With Friday the 13th safely out of the way the Bull and the Finisher could relax. But in darts there is no room for complacency. Success in darts, as in life, requires competition. It really is a case of survival of the fittest. Don’t dart what you can’t finish, or so the saying goes.
Dart Club may have survived a Friday the 13th, but Lady Luck is a cruel temptress. The voodoo hoodoo of what actually turned out to be a not-so jinxed night in the Lyric had a hangover waiting in the wings. Like the after shock of an earthquake it hit Dart Club hard. The next chosen boozer, the Duke of York, which is at the bottom of on Rathbone Street, had replaced its dartboard with the evil golf machine video game thing.
A golf machine.
Just look at that small sentence, sitting up there all smug. Does it make you sick? It should.
“….er where’s the dartboard?” asked the Bull.
“We’ve replaced it with a golf machine,” came the response from yet another witless Aussie barman.
“Strewth, yer flammin gallah,” the Bull might have said, were it not for the fact that he could see perfectly well that there was no longer a dartboard and had exited the pub before Bruce Breadthief could pipe up the bleedin’ obvious.
It was like the Red Lion all over again, only worse. Golf video game things have no place in London pubs. Fact.
Walking down Rathbone Place the Bull and the Finisher entered three more public houses without success before finally stumbling across the Bricklayer’s Arms, which sits pretty on Gresse Street (just off Rathbone Place, which is just off Oxford Street – come out of Tottenhamhotspur Court Road tube station, walk towards Oxford Circus and Rathbone Place is second on the right.
The pub itself features some nice benches outside, pub grub, an upstairs bar area and best of all, a little back room with a lovely dartboard. The gents toilet is close to hand, so no need for scrambling down steep steps like in the Lyric, the bar staff are about 50 per cent Australian, but don’t let that spoil your night. The beers are German. And very reasonably priced.
Unlike Richard at the Lyric, the Bricklayer’s Arms landlord wanted more than our word that Dart Club would show up, fill the place and drink solidly. Which was a trifle cheeky considering the Bull and the Finisher’s presence in the bar that day had doubled his attendance figures that lunchtime. Still, the co-chairmen couldn’t take the risk of organising a Dart Club and then finding the oche busy. The Bull placed down 50quid of his own money to book the room for the following Wednesday.
The emailed invites were sent out. The co-chairmen were feeling smug. Complacent even. But as has already been pointed out to you the eagle-eyed reader, there is no place for complacency in darts. Because although Friday the 13th’s hex had replaced a perfectly serviceable dartboard with a golf machine at the Duke of York, it had just one more trick up its evil sleeve. Communism. And nothing is more evil.
The Trotskyite tube drivers announced that they intended to have a day off on strike the Wednesday that Dart Club had just booked the boozer. It was unusual that the Tube workers had called the strike because the weather forecast wasn’t that good.
“Fuck ‘em” said the Finisher, in his inimitable unintimidatable style, “If we have Dart Club, the darters will come.
But on this occasion the Finisher was wrong. Dart Club is not Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner. It would be ridiculous to expect people to make it to London’s glitzy West End without use of the Tube. DC would have to be moved.
“I don’t like Mondays”, sang a mealy mouthed Bob Geldolf in his youth, well perhaps if he’d played a bit more darts he might cheer up. Monday night’s alright for darts. DC would be brought forward two days.
Thankfully the landlord at the Bricklayer’s is a nice bloke and was happy to swap the booking, a more sinister type would have put two and two together and realised that the only way to ensure any drinkers on Wednesday night would be to insist that the Bull honour his pledge to fill the back room with heavy drinkers all night, leveraging his 50quid deposit.
One word. Naïve. Another word. Nice.
But before the Dart Club chairmen could sit back, relaxed and look forward to another successful Dart Club, more disaster struck. The dim-witted Bull suddenly realised what he was sacrificing for the hastily re-arranged Dart Club – a box seat at the west London derby between Fulham and the MIGHTY BLUES CHELSEA. Sheepishly he had to ring his Fulham supporting uncle and explain that he would have to pass because he was “playing darts”.
Uncle Bull was slightly bemused at first, not quite sure of his nephew’s priorities. But when the full majesty of the Dart Club blueprint was made clear to him, he fully understood the decision and vowed to come along to the next outing. And besides, the game finished nil all in the end. So the Bull didn’t miss anything.
Continuing the American themed darts variant games, the game to be played at the Bricklayer’s Arms was baseball. Now baseball, as your dad would rightly say on this occasion, is just like rounders – the game made famous by girls in the playground shouting “rounder, rounder, rounder” while the stocky tom-boy girl (for she was the only one capable of striking the ball with any sort of conviction) ran around the hopelessly small square-shaped diamond.
As with almost all popular American sports, baseball players get to wear quite cool outfits and have quite cool names, however, there is no getting away from the fact that baseball is a bit soft. Baseball-darts is not soft though, oh no. It is very manly.
As with the real thing, darts baseball consists of nine innings. That’s pretty much where the similarities end, although the dart game does use some of the same vernacular as the bat and ball game.
It is really a two player only game. One player is the batter and one the pitcher (that’s American for bowler). Players choose who is who in the usual closest to bull’s-eye fashion. The pitcher then has three throws to hit the 25/bull – if successful the batter is struck outski, then the roles are reversed. If the pitcher fails to register a 25/bull, he must remove all but the last dart and allow the batter three darts. The batter can score a home run in two ways: With any one of his three darts the batter must hit the 25/bull. Or, rather than hitting the 25/bull, he should hit the last bed that the pitcher landed in (which should be obvious, since the pitcher should have left his final dart in the board).
If the batter has taken the second option, and successfully hits the final bed of the pitcher, he must then hit one, two and three with three darts. NOTE: it ain’t all over for the batter if he fails to hit one, because with his second dart he needs to hit double one, then go for three, if he fails to hit double one he can go for treble one. If the batsman fails to get a home run, it is strike one. If the batter fails to get a home run three times, he is out – i.e. three strikes and you are out.
The winner is the player who scores the most home runs. If after nine innings the scores are level, it comes down to that old devil – nearest to bull wins.
This is a game of bull and as such, one would expect the Bull to cruise to an easy victory in the opening game of the fourth Dart Club meet. However, for the fourth week running, the Finisher was closest to bull’s-eye to start the game. But darts, like many sports, with the possible exception of sprinting, is a marathon.
Since baseball really is a game of seeing who can hit bull’s-eye more often than the other it makes statistical analysis of who scored what points a bit redundant, since points don’t mean shit.
It wasn’t until the sixth innings that things started to hot up. Although, perhaps ‘hot up’ is the wrong phrase to use. Things certainly started to get warmer. The Bull got a home run or homer as they are known in the States.
Then the Bull went and got another homer in the seventh, putting him two up, with only two more innings to go, surely he would take the opening game for the third week running?
But no, the Finisher scored a homer in the eighth, edging back into the game, only to see his fight back quashed with a homer from the Bull putting him 3-1 up going into the ninth.
Surely this time it was all over?
Never write off the Finisher though, unless it’s towards the end of the night and his eyes have glazed over. Thankfully for the Finisher the chairmen were playing darts baseball early doors and like some sort of phoenix from the flames, he scored two home runs in the ninth and pitched the Bull clean out, levelling things at 3-3.
Phewee, it was actually quite exciting after all. Especially for the Bull who bucked the trend of darts lifetime and went closest to the bull sealing the game and his third opener on the bounce and answering his critics in the most emphatic of bull’s-eye hitting fashion.
You see, the Bull had started to be questioned on why he had his nom de plume when the bull’s-eye seemed to figure so rarely in his 301 breakdowns (although no one questions the Finisher when he is trying to hit double one for the umpteenth time, and no-one has asked the Specialist just what he specialises in yet). But a game like baseball is just the kind of right to reply he needed.
The rest of the evening consisted largely of 301s, although one game of American cricket was played, in which the Specialist and Darkness clocked up the biggest ever Dart Club total so far with 420 points, toppling the Finisher’s 398 from dartweek two at the Champion. The vanquished pair, Danny Boy and the Sidewinder, managed to score 245. However, a high scoring game of American cricket is like a quick game of chess where the players sacrifice pieces without really knowing why or caring. It is the trench warfare of darts games. In short, it is bad form.
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| The Specialist has got the X Factor |
There then followed a massive 15 more games of 301, featuring four Dart Club debutantes, the Fire, the Shy, the Snowman and Uncle Sam.
Uncle Sam became the first visitor from across the pond to grace Dart Club. And he had the audacity to win a game. Honestly, they come over here, all nylons and fancy ways and then they have the bare-faced cheek to win the most British of games of all (except American cricket, American football and baseball). Although, ironicaliciously enough Uncle Sam was victorious in 301 (partnered, for the record, by the Sidewinder).
Darter of the night, however, was without a doubt the Finisher, who managed his second ten dart 301 finish leaving his opponent, the Darkness, on 179 at check out. He also scooped 60quid in the 501 play-off challenge. According to Dart Club rule two, the money was immediately ploughed back into Dart Club. Dart Club, having learnt a lesson from last time's close shave at the Lyric, very sensibly held the 501 challenge at the early doors time of 21:00, leaving enough time to buy a round. Then carry one playing 301.
Now, you the reader may be losing track of just who is a Dart Clubber and who is just a fly-by-night fair weather dartist, a lot of silly names have made it into the blog so far and you, no doubt, will have spotted some of the regulars.
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| The Bubble is coining it in | Ooooh Danny Booooy! |
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| What the fuck is the Animal doing? |
You may also be finding it difficult to follow just who scores what, you might not even care who scores what – you might just be using the blog as a guidebook to new as yet unlearnt darts games, or maybe even a guide blog to pubs in central London. But it was eluded to in the previous chapter that numbers are everything in darts, plus if there was no statistical stuff it’d be a short blog. There has been plenty of statistical analysis along the way, but sometimes it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees.
Now, mathematical fuck-wits the co-chairmen may be, but they do have a keen sense of what is right and wrong. As has been pointed out before, darts is a numbers game, so it should be a fairly straight forward task to develop some sort of quantitative ranking system. After four Dart Club meets, enough statistics had been accumulated to sort the men from the boys. It was for that reason and also to prove to the Bull that he was a finer arrowsmith, that the Finisher developed the patented Dart Club Ranking System©. Points would be awarded for Dart Club loyalty, attendances at the oche and the subsequent successes and merit points for ‘sexy darts’, as shown below:
Dart Clubs attended = 1pt
n01 singles played = 1pt
n01 singles won = 2pts
n01 doubles played = 2pts
n01 doubles won = 1pt
501 challenges played = 3pts
501 challenges won = 5pts
Non-n01 games played = 1pt
Non-n01 games won = 2pts
Merit Points for Sexy Darts
170 exit = 70pts
Three dart exit = 10pts
Bull’s-eye exit = 8pts
Double top exit = 5pts
Double 1 exit = 1pt
Pub Score = 1pt
Bull’s-eye = 1pt
A 180 = 50pts
A 160 = 40pts
A 140 = 30 pts
A 120 = 20pts
A 100 = 10pts
When the Finisher tabled the idea of the Dart Club Ranking System©, giving the Bull ample opportunity to amend the point scoring system, the Bull gave him the thumbs up. However, when the Bull saw the Dart Club Ranking System© results he was less than happy. And little wonder, because after four Dart Clubs a clear rift had already developed. For the record, and without the need of going into meaningless statistical analysis regarding averages and accuracy coefficients, here is the Dart Club Top Ten according to Dart Club Ranking System points earned.
| 1 | Finisher | 165 |
| 2 | Danny Boy | 112 |
| 3 | Clinician | 85 |
| 4 | Bull | 72 |
| 5 | Specialist | 56 |
| 6 | Darkness | 43 |
| 7 | Animal | 42 |
| 8 | Black Bomber | 29 |
| 9 | Sidewinder | 25 |
| 10 | Bubble | 21 |
The goal-posts had been set, which brings up the fifth rule of Dart Club.
The fifth rule of Dart Club is never, ever question the validity of the Dart Club Ranking System.
After four Dart Clubs 25 happy darters had played a part. Five people had a 100 per cent attendance record (the Finisher, Danny Boy, the Clinician, the Specialist and the Bull). Those five darters make up the top five places, proving that loyalty and practise are the two most important things in darts.
The other most important things in darts are Merit Points for Sexy Darts. Without the Finisher’s 140 and two 120s to fall back on he would have 95 and Danny Boy would lead the hit parade. However, the Finisher does have the sexiest darts so far (including no less than eight Pub Scores) and so is head and shoulders above the chasing pack.
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