The Putting Green: Accuracy and Decision Making

A gentle start to your daily practise, a fun game that is easy to play, but hard to master. The Putting Green involves single dart accuracy, board use and decision-making.

The scoring is simple: 1 point for a treble, 2 for a double, 3 for a single and 5 if you miss the segment completely. The aim, is to score as few as possible. The twist is that only the last dart thrown counts!

So, if you throw your first dart and if it lands in the single segment you have a decision to make. Accept the 3 points? Or, throw again? If you choose to throw again you risk missing and piling pressure on your final dart. If you chose to gamble, perhaps by going for an obscured treble, you risk adding a 5 to your ‘scorecard’.

We play this as a warm up drill, or fun finish, first go for numbers 1-9. A perfect ‘round’ would be 9 trebles and score 9 points. However, even the very best don’t get near that often.

The back nine (10-18) can be played either afterwards or as a break from a more serious session.

From my recall the best ‘front 9’ was 14. A thirteen has been managed on the second set and the best continuous round was 29. Jamie Caven was a master at this drill as was Paul Cook, former News of the World champion.

Article originally appeared in Darts World Magazine (571) 2020.

Words: AIM