Every beginner is told to throw at the triple 20, because 60 is the highest score on the board for a single dart. That advice assumes that your darts land exactly where you aim, which is not true for most players, and especially not for beginners! In general, your darts land somewhere in a cloud around where you aim, and the right target to aim at to maximise your scoring average depends on the size and shape of that cloud.
The reason the triple 20 is not automatically the right place to aim is what sits either side of it. The 20 bed is flanked by the 1 and the 5, so a dart that drifts sideways can score very little. The 19 is flanked by the 7 and the 3, so the same miss aimed at triple 19 can returns a slightly higher score. Hitting the triple is worth 3 more points on the 20 than on the 19, but missing it can cost you a lot more, and the shape of how your darts miss can determine the best place to aim.
Try it
The simulator below throws a few thousand darts for you. Set your grouping (the approximate distance that 90% of your darts land inside) and it tests every aim point on the board to find the one where your average score will be the highest.
Some things worth noticing:
- At a tight grouping (under about 35 mm), triple 20 wins. This is the professional case, and it is where the standard advice comes from.
- Through the middle range, the best aim point switches down, first to the T19, then T7, then into the single 7 region. The gain is small, just a couple of points per visit at first, but more as the grouping widens.
- At a wide grouping (over about 100 mm), the best aim point keeps moving in towards the bullseye, and the differences flatten right out. At 140 mm the best spot on the board is worth only half a point more than the bull itself.
What this does and does not mean
This is a model, and it is worth being clear about its limits. It assumes your misses are symmetrical around your aim point. Real throws are not and most players have a bias in one direction and a spread that is wider vertically than horizontally, which is why a fitted profile beats a single number.
It also assumes you are purely maximising points. Once you are on a checkout, the key thing becomes leaving yourself a double, and expected average score stops being the right objective.
The more useful conclusion
The conclusion is not "always aim at the 19". It is that the right target depends on your grouping and the shape of your throw, and almost nobody knows their grouping.
Most players estimate their ability from their three-dart average, which mixes together accuracy, consistency, checkout skill and luck into one number that moves around far too much to train against. Grouping is the underlying quantity. It changes slowly, it responds to practice, and it tells you what to work on.
Darts Lab measures it from a ten-minute drill with no cameras, no hardware, and just the score of each dart. It then builds you a daily practice routine to target your weaknesses and help you improve.