I Don't Understand

How can I have incredible practice rounds all day and then hit absolutely nothing at all during league? I had the worst night of darts I have ever had (at least within memory). With the exception of a couple mid-fifties outs, I hit squat for the entire duration of the match. My team lost 16-3. Ouch. That is our most crushing defeat to date. And although my people were joking at the bar afterwards, I can't help but feel they were discouraged. None of them had any interest in throwing more darts!

Of the 3 points we did win, one point came in a doubles 501 game that my partner and I won. I hit a 58 out in that game for the win. The other two points were from a singles Chicago match that I won (I won the cricket game we opened with, and then hit a 50 out (s18, s8, d12) for a quick 2-0 win in that match). Other than these two wins we lost everything else. And the worst part is that I was on fire all day during practice, and then on fire during the hour warm up before league play started. On fire to the point that my teammates were commenting on it. I could not miss the bulls, nor my doubles. And then like magic the league play starts and my fire is doused with 1's and 5's.

Anyway. Enough dwelling. I look forward to the next match. We have a bye next week and then we play against Nicos the week after. They are formidable opponents to say the least and they trounced us when we first encountered them. Nonetheless, I am certain we will beat them this time!

Here is a completely random pic from a long time ago. It has nothing to do with last night's defeat or this post.

First Ever Deadeye

This shot made me happier than just about any shot I have ever made. Even more so than my first Ton-80. I had only ever seen this done once. My good friend and teammate in Seattle pulled one off in practice before a consolation tournament a few years back.

Seventh Lifetime Ton-80

It has been since July 15 since I have last hit a "max". So this was just the shot I needed to bring myself out of a rut in dart playing. But in all fairness I haven't been in a slump necessarily, just a rut. I have been doing decently in league but not spectacular. I have hit several Ton-40's and Hat Tricks, several other low tons, etc. but not consistently. So I have been shooting above average, just not at the level I desire.



My accuracy with the darts pictured above surprised me a little. I have been in the mindset lately that 24 grams is pretty much the perfect weight for a dart. Depending on the dart of course. Front loaded darts have a wider range of acceptable weights. For example I have been throwing my 27 gram GT3's lately with pretty good accuracy and not suffering due to the extra grammage. So when I picked up the 16 gram darts (in the picture) and started hitting things I was surprised. I put a slightly smaller flight on them (pears) and found they flew pretty much straight and with a good flat trajectory. I did notice that I throw these darts harder. I think this is in response to their lighter weight, and according to a book I am reading (How to Master the Sport of Darts) throwing harder is a more accurate style than lobbing high-arced trajectories. Time will tell.

Hot and Cold, Hot and Cold

The bad news is we lost our match last night 13-6. The good news is that we did better this week than two weeks ago and my teammates were pumped even at the end when the match was over. Despite back to back stompings my team is happy and looking forward to the next match! No morale boosting necessary for my troops. Talking to them each after the night they all felt that they were throwing well and that each game they had a fair chance to win. And I am certain they did! In one singles match my teammate took out 88 by going 20, 18, double Bull. I was terrifically impressed. I advised him on the round as such: first dart goes to the trip 20. (He missed into the single.) 68 remained with two darts. Second dart goes to the trip 18. (He missed into the single.) 50 remained with one dart and he nailed the double bull. In the end he missed his intended mark with the first two darts and still took out the 88 for the win.

I personally did both quite well and quite poorly. In cricket especially. In my first cricket doubles game in my last round I hit 15, bull, double bull to win. That was exciting. But in my only singles cricket match I allowed myself to be demolished. It was not a lack of strategy either, it was a lack of accuracy. I hit squat that game. But in the next doubles cricket game I hit 5 bulls in the last couple of rounds to come back from behind and win it for us. Fun times.

In the '01 games I did manage to take out 4 once for a win. Other than that I had a poor night. No tons, nor many trip 20s at all. Perhaps next week... By the way the pic has nothing to do with last nights match. I just thought it made a nice visual.

First Double Bull Out

I had a terrific night last night. Our team had a bye so we gathered at the home pub for some much needed practice and chemistry building and I had a terrific night. The others did well too, and I feel we are gaining momentum in the categories of team chemistry and confidence. Next week we play a team that by all reports (okay only one person told us this) should be in the Super division but have decided to play B League this season. So I hope that our momentum stays and does not crumble. So what made my night so good? These things:

1. An exciting finish in a singles 501 game.
2. Two 135's scored.
3. Multiple Tons (did not keep track).
4. Dominated Cricket all night.

So here is how that exciting finish went down: I had 85 left with three darts in hand and decided to go bull with the first dart. This would leave me either 35 (less likely) or 60 (more likely) with two darts and I'd be happy with that. Well I missed. I hit the single 15 and had 70 left with two darts. Then I decided to try something I'd been thinking about. I decided to go triple 20, double 5 with the last two darts so that if I were to miss into the single 20, I'd still have an out with my last dart. I missed into the single 20. I had one dart left and 50 points to go. I squared up and shot with confidence and voila. Double Bull for game.

The sweetness of that win lasted all night.

Pickup Your Game

For those who have asked who made my new darts and where they can also get some like them, and for those who have PM'd me or posted comments on the last entry about the darts pictured there, I am posting the contact information of the gentleman who made mine. And here it is:

Jeff Pickup
145 Rembrandt Pl
London, ON N6C 5G9
(519) 686-6659
jpickup
rogers.com

The last two lines are his email address, just stick an @ between them. I did it this way to spare him any spam that might be generated otherwise.

He made mine to exact specifications. I described them as I wanted them, detailing barrel length, weight, texture, nose shape, taper points, everything. He delivered precisely what I asked for and I am very please with the darts.

He has a unique MP system. His moving points are excellent and I use them on both my sets of GTs now. You can see a cross section of one that he'd cut in half for demonstration purposes. He uses an o-ring to slow and stabalize the movement of the point. His collars are also very low profile, similar to the GT collars.

He also has a unique stem system. And it may be the most clever stem system I have ever seen on a dart. He use a section of a Q-tip stem as a spacer to hold in the rod and top of a titanium shaft. Good stuff. Perhaps he'll log in and leave a comment.

Please let him know you heard of him through Zeeple at The Dart Indoors. Cheers folks and good darting!

Darts For Sale

These are not my darts, but they are for sale. They were designed and lathed by the same guy who made my new set of darts. They are quite nice looking, in my humble opinion, and have the kind of strong taper found darts like the GT which are moving point darts (only). The darts pictured are 22.5 grams in weight and are fixed point, but I think he'd be willing to do the same dart in moving point if that is your preference. In fact his moving points are also quite special. They are his own design.

Size Matters

A lot of people have asked me about the stems they see on the blog. Especially regarding the new screw in type shafts from Bottelsen they designed for their GT line. I thought I'd snap a quick pic to illustrate the difference between 1/4", 2BA, and the GT shafts. Take a look at the barrels. From left to right they are a 17 gram no name dart, a 22 gram Halex Tungsten dart and finally, a 27 gram GT3. The leftmost dart is from a one of two sets of darts that came free with a dart board I bought once at the sporting good store. I knew nothing about dartboards then and bought the cheapest, whcih was a paper-wound job. Terrible board, but oddlly, I like the darts (bottom dart in pic). This is one of two darts I own that have an opening for a 1/4" threaded stem, and the only dart that requires the 1/4" stem. The other set I refer to has an opening on one side for 1/4" and 2BA on the other, so you could either use 1/4" points or stems and 2BA of the other. The middle dart is the most common. Almost every dart on the market is like the middle barrels in these pics and requires the 2BA stem, also pictured below it. The last barrel, form the GT3 has a very tiny opening requiring the tiny stem you see near it. I do not know what thread size it is. The next set of darts I design and have made for me will take this type shaft. It allows for a much more salient taper.

Back to Back Hat Tricks

I hit hat tricks often enough now that I am no longer tempted to take a picture of every single one. In fact not many shots excite me any more. But tonight I hit two Hat Tricks back to back. The first picture is actually from a practice session last night, and tonight I didn't whip out the camera until I hit that second Trick. So my back to back Tricks toght were both with the Red/Blue/Yellow flight combo, where as the clear flight was a previous CPC. I am not sure if these photos are oriented correctly. I think the one from yester day may need to be flipped around one way or another but I cannot remember.

Round of Nine

While tossing around with my mystery darts yesterday after work I hit a clean Round of Nine. It was not in a game, nor was it really in any kind of structured practice game, I was just aiming at triples for practice. Triple 18, triple 17, triple 16. I have hit a True round of nine before but it is rare for me. I'd say it might even be more difficult than a Ton-80 since you have to change your aim after each dart. I later played a few rounds of DartPro against an online friend from Bulgaria and did pretty well in those games too. Such evenings tend to give me a lot of confidence. Why do shots like this never happen in league matches? Last Tuesday night I had one good game of cricket but other than that I couldn't hit anything at all. At least I'm rebolstered for next match!

Perennial Posts

Has it been a year already? I guess it has. One year ago today I posted my first blog post to try to find some darts for a set in which I was missing a dart. The Mystery Darts. How appropriate for my one year anniversary post to concern those very darts. They are still mystery darts and I have not found anymore like them but I did find a guy who would make me a duplicate third dart so I could have a complete set:


Notice that there are some differences. The new dart is shinier which I would expect, but also the striations that run the length of the dart missing. He said that this was created by running the dart through a particular kind of machine which he did not have and asked if I'd like the other darts to be made smoother so they were all identical. I opted to keep the longitudinal pattern on the others because I have not given up hope for finding some more of them. The same guy in Canada who made my new set also made this one. Here is a close up of the barrels together:


Well, I hope you few who follow my ramblings have enjoyed the blog for the last year. Cheers!

CPC: Current Preferred Configuration

Hi all, time for a CPC update. As it happens I have been limiting my barrel usage to the new set (the Dagnabits) and I have put away all of the other sets. So all that is left to mess with is the stems and the flights. I have thus far tried short nylon stems and "in-between" nylon stems, both of which are acceptible but nothing else. The medium nylons are too long for a barrel that is a full 2 inches long such as mine. The flights that work with this barrel and stem combo are many and varied. I have tried the Spiraline flights which I like quite a bit, the standard dimplex, and smooth dimplex. I have also, much to my delight, found that the mini dimplx flights work nicely, leaving the darts pretty much perpendicular to the board with no left or right slant. My CPC is as is pictured to the right. Black smooth pear shaped flights with black short stems.

The Quest for the Holy Grail

Perhaps the greatest aspiration for your average darter is not to master those difficult shots like the Ton-80 or a Deadeye, but rather the assembly of the perfect dart. This is the true Holy Grail of darting in the modern world of nearly infinite options. So the trick now is to break this problem down to its constituent parts and assemble the dart from front to back. Here are the components in order of appearance: point, barrel [weight, shape, texture, material], stem, flight, extras.

What are the options? Points can be fixed or moving, sharp or rounded dull, roughed or smooth, long, medium or short. Barrels, not to be outdone, have many more options. They can be tungsten, nickle-silver, brass, copper or rhenium (gimme a break already). Knurled, ringed, grooved, barbed, smooth, coated or bare. Front loaded, middle weighted, reverse tapered, fat pencil, skinny pencil, scalloped and may be anywhere from 8 to 45 grams. Stems are aluminum or nylon or plastic, short, medium, long, inbetween, extra-short or micro, spinning or static. Flights can be standard, kite, pear, heart, slim, cut-off, delta, combat or spinning. Smooth, dimplex, ribbed and with any design you can imagine. For extras you've got o-rings, stem rings, crowns, flight protectors and add-a-grams.

With all of these options there is a near infinity of possibilities. So how does your average bar room darter assemble a superior, if not perfect dart? And do not tell me there is no such thing as a perfect dart because one of the imperatives of the human condition is that there BE a Holy Grail.

The Silence is Broken

In the best possible way. Announcing some new darts. Some darts which will in fact herald quite a few new posts because when I got these, I also had a couple of sets repaired and they are begging to be blogged. So here they are:


And for that matter, I think these are the finest darts I have ever seen. I took them out tonight for the first team practice and I did pretty well with them for being new to me. I was hot on the doubles and I hit a hat trick, at least one ton and sprinkled several treble 20's throughout the night.

About the darts: These are darts of my own design which I hired a master lathesman to lathe for me. I had two sets made. One for me and one for my good dart pal in my old city. I call them, as a model name, Dagnabits. So the official catalogue line item description of these darts would be:

"24 Gram Fixed Point Dagnabits, Smooth Finish."

It is hard to tell from the photo unless you zoom in on it, that the barrels are actually tapered, but it is a very subtle taper. The barrels are a full two inches long, and the alloy is 90% tungsten. They were drilled a bit to make them exactly 24 grams.

Switching Flights

Funny how droughts come and go. I have not been able to hit the trip 20 recently to save my life.

When you have been playing for a few years it is difficult to know what to point your finger at as a cause for suddenly loose groupings and failing accuracy. On the one hand you have enough experience to know the theory behind the throw, and even a little unrefined skill. You will have had periods of superb darts and so you know you CAN hit the trip 20 consistently, even if you cannot always do it. But on the other hand, just a few years of play is not enough (for me anyway) to reach that level of Mastery that allows for the 'expectation' of hitting the trips you aim for. But merely you have the confidence that it is possible, and you are doing your best to push the possible towards probable.

In the last couple of weeks I have been 26ing myself into a bout of worry. I have tried many things to snap out of it, most importantly sticking with a single set of darts as best I can. I have modified my Random Practice Script to return only games and not darts, I have re-examined my form and grip and stance. I have tried looking for failings in my mental game and improving the confidence aspect. None of these things worked. Switching flights DID work, however!

I switched from the top dart to the bottom dart and suddenly started hitting more trip 20's. Consistently, too. A few Ton-40's but at least one every few rounds or more. Go figure.

Tricks for Kicks

I had a terrific practice day yesterday. Okay maybe it wasn't terrific but it had a few good points. I used my new program to generate a list of random practice games with random dart sets and I ended up with at least two sets of Bulls practice. I call that "20 Bulls" since all I do is throw at the bull till I hit 20 of them and then move on to the next practice game. I finished both of those practice games in style: with Hat Tricks. The first game was with the 25 gram Crossfires that you see in the first pic. The second was with the 25 gram Great Whites that you see in the second pic. Click on the photos for closeups. Note that both tricks are 4-counts.

One thing I have noticed so far about the perl script I am using is that, even though it is technically random, it seems to favor a handful of dart sets. I am thinking about re-writing it so that it will use a set and then remove it from the array until the array is empty and then start over. That way it will cycle through all of the darts randomly. However, within a few weeks I hope to actually have my new darts from Canada, as well as be on a league team, so I will likely just use the f switch all the time for practice. That way I am sure to always be using the new darts.

Mathing Your Oche

I decided on blue masking tape. Actually in the beginning I just decided to use tape again since the black electrical tape worked well at the old place, and comes up easy not leaving a mark on the floor. Any residue cleanable with something like 409. So when I wandered into the basement to find it I saw this stuff sitting on top a shelf, left over from painting. I thought, Hey. It's medium stickiness so should come up pretty easy, it is wider than the electrical tape, and is nicer looking.

Putting the oche down also gave me the chance to double check my math. The 7' 9.25" is supposed to be from the face of the dartboard, not from the wall, so adding this distance to the thickness of the board and backboard combo I get 7' 11.75". But then subtracting the thickness of the baseboard and cord a round I really end up with 7' 10.5", which as I'd measured before, really DOES correspond exactly to a line in the hardwood floor. Nice to have an official oche anyway.

Practice Script Improvements

I have added a few features to the perl script I posted a few posts back. Here they are:

1. An additional array for your favorite darts. So I know that most folks have a lessened affinity for switching between multiple dart sets between games, and most people in fact stick to a single set or two. Thus I have added an array in which you can list these few (or one) sets called @priority_sets and provided a way to call it with a switch. Simply include an 'f' anywhere on the command line after the name of the program. 'f' stands for 'favorite darts'. Example: $practice.pl f

2. Args act like switches. Instead of now having to have a number followed by a space followed by the 'f', you can specify the number of games and put your 'f' in any order and spaces do not matter. So these are all equivalent:

practice.pl 10 f
practice.pl 10f
practice.pl fav10
practice.pl f 10

3. Doubles array. I added an array to be picked from randomly that holds different ways of practicing your doubles. Clockwise, counter-clockwise, up, down, etc. This of course is only called when doubles is selected as the game to play.

Note on arrays: the arrays in this prog are written with one element on each line on purpose. This way you can comment out dart sets that have fallen from grace or which you wanna set aside for what ever reason. Notice in the pic to the righ I have commented out two of the fav sets so that when I use the 'f' switch I always end up throwing with the Bombs.

Alias for "quickie" and "practice" modes: Add this line to your profile (on a Mac: /etc/profile) so that you can just type 'quickie' at any prompt without having to worry about what the pwd is. As you can see form the pic below you can use the f switch with these as well:

alias quickie='/Users/robert/projects/random/practice.pl'
alias practice='/Users/robert/projects/random/practice.pl 10'

New Digs

So these are my new digs. Once again in the new house I have arrange the darting area in the same room as my office which works out nicely because it is long and narrow. I like the new setup a hell of a lot better than the old place though even though it is smaller. There is nothing new here, just a different environment, although I think I am going to by an oche if I can find one that doesn't have the name of a beer on it. Otherwise I'll just put black electrical tape on the floor again. I don't have an oche now but I still dart because I have measured it and the 7'9.25" corresponds to a line in the hardwood floor.



One of my favorite things about the new dart room is that I can attach the backboard to the wall with screws (which you can see if you zoom in on the picture). In the old place I had it hanging by a chain and so the board would wobble shift and move from time to time. Now the board is solid and I can just yank the darts out with little worry. I think I brought the number ring with me but I am not sure. I never use it anyway.



Another difference is that I never really had a place to keep all my dart crap before, whereas now I have a shelf. Zoom in and you can see the contents: my plastic jars of flights, the only dart trophy I ever earned in league, a wooden box with shafts and othe miscellaneous, a gram scale (I actually use that for backpacking more than darts) . My books will go in here too, when I find them.



One of the nice features of this setup is the glass-block window right by the board. Makes for terrific natural lighting during the day and the sill is the perfect length for my dart holder.



When there is no daylight to guide my arrows I rely on this fifties-looking psuedo tracklight. The room originally had one of those funky Japanese lantern type globes hanging from the ceiling but it gave off no light and got in the way of the dart line of sight. So I replaced it with lights I could aim at the dartboard. Works extremely well.


As always, click the image for a larger picture.

Perl Program

Those of you who have a Perl compiler, and like to randomize everything (like I do) might enjoy this little perl script I wrote last night during the Mariners game. It basically generates a practice routine for you that is different every time. It takes one argument, and that is the number of practice games you wanna play. You will obviously need to change the content of the arrays to suit your dart collection and your favorite practice games, but this little program will certainly "keep it fresh" for you.

The usage is as such: $ ./practice.pl 9

In this example '9' is the single argument indicating that you'd like a list of nine random practice games. The default argument is 1. So if you just type 'practice.pl' at the prompt with no argument at all it will give you a single practice game.

This is what the output looks like:



========================= begin practice.pl
#! /usr/bin/perl

$sets = $ARGV[0] || 1;

@dart_sets = (
'27g Razors',
'24g Merv Kings',
'16g Unicorns',
);

@practice_games = (
'Three 101\'s',
'SIDO 501',
'DIDO 301',
'Cricket',
'Doubles',
'Paul Williams Challenge',
'Chase',
'20 Bulls',
'20 Sixties',
);

for ($i=1; $i <= $sets; $i++) {

$index1 = rand @dart_sets;
$darts = $dart_sets[$index1];

$index2 = rand @practice_games;
$game = $practice_games[$index2];

print "$i. play $game with $darts\n";
}

========================= end practice.pl