Legs and Sets in Darts: Formats, Throw and Tie-Breaks
How legs and sets in darts work at British tournaments: what a leg is, how many make a set, who has the throw and how a tie-break settles a level match.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Darts Rules & Scoring24 min read
- Legs to win a standard set
- 3
- World Championship first played in sets
- 1979
- PDC World Championship final
- Best of 13 sets
- World Matchplay final
- First to 18 legs
At five legs all in the last set of a World Championship match at Alexandra Palace, two players who have been on stage for the better part of two hours find that everything they have done comes down to one more game of 501. That game is a leg. It is the unit darts is built from: a single race from 501 to zero, begun with the first dart and ended by the winning double.
A set is a short race of legs, normally the first to three, which is the best of five. A match is then won in one of two ways. In leg play the winner is the first to a stated number of legs, and sets do not exist. In set play the winner is the first to a stated number of sets, and a leg matters only for winning the set it belongs to. The PDC, which runs the professional game in Britain, uses leg play for most of its tournaments and set play for a few of the biggest, and the choice between them decides more matches than most viewers realise.
What a leg, a set and a match each are
The leg comes first because nothing else can be defined without it. Two players start on 501, throw three darts in turn, subtract, and the first to reach exactly zero with a double wins. How that is done, from the throw at the bull to the call of "game shot", is set out in our guide to the rules of 501. A leg has one winner and no margin. Whether the loser was left on 2 or on 300 makes no difference to the scoreboard.
A set is a container. It holds between three and five legs in its ordinary form, it is won by the first player to three, and the moment it is won the count of legs goes back to nil-nil. A set finishes 3-0, 3-1 or 3-2 and nothing else. Nothing about the darts changes inside it. The same 501, the same double finish, the same alternating throw.
A match is whichever race the organisers have chosen to run.
| Unit | What it is | How it is won |
|---|---|---|
| Leg | One game of 501 | Reaching exactly zero with a double |
| Set | A short race of legs | First to three legs, in the standard form |
| Leg-play match | A race of legs with no sets | First to the stated number of legs |
| Set-play match | A race of sets | First to the stated number of sets |
One word causes confusion. "Game" has no fixed meaning in darts. A referee calls "game shot" when a leg is won. A county captain talks about "winning my game", meaning an entire singles match of several legs. A league secretary writes that a fixture consists of nine games, meaning nine separate contests of whatever length. Leg, set and match are precise. Game is whatever the speaker needs it to be, and it is worth pinning down before reading any local rule sheet.
The rule books treat all this briskly. The Darts Regulation Authority Rule Book, which governs PDC events, defines the throw, the leg and how a leg is finished, and leaves the number of legs or sets to the conditions of each tournament. That is why formats can differ so much from one event to the next under a single set of playing rules.
Reading a format line: what best of 11 legs means
Tournament formats are written in two dialects. "Best of 11 legs" states the maximum: the match can go to eleven legs and no further. "First to six" states the target. They are the same match, because a player who has won six of a possible eleven cannot be caught.
The conversion is simple enough to do in the head. Add one to the "best of" number and halve it. Best of 19 is first to 10. Best of 35 is first to 18. Going the other way, double the target and take one off.
| As written | Also written as | Shortest it can run | Longest it can run |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best of 3 legs | First to 2 | 2 legs | 3 legs |
| Best of 5 legs | First to 3 | 3 legs | 5 legs |
| Best of 11 legs | First to 6 | 6 legs | 11 legs |
| Best of 19 legs | First to 10 | 10 legs | 19 legs |
| Best of 35 legs | First to 18 | 18 legs | 35 legs |
| Best of 5 sets | First to 3 sets | 9 legs | 25 legs |
The shortest a match can run is always the target itself, a whitewash. The longest is the "best of" figure, reached only when the score is level going into the final leg. A result tells you where between the two it fell: 6-4 was a ten-leg match, 6-5 went the distance.
Each dialect has its users. Schedulers and broadcasters prefer "best of", since the maximum is what they have to allow time for. Players think in "first to", because the target is what they are chasing. The World Matchplay is nearly always described by its targets, and the reason is that its matches can run past their nominal maximum, which makes "best of" a slightly dishonest label there.
The even-numbered exception
A best-of format needs an odd number to guarantee a winner. Make it even and a draw becomes possible. Best of twelve can finish 6-6. Darts has used this deliberately: for a number of seasons the league phase of the Premier League was played over an even number of legs, with a point each for a drawn match, before the competition moved in 2022 to nights played as eight-player knockouts. The WDF's playing rules take the opposite line and require the number of legs in a set or a match to be odd. The Premier League format page follows that change.
Leg play: a straight race in which every leg weighs the same
This is the default. Players Championship floor events, the European Tour, the UK Open, the Grand Slam, the World Matchplay and the Premier League are all counted in legs, and so is practically every league and pub match in England. A list of the professional events that use sets would be far shorter than a list of those that do not.
The defining feature is that a leg won is a leg banked. It can never be taken away or made worthless by what follows. A player who goes 5-1 up in a race to six has five-sixths of the job done, and the opponent has to win five in succession to turn it round. Leads in leg play are heavy things.
That makes the format a blunt and fairly honest measure. Over a long enough race the player who is scoring more heavily and hitting more doubles will win more legs, and the scoreline will say so. Over a short race it is a different matter. A best of eleven can be over in twenty minutes, and a single missed double at 4-4 can decide it. The floor events use short races because they have to, with a field of 128 players to get from the first round to a final in one day. The majors lengthen the race as the tournament goes on, on the reasonable principle that the later rounds ought to be harder to fluke.
Length and the first throw
In any odd-numbered race the player who throws first in leg one gets the throw in one more leg than the opponent, provided the match goes the distance. In a best of eleven that is six legs to five. Since the starter of a leg has a clear advantage, a match in which both players win every leg they start ends 6-5 to whoever won the bull. The other player has to take a leg against the throw at least once.
Stretch the race and that edge thins out. One extra leg on throw is a large share of a best of eleven and a small share of a best of thirty-five. It is a second reason longer matches are thought the truer test: the accident of who won the throw at the bull counts for less.
Set play: how sets work in darts and how the match is counted
Set play groups the legs into sets of best of five and then throws most of the information away. Only one thing is carried from a finished set into the match score: who won it. A set taken 3-0 in eleven minutes and one taken 3-2 after a missed bull for the match are each worth exactly one.
- 3Legs needed to win a set
- 5Most legs in an ordinary set
- 7Sets needed to win the world final
The standard best-of-five-leg set, and the best-of-thirteen-set final used at the PDC World Championship.
The match is then a race of sets. A first-round match at the PDC World Championship is the best of five sets, which is first to three. The final is the best of thirteen, first to seven. A result is given in sets alone, 3-1 or 7-4, and the legs appear only as supporting detail.
The consequence that catches people out is that the player who wins more legs does not necessarily win. Legs won in a set a player goes on to lose count for nothing, and legs won by a wide margin count for no more than legs won narrowly. Here is the extreme case in a best of five sets.
| Set | Legs to player A | Legs to player B | Set goes to |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | 3 | 2 | A |
| Second | 0 | 3 | B |
| Third | 3 | 2 | A |
| Fourth | 0 | 3 | B |
| Fifth | 3 | 2 | A |
| Match total | 9 | 12 | A, by three sets to two |
Player B has won twelve legs to nine and lost. Scale that up to a best-of-thirteen-set final and the gap can be wider still: seven sets won 3-2 and six lost 3-0 would give the champion 21 legs and the runner-up 32. Nothing so lopsided is ever likely to happen, but milder versions happen regularly, and they are the root of the complaint that sets can reward the wrong player.
The defence is that set play was never trying to count legs. It asks a different question. Leg play asks who was better over the whole evening. Set play asks who won the passages of play that mattered, and it creates a great many more of those.
Who has the throw through the legs and sets
Throwing first in a leg is an advantage worth roughly a visit, since the starter reaches every stage of the leg three darts ahead. Formats are built round sharing it out.
The start of a match is settled at the bull. Each player throws one dart, the nearer to the centre wins, and that player throws first in the opening leg. Our guide to who throws first in darts covers the procedure. After that the rule in leg play is strict alternation. Whoever started leg one throws second in leg two, and the pattern continues without regard to who won which.
In set play the alternation runs at two levels. Inside a set the legs alternate as usual, so the player who starts the set throws first in its first, third and fifth legs. Between sets the start alternates as well: the player who began set one throws second at the start of set two and first again in set three. This is fixed by the order of sets, not by who won the previous one or how long it lasted.
A small oddity follows. If a set ends after four legs, the player who started its fourth leg is also the player who starts the next set, and so throws first in two legs running. Nobody has been cheated. Over the match the starts still even out.
Holding, breaking and the set against the throw
A player who wins a leg they started has held throw. One who wins a leg the opponent started has broken. A player who starts a set can win it purely by holding, 3-2, without ever breaking. The other player cannot. To win a set against the throw requires at least one break.
Follow that through. In a best of five sets, the winner of the bull starts the first, third and fifth sets. If every leg in the match goes with the throw, each player wins the sets they start, and the bull winner takes the match 3-2. A set-play match between two players who never break is decided before a scoring dart has been thrown.
Matches are seldom that tidy, which is the point. The break of throw is the event the whole format turns on, and a set won against the throw is the nearest thing darts has to a break of serve in tennis.
The deciding-set tie-break at the World Championship
Everything in the last section explains why a tie-break exists. If a final set is an ordinary best of five and both players hold, the player who started it wins 3-2 on the strength of having thrown first. A world championship match settled that way would be settled, in effect, by the bull-up two hours earlier.
So the final set is treated differently. The rule has been reworded more than once, and it is given here as it stood at the 2025 PDC World Championship, the edition played at Alexandra Palace across December 2024 and January 2025.
In every round except the first, the deciding set had to be won by two clear legs. A player still needed at least three, but 3-2 was not enough. From two legs all, play went on until somebody led by two. If the set reached five legs all, one further leg was played, and that sudden-death leg decided the match with no throw at the bull beforehand. In the first round the tie-break did not apply, and a deciding set there was a normal best of five.
The rule book behind this is brief. The DRA leaves tie-breaks to the promoter, to be laid out in the tournament rules in advance, and fixes one point of its own: there is no throw for the bull before a final-leg tie-break, which is started by the player who threw first in the opening leg of the match.
- Sets levelThe match reaches its final set, such as two sets all in a best of five.
- First to three, two clearA player leading 3-0 or 3-1 wins the set and the match in the ordinary way.
- Two legs allA 3-2 score no longer wins. The set carries on until one player is two legs in front.
- Five legs allIf neither has pulled two clear by then, a single sudden-death leg is played.
- The eleventh legIt is thrown in the normal alternating order, with no return to the bull, and its winner takes the match.
The tie-break as it applied from the second round onwards at that championship. It has been changed before and may be changed again, so check the conditions of the event in question.
A deciding set under this rule can therefore run to eleven legs, more than twice the length of an ordinary one. The eleventh leg, being odd-numbered, falls to the player who threw first in the set, and since a deciding set is always an odd-numbered one, that is also the player who threw first in the match. Two clear legs cannot be won without a break, so the tie-break gives the player throwing second every chance to take the set on merit, and only if ten legs fail to separate them does the order of throw come back into it.
Earlier versions were not identical. For years the players went back to the bull before a sudden-death leg, and the most famous instance is the 2007 final, in which Raymond van Barneveld came from three sets down against Phil Taylor and won 7-6 in a sudden-death leg after winning the throw at the bull. The first-round exemption is likewise a feature of particular years and not a permanent one. It belonged to a draw in which the seeded players came in at the second round, and for the championship played across December 2025 and January 2026 the field grew to 128 with every player starting in the first. Anyone settling an argument should look up the edition concerned, and our page on the PDC World Championship format tracks the rounds and the changes.
Two clear legs in leg play: the World Matchplay extension
Blackpool, in July, at the Winter Gardens. The World Matchplay has been played there every year but one since 1994, the exception being 2020, when it went behind closed doors in Milton Keynes. It is the PDC's senior leg-play tournament, and it has never allowed a match to be won by a single leg at the scheduled distance.
The principle is the one the tie-break uses, applied to a race of legs. A first-round match is the first to ten. If it reaches nine legs all, ten is no longer enough, and the players carry on until one of them leads by two. From 1994 to 2012 there was no limit on how long that could last. Since 2013 there has been: if six extra legs fail to produce a two-leg lead, a sudden-death leg is played.
In a first-round match that puts the cut-off at 12-12, with the twenty-fifth leg deciding it. In the final, a race to eighteen, the same sum gives 20-20 and a forty-first leg.
Two things set this apart from the World Championship arrangement. It applies in every round, from the first afternoon to the final. And it operates in a format with no sets to reset anything, so the extra legs are simply more of the same race, with the throw alternating as it has all match.
Most leg-play events do nothing of the kind. A best of eleven at the UK Open or on the floor that reaches five legs all goes to a single deciding leg, thrown first by whoever started the match, and that is that. The Matchplay's rule is a statement about what the tournament thinks it is for. It costs time, which is why few others copy it, and it is a good part of what gives the World Matchplay its standing among players.
What a set does to the shape of a match
Lose six legs in a row in a race to ten and a player is six behind with the match very nearly gone. Lose six in a row in set play and the damage is two sets, perhaps less if the run began partway through one. The next set starts at nil-nil. That is the essence of what sets do: they put a ceiling on how much any one bad spell can cost.
Slow starters are sheltered by it. A player who needs twenty minutes to find a rhythm can drop the first set 3-0, look hopeless, and be level one set later. In a best of eleven legs the same start would leave them 3-0 down with half the match gone. It is no coincidence that the great recoveries in the sport's history, the 2007 world final among them, have come in set play. The format keeps a trailing player mathematically and psychologically alive for longer.
Sets also multiply the moments of pressure. In a race to ten there is one finishing line. In a best of nine sets there may be nine, each with its own deciding leg, and a player who is weak when a set is on the line will be found out repeatedly. Some players have built careers on being better at 2-2 than at 0-0.
The argument over which format is fairer
It has run for as long as both have existed. The case for legs is that they waste nothing: every leg counts once, and the better player over the distance wins. The case against sets is the table earlier on this page. A format in which the player with fewer legs can win is, to its critics, a format with an arbitrary element built in.
The case for sets is that darts is a game of holding one's nerve at particular moments, and a format that manufactures more of those moments tests the thing that matters. Supporters add that sets are easier to follow and give a long match a structure, with a natural pause after each.
Both sides are right about what they describe. Leg play is the better measure and set play the better drama, and the calendar is richer for containing a major of each kind six months apart.
Counting the legs inside a set-play match
A set-play format hides its real length. "Best of thirteen sets" sounds comparable to "best of thirty-five legs", and the two are nothing alike.
The fewest legs a set-play match can contain is three for every set the winner needs. The most, with ordinary sets, is five for every set played. The tie-break adds up to six more in the deciding set, since a set that would have ended at five legs can now run to eleven. The arithmetic is worth doing once, because the totals are larger than the format line suggests.
| Match length | Sets to win | Fewest legs | Most legs, ordinary sets | Most legs with the 2025 tie-break |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best of 5 sets | 3 | 9 | 25 | 31 |
| Best of 7 sets | 4 | 12 | 35 | 41 |
| Best of 9 sets | 5 | 15 | 45 | 51 |
| Best of 11 sets | 6 | 18 | 55 | 61 |
| Best of 13 sets | 7 | 21 | 65 | 71 |
Put a world final beside a race to ten legs. The race to ten lasts between ten and nineteen legs. The final lasts between 21 and 71. At its shortest the final is longer than the other match at its longest, and at full stretch it is close to four times the length.
That is a different physical test. The throw itself is not strenuous, but standing under stage lights and repeating a precise movement several hundred times over an evening is, and concentration frays before the arm does. A long set-play match is broken up by intervals, and players talk about managing them: when to sit, when to keep the arm moving, how to come back out after a break without giving away the first two legs. None of that arises in a best of eleven on a floor board, which is over before fatigue has a say.
Reading the scoreboard and a printed result
The television graphic stacks the two players' names with columns beside them. In set play there are two small columns and one large figure: sets won, legs won in the current set, and the score remaining in the current leg. In leg play the sets column is absent. A marker, usually a dot or a small arrow next to one name, shows who threw first in the leg being played. It is the most useful thing on the screen and the least noticed, because it tells the viewer whether a player closing in on a finish is about to hold or to break.
Read from the left, then. Sets say who is winning the match. Legs say who is winning this set. The marker says whose leg it ought to be.
A printed result in set play gives the sets and, in brackets, the legs in each. Something like 4-2 (3-1, 2-3, 3-0, 1-3, 3-2, 3-1) is read from the winner's side: took the first set by three legs to one, lost the second by two to three, and so on. The brackets repay attention. They show whether a 4-2 was comfortable or a string of deciding legs, and they are where a reader finds out that the loser won as many legs as the winner.
The averages printed alongside ignore sets entirely. A three-dart average is worked out over every dart thrown in the match, with no weighting for which legs mattered, so it is quite common in set play for the losing player to have the higher figure. How that number is put together is explained on our page about the three-dart average. In a leg-play result the higher average usually belongs to the winner. In set play it is a weaker guide, for exactly the reason the format exists.
One further line appears on fuller scoresheets: legs won against the throw. It is the count of breaks, and in a close match it is often the whole story in a single figure. A set-play match with a single break in it was settled by the bull-up and one lapse. A match with a dozen was a brawl in which the throw meant very little.
Legs and sets away from television
Sets are a televised phenomenon. In the pubs, clubs and county halls of England almost everything is counted in legs, and in short races.
A typical local league singles is the best of three legs of 501. It takes ten minutes or so, which matters when one board has to get through a full card of games between half past eight and closing time. Team and pairs games are often a single leg of a longer total. The night's result is then a count of those contests, a 6-3 or a 5-4, with each one worth a point to the side that won it whatever the margin inside it. Formats vary from league to league, and the rule sheet is the only reliable guide, which is one of the first things covered in our guide to joining a darts league.
Step up to Super League and the singles lengthen, commonly to the best of five or seven legs depending on the county, because the standard is higher and the purpose is partly to pick county players. A longer race tells a selector more.
County darts keeps the same logic at greater length. A county fixture is a list of individual singles, men's and women's, played one after another on a stage board. Each is its own race of legs, and the county's score is the number of those games its players win. An individual's legs feed their personal average, on which county rankings are kept, but the match is decided game by game. Our guide to county darts describes the structure.
There is a quiet resemblance to set play in all of this. A league match scored as games won, where each game is a short race of legs and the margin inside it is discarded, is a set-play match in everything but name, shared among a team. The player who wins 2-0 and the one who scrapes home 2-1 contribute the same single point. Captains know it, and it is why a side that keeps losing deciding legs can be beaten heavily on a night when it won nearly as many legs as the opposition.
How sets came into darts and which events kept each format
The first Embassy World Championship, at the Heart of the Midlands Club in Nottingham in 1978, was played in legs. The early rounds were the best of eleven, the semi-finals the best of fifteen, and Leighton Rees beat John Lowe by eleven legs to seven in a best-of-21 final. It was the only time. In 1979 the championship moved to Jollees in Stoke-on-Trent and to sets, and it stayed in sets through the move to Lakeside in 1986 and for as long as it was staged.
The usual explanation is television. Sets give a broadcast regular breaks and a recurring climax, and they keep a one-sided match looking open for longer than a bare count of legs would. That is a reasonable account of why the format suited the BBC, though it would be overstating the evidence to present it as a documented decision with a single cause.
When the leading players broke away in the early 1990s to form what became the PDC, their own World Championship kept sets from its first staging in 1994. Their second major, founded the same year, went the other way: the World Matchplay was a race of legs with two clear required. The professional game has held both formats side by side ever since.
| Event | How it is counted |
|---|---|
| PDC World Championship | Sets of best of five legs |
| WDF World Championship at Lakeside | Sets |
| World Grand Prix | Sets, with a double needed to start every leg |
| World Masters, in its PDC form | Short sets of best of three legs |
| World Matchplay | Legs, with two clear needed |
| UK Open, Grand Slam and Premier League | Legs |
| Players Championship and European Tour events | Legs |
The set-play events are few, and each presents itself as a world title of one kind or another, though the Matchplay, a "World" event counted in legs, shows that the name alone settles nothing. The World Grand Prix pairs sets with a double start. The World Masters, since the PDC took it on, uses sets so short that a match is a rapid sequence of small crises.
Everything else is legs. That split, a handful of prestige events in sets and the working week of the tour in legs, is likely to hold, because each format does a job the other cannot. Readers who follow more than darts will find the rest of our coverage for this country on the England hub.