Introduction – under darter’s orders

Some people are born into darts, others have darts thrust upon them. Almost everyone, however, is crap at darts, and we the authors are no exception. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t enjoy a game of darts, far from it.

Every lunchtime we wend our way down to the dirty old man’s pub (that’s a pub that’s dirty and old and full of blokes, rather than the sort of place you find in the less salubrious parts of town), just around the corner from our office for a game of arrows.

A game starts slowly working down from an achievable total of 301. More often than not scoring a 1, a 20 and a 5 with the three darts – the classic ‘pub score’ – until eventually our totals get down to a manageable and easily deduced target, usually 40, requiring the classic finish of double top.

After a series of misplaced arrows we’re usually engaged in the achingly painful task of aiming for double 1, in darts parlance, you are in the madhouse. Many is the time one game of 301 has lasted us all lunchtime.

So when we found out that our company was moving us to swanky new offices London’s glitzy West End our hearts sank. The Circle Line (that’s the yellow one folks) at first glance seems to be some sort of darts no mans land, a barren hinterland bereft if sisal. It became our quest to seek out darts oases in the ocheless desert stretching across the heart of the nation’s capital that spawned this opus, that and a mutual compulsion to get one over on the other.

Now, inevitably, dartboards tend to be located in pubs and since a person’s power of arithmetic is inversely proportional to their beer fuelled enthusiasm (and ability) it almost always leads to a quick game or two of round the clock.

Over time though, even drunk people get bored of stuff. And the merits of other pub-based sports start to seem attractive, including pool and the evil golf machine with the rotating ball thing.

But why leave the comfortable confines of the oche? Besides 301 and round the clock, there are a number of popular alternatives and we decided that for the good of mankind, a book featuring 26 of the world’s greatest dart games needed to be written. And quite handily, it also doubles as a guide to 26 of our favourite London boozers, where the barrel, shaft and flight are king.

So with the wind in our hair and the darts in our hands we decided to play our own peculiar brand of A-Z. We were sorely tempted to introduce the idea that this book is the result of some kind of mad-cap wager gone crazy, however, it is not. It is our attempt to put something back into people’s lives, well, it is really our attempt to put darts back into people’s lives, whether they want it or not. It does not contain a wizard.