Stress And Mistakes In Darts.

When you stand up in front of an audience you are always under a little stress and are perhaps a little concerned that you don’t make a fool of yourself. Unfortunately all darts players will testify to times when they have “Lost it,” sometimes when marking the board and sometimes when playing.

Mistakes on the dart board by the marker are usually greeted with jeers of “you should learn to count,” especially if the marker is having a bad day and makes a few real howlers instead of just small counting errors. The most frequent howlers are scoring a ton too much, or less and starting from 501/401/301 instead of whichever it should have been. Of course all markers will make the occasional mistake which should be forgiven, but just sometimes the maker’s attention will be completely lost and scores can get completely messed up resulting in a brief pause in the game to sort it out. Perhaps I suffer more than most with stress related problems on the scoreboard, because of my mental health conditions, but I have found one simple little way that often stops me from getting totally lost with the scores. Normally, you add up the player’s score and deduct it from the running total to calculate the remainder. However, if I blank out, I look at the players score, say 78 and don’t need to work out that it is 22 off a hundred, so I simply add on 22 to the running total and knock off 100. It sounds long winded, but if you have blanked out, it approaches the scoring from a different direction and often seems to over come the mental block for me.

Taking the score from the wrong side is another frequent mistake that can mess up a game and again there is a simple way of scoring that prevents this. Scores for the two players are normally written on the same line, but if the second player starts first, his score should be written up and then when the first players breaks afterwards, his score should be written slightly below the level of the LAST score of his opponent. This may look a little odd and mean starting the first players score a little way down the board, but it will prevent you taking the scores from the wrong side.

Players often get mixed up when working out their finishes and I have been more guilty than most of this. Markers are sometimes partly to blame though, especially when they don’t put a line through the player’s previous scores and the player throws thinking that his last score is his remainder to finish. Having said that, I have been known to get so mixed up, that I have thrown for my opponents score instead of my own! That is very sad, especially when I actually get it!

Players also frequently miscount their finishes on the bigger out shots. Once I had a great finish, somewhere in the 140’s, but when I proudly went up to the board to take my darts out, I found the marker chalking up double one as I had miss counted. Sometimes, if you are very lucky as a player, the mistake on the count will not be noticed, the board will be wiped before anybody realises and you will get away with it. Only this week someone in my league had a great 123 finish by hitting 57, 16 and tops, (Instead of the Bull!) and he got away with it!