you are out, which is the whole shape of Killer.
- Handicap A start given to the weaker player so that a mismatched pair can play a real game — a lower starting score, a spare life, or a stroke a hole in Golf. It is the difference between a parent playing a child and a parent beating a child.
Where the words come from
Nothing above is this board's invention. They are the words used at a pub board, a league night and on television, and they are worth knowing in that order — the first game anybody plays will be scored by somebody using half of them without explaining any.
Every one of them is a word this scoreboard keeps track of for you: it subtracts the visit, spots the bust, suggests the checkout, counts the marks, and works out the average at the end. The rules of each game are on the rules pages, one per game, and the finishes are on the checkout chart.
Play them
All twenty game modes are in Friendly Fire Casper, a free darts scoreboard that runs in a browser and keeps working when the wifi drops. It keeps the score, suggests the way out, plays a CPU opponent, runs the tournament, and can put the board on a TV while everybody scores from their own phone. No account, no app store, nothing to install unless you want to.