Two weeks later with anticipation hanging in the air like a lingering fart, it was time for the second Dart Club meet. Spirits were high on leaving the One Tun. On that night of nights, friends were made, rivalries formed, promises made only to be broken. Was it just the beer talking? Like all climaxes though, there has to be an anti-climax. It’s not just swings and roundabouts, it’s slides too. One down 25 to go.
At 17:00 doors the Finisher and the Bull went to the Champion, which stands proud on the corner of Wells Street and Eastcastle Street. Wells Street is about half way between Oxford Circus and Tottenhamhotspur Court Road, running north off Oxford Street.
The Champion comes heartily recommend. This fine public house is notable for its beautifully rendered stained glass windows, featuring great British sporting heroes (and curiously Florence Nightingale) – although no dartsmen as such. It is a Sam Smiths boozer so serves a wide selection of Teutonic lagers, the prince of which (or should that be Baron?) is Ayinger Brau Weiss, which is German for wheat beer.
Being a wheat beer it comes in a funny shaped glass and knocks your socks off. It is a perfect accompaniment to the bangers and mash of the day, a sporting pun, which the Aussie bartender didn’t understand (although he assured us that they do sometimes have garlic mash, but on this occasion it was just “normal”). The bar staff it turns out are about 80% Australian. They start serving food at 17:30, but if you’re hungry have a fag – rather refreshingly the fag shop is right next door, so there’s no need to get change for a machine that over charges and dispenses packets of 16.
The next game on the list was Cricket. Ironicallistically enough, this game was unearthed by the Finisher in a bar in New York, on w58 between 8-9th Av, where the locals are friendly and the darts goes on all night. And with a double stroke of ironicalisticalness in the UK the game also goes by the name Mickey Mouse (and Tactics), but for the purposes of even less clarity we decided to call it American Cricket. It has very little in common with another darts game also called Cricket, which is based on the British summer sport that sports the same name: other than it is a game played by gentlemen. Players should mark out on the score board the following list:
20
19
18
17
16
15
25/bull
Players might like to add to the lists, D and T, standing for double and treble. However, Dart Club didn’t bother.
Once it has been established who goes first. Players take it in turns throwing three darts per go (but not all at once), aiming at the various targets shown above – in any order. When a target has been hit three times it is shut out – doubles and trebles count – and if you have added D and T you may elect to strike these targets out, or score on the points. If one player shuts out a target before the other, then that player may score points on the target until the other player shuts it out too. When it comes to shutting out the bull’s-eye, players need to hit it either three times in the 25, or one 25 and one bull, or two bulls.
When both players have shut out the target, i.e. it has been hit at least three times by both players, no one can score points on it. When all the targets have been shut out, the points are tallied, with the winner being the one with the most points. There is a slight twist in that if both players shut out the bull, the game ends there and then.
Standard marking practice is to strike a diagonal mark when a target has been hit, thus: /. When a target has been hit twice players should mark it thus: X. And when shut, the target is traditionally marked with a O. Unless a player shuts the target out with a clean treble, the chances are that the marking on the scoreboard will look like this: ∅, or this: ⊗. In some regions players choose to chalk up a line per hit i.e I for one hit II for two and, yep, III for three, but the other way is more aesthetically pleasing. And Dart Club is all about sexy darts.
This gives rises to the third rule of Dart Club: Dart Club is all about sexy darts.
The Finisher was closest to the bull’s-eye, thus casting further doubts over the Bull’s assertion that he be named the Bull. However, 156 darts later the Bull won the game by 12 points. A real nail biter.
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| The Bull is bullish in victory |
The Finisher failed to register a successful dart on 10 occasions, two more than the Bull. Which gave the Bull an accuracy coefficient of an impressive 89.7%, some 2.5% more accurate than the Finisher. The best man won, justice was done, a score had been settled.
It was still early doors and any form of tactical nous had yet to establish itself as the pair set off on a second game. The Bull was to swiftly learn a great piece of advice – whatever you do, don’t let your opponent close off 20 without closing it off yourself. If your opponent closes it and starts scoring left, right and centre you are truly fucked. While there is something to be said for spreading yourself around the board, there is also something to be said for getting 20 closed if your opponent does, particularly if your opponent is quite good at getting 20s. The next game was something of a rout. And the least said about it the better, despite the fact that the Bull went one better than before scoring 89, the Finisher was victorious racking up the largest score of the night with a whopping 393 points and all because the Bull neglected the 20. He wouldn’t do it again, that’s for sure.
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| Finisher looks like one of the illiteracy gremlins |
Now Dart Club is a place for experimentation (no – not that kind Danny Boy!!). So it was that the club attempted a multi-player variant. Under the rules laid out above, three or more players tends to devolve into an exercise in persecution and bullying – i.e. two gang up against one. Usually this is the best bit about most games but it’s not Dart Club’s style. So it was lucky that only a few days earlier the club had come across a rival gang of darters in the Champion, playing a cricket-based game, which they erroneously called killer. Only with their version, any number of players can be accommodated.
Where in the original points go on the scorer and the aim is to score the highest number of points, in American cricket mkII, wrongly aka killer, the aim is to escape receiving any points. Once a player closes a number, say 20, he can then start scoring. And for every 20 he scores he can allocate those points onto whichever of his opponents he chooses – provided that they have not closed that number. Obviously, if you are last to close a popular number you are likely to clock up a hefty score. Similarly if you are hitting your targets regularly you could well escape unblemished until you get to the bull.
Upon arriving at the bull, darters have to score a full 50, aka an Hawaii (either one bull or two outer bulls), before using the 25 and bull to whittle down their own personal total. The winner is the first player to get his score down to zero (note that if you get to bull with no points then you simply have to hit bull once or outer bull twice to win the game).
After the Finisher and Bull played out a couple of games of American cricket Dart Club received two new members, the Bubble and the Animal – both friends of the Specialist. One of which, the Animal, it turned out is a drummer – in other words, the Holy Grail for anyone who wants to form a band. After only two weeks, it was already apparent that Dart Club had some serious musical clout. Most members had at least some heavy metal skeletons, and most metallers join a band at some stage. The link between playing great darts and rock music is well established, Dart Club 7 was born.
The demographics of Dart Club being white middle class 30somethings, dictate that a) everyone has a copy of Appetite for Destruction and b) everyone has played in a dodgy rock band at some point. Now whereas this usually means that you end up with a band with nine guitarists and a bloke that uses a settee for a drumkit, Dart Club 7 would be different. It’d be a damn sight different from 1970s band Dart, who actually made Showaddy Waddy look good.
First up, on drums, and with his own drum kit to boot, new member The Animal.
Turntable terrorist is Danny Boy
Ivory tinkler and spandex duties fall to the Light with the Darkness (if he can play keyboards that is) as his evil alter-ego in ..er… black spandex and a cloak (and possibly a mask). The two opposite forces will have epic keyboard contests in a neo-classical style at regular intervals.
The Bull, the Finisher and the Clinician will share axe duties with the short straw playing bass and the big straw getting all the solos.
And the Specialist (specialist indeed) will be playing the throat.
So that was the band sorted. Now for the songs. Initial discussions centred on any song with the word ‘heart’ (or a rhyming derivative thereof) being supplanted by the word ‘dart’. This produced a setlist of:
Dartbreaker
Dartbreak Hotel
Burning Dart (Theme from Oche IV)
Don’t Go Breaking My Dart
Total Eclipse of the Dart
Poison Arrow (To My Dart)
Young at Dart
Dart of Glass
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Dart Club Band
A Good Dart (Fergal Darty – oh dear)
That would do for starters, but the world of music and crap word-play means that a number of alternative tracks could be selected, including:
Saturday Flight Fever
Black Flight
In the Still of the Flight
Under the (dart)Boardwalk
Oche Mountain Way
Bull’s Gold
Ob Li De Ob Li Dart
Love Will Tear us Adart
It is not beyond the realm of possibility that there could be a touring musical, the Oche Horror Picture Show. And if Dart Club ever launch into film production its first feature will be a white, middle-class remake of Shaft, the opening gambit in the brave new cinematic world of dartsploitation movies.
After getting hot under the creative collar the darts came back into focus. The two new members were welcomed with open arms. Mi casa su casa. The Finisher and the Animal prevailing over the Bubble and the Bull in the next game of American cricket and while it was a fairly pedestrian game, it was played in the spirit that darts was meant to be played. All of the players were incompetent, it has to be said, but there was a noticeable difference in incompetence between the new blood and the old hands. It would seem that practise was starting to pay off.
The learning curve for darts is like no other sport. It is so slight that to the naked darter’s eye it seems to be non-existent. Age over enthusiasm is the key though, experience counts for everything in darts. This theory was borne out later in the evening when the Animal and the Bubble (combined age 44) teamed-up to take on the Bull and new arrival the Black Bomber (combined age 58) when the youngsters tabled the lowest score that night with a poultry 34. It’s not the winning though, it’s the taking dart.
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| The Animal executes the Bubble |
Two behemoths of Dart Club clashed in the next game of American cricket, the Clinician and Danny Boy. The pair had both managed three victories during the first week’s 301 challenge, and with a new game to master it was always going to be tight. Danny Boy sealed the victory by the tightest margin of the night – a mere nine points.
With sufficient games of American cricket under their collective belt Dart Club was free to go and re-visit previous dart variant games. Under the stringent and very much written rules of Dart Club it is strictly forbidden to play a virgin game until road-tested at a previous Dart Club.
The fourth rule of Dart Club is: it is strictly forbidden to play a game at Dart Club that hasn’t been road-tested at a previous Dart Club.
So the Club was left with little alternative than to play a few games of 301, the Finisher managed a 140 – the highest score so far. But a bigger prize went to the Clinician who scooped 50bigones in the grand finale 501 challenge.
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| Mmmmm lovely fags |
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