Nine-Dart Finish: The Perfect Leg and How It Is Thrown
A nine dart finish wins a leg of 501 in nine darts. Every route to one, the arithmetic behind it, and what British television saw in 1984.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Darts Rules & Scoring22 min read
- Starting score
- 501
- Darts in a perfect leg
- 9
- Distinct scoring routes
- 3,944
- First thrown on television
- 13 October 1984
The Fulcrum Centre in Slough, a Saturday in October 1984, an ITV camera crew and a prize fund nobody had previously thought could be won with three visits to the board. John Lowe put six darts in the treble 20 bed, left himself 141, and closed it with treble 17, treble 18 and double 18. The cheque was for 102,000 pounds. Until that afternoon the perfect leg had been a thing darts players knew was possible and had never seen happen in front of a camera.
What Lowe did is the whole definition. A nine-dart finish is a leg of 501, under the double-out rules the Professional Darts Corporation and the Darts Regulation Authority both set out, won with nine darts and no more. Three visits, three darts each, a total of exactly 501, and the ninth dart in a double or the bullseye. Ten darts is a very good leg. Nine is the floor of the game, and the reason it is the floor is arithmetic rather than tradition.
Why nine darts is the floor and not a convention
Work it from the last dart backwards, because that is where the constraint sits. A leg of 501 is finished by a dart in a double, and the double-out requirement is not negotiable in any PDC, WDF or DRA format. The bullseye counts as double 25 for that purpose, which makes it the biggest double on the board at 50 points. Double 20 is worth 40.
Now the other eight darts. The highest score a single dart can produce is 60, from the treble 20 bed. So the best conceivable eight-dart leg is seven darts at 60, which is 420, plus a closing dart at 50. That comes to 470. The target is 501. Eight darts falls 31 short, and no arrangement of the board changes it, because 60 is a hard ceiling on one dart and 50 is a hard ceiling on a dart that ends a leg.
Push it one dart further and the sums open up immediately. Eight darts at 60 is 480, plus a bull is 530, comfortably past 501. Eight at 60 plus double 20 is 520. The question stops being whether nine darts can do it and becomes which nine.
- 501Starting score
- 60Highest score from one dart
- 470Most eight darts can score
- 167Points needed per three-dart visit
Fixed by the rules of 501 double-out and the scoring beds on a standard board, not by any player's record. The 470 is seven darts at treble 20 plus a closing bullseye, the best an eight-dart leg could manage.
That last figure is the one worth holding on to. 501 divided by three is 167 exactly, so a nine-darter is a leg thrown at a 167 average over three visits. For scale, a tournament-winning three-dart average in a major is usually somewhere in the high nineties to low hundreds. A perfect leg asks a player to throw at better than 160 per visit, three times, without one loose dart. The numbers are not close to each other, and that gap is why the feat remains an event.
There is also a secondary constraint that tends to get lost. The nine darts must land on beds that sum to precisely 501, not 501 or more. Overshooting is going bust and the visit is void, the score reverts, and the leg is no longer perfect however many trebles came before it.
The 180, 180, 141 route that most televised nine-darters follow
Six treble 20s, then a 141 checkout. If you have watched darts at Alexandra Palace or the Winter Gardens you have almost certainly seen this route and no other, and the reason is not that it is mathematically privileged. It is that the first six darts are the six darts a professional throws thousands of times a week.
501 minus 180 is 321. Minus another 180 is 141. The standard close from there is treble 20 for 60, treble 19 for 57, and double 12 for 24.
That is Paul Lim's leg from Lakeside, 9 January 1990, which remains the only nine-darter ever thrown at the BDO World Championship: six maximum darts against Jack McKenna, then treble 20, treble 19, double 12, the whole thing over in roughly a minute. The Frimley Green crowd took a while to work out what they had watched.
Why 141 falls out so naturally
A professional aiming at treble 20 and hitting it three times running has scored 180 whether or not a nine-darter is in prospect. Two such visits are not planned, they are simply two good visits. The leg then presents 141 and the player has to make a decision, which is the first actual choice in the whole sequence.
141 is one of the better three-dart finishes on the board, because it decomposes with a single treble switch. Stay on treble 20 with the seventh dart, cross to treble 19 with the eighth, and the ninth is a straightforward dart at double 12, which sits two beds anticlockwise of the 20 in the upper left. One switch, one dart at a double, and the switch is to the bed a professional drops to more often than any other.
The switch that the route hides
The 19 is at the bottom of the board, one bed clockwise of the 3 that sits directly opposite the 20. So the eighth dart of a nine-darter is not a nudge. It is a move from the top of the board to the bottom, with the aim point and the sightline both having to reset while the seventh dart is still standing in the twenty treble on the other side of the face. What makes it the dart a perfect leg is most often lost on is that it is the first dart in the whole leg aimed anywhere other than treble 20, and it arrives at exactly the moment the room has worked out what is happening.
The other ways to close 141, and the beds nobody practises
Lowe did not finish on double 12. He finished on double 18, having gone treble 17, treble 18. That route is worth setting out because it tells you something about how checkouts were thrown before the modern floor-event era standardised almost everything.
| 141 checkout | First dart | Second dart | Last dart |
|---|---|---|---|
| The modern standard | Treble 20 (60) | Treble 19 (57) | Double 12 (24) |
| Lowe's 1984 route | Treble 17 (51) | Treble 18 (54) | Double 18 (36) |
| Big-double close | Treble 20 (60) | Treble 15 (45) | Double 18 (36) |
| Two-switch route | Treble 19 (57) | Treble 16 (48) | Double 18 (36) |
| Reversed standard | Treble 18 (54) | Treble 19 (57) | Double 15 (30) |
Five routes, and only the first is one you will see thrown in a PDC event. Look at what separates them. The modern standard leaves 24, which is double 12, two beds anticlockwise of the 20 in the upper left. Three of the others leave double 18, over on the upper right. Every double bed on the board occupies the same slice of the same ring, so the choice between them is nothing to do with target size. It is about which double a player has thrown thousands of darts at and can find without looking for it, and plenty of English players of Lowe's generation would have told you that was double 18.
The case against treble 20, treble 15, double 18 is the fifteen. It sits on the right-hand side of the board below the 6, and it is not a bed the professional game switches to. The nineteen is: it is the standard second scoring bed, the one a player moves to when the twenty treble is blocked, and it carries a lifetime of practice darts behind it. Lowe's treble 17 and treble 18 route involves two switches, both awkward by modern standards, and he threw it in an era when there was no settled orthodoxy for 141 to fall back on.
A full checkout chart lists every three-dart route from every score, and 141 has more of them than most. In practice the professional game has converged on one, and the convergence is a coaching decision rather than a mathematical one: fewer switches, one dart at a double, done.
The 180, 177, 144 route and the switch it forces early
Not every perfect leg opens with two maximums. The second-most-plausible route in the professional game is 180, then 177, then a 144 finish, and it comes about by accident rather than design.
A visit of 177 is treble 20, treble 20, treble 19. A player who has thrown two darts into the twenty treble and then dropped one into the nineteen has 177 on the board, 501 minus 180 minus 177 leaves 144, and 144 is a three-dart finish: treble 20, treble 20, double 12.
So the leg is still perfect, but the shape of it has inverted. Instead of six twenties and then a switch, the player has five twenties, an unintended nineteen, and then has to come back to the twenty treble twice before taking the same double 12. The arithmetic is kinder than it looks. Treble 19 and treble 20 differ by three points, and 144 and 141 differ by three points, so a stray nineteen in the second visit costs nothing at all provided the player notices and recalculates.
- Visit oneThree darts in the treble 20 bed score 180. The leg opened at 501, so 321 remains.
- Visit twoThree more in the same bed for a second maximum, which leaves 141 and a three-dart finish.
- Seventh dartTreble 20 again for 60, leaving 81 on the board.
- Eighth dartTreble 19 for 57. That leaves 24, which is double 12.
- Ninth dartDouble 12 checks the leg out. The referee calls game shot and the leg is perfect.
The 180, 180, 141 route under double-out rules. The figures are what remains on the board after each dart, not what the dart scored.
What the player is actually counting
None of this is done on paper. Professionals do not calculate 501 minus 180 minus 177 mid-leg; they recognise 144 as a number they have finished a hundred times. The skill being exercised in the third visit of a nine-darter is pattern recall, not arithmetic, which is why an unexpected 177 does not derail it and an unexpected 140 sometimes does. 140 leaves 181, which is not a three-dart finish at all, and the perfect leg is gone on the sixth dart without anyone having thrown a bad one.
Nine-dart finishes with no maximum in them
Three visits of 167 also comes to 501. Treble 20, treble 19, bullseye is 60 plus 57 plus 50, and done three times in a row that is a nine-dart finish with no 180 anywhere in it.
It is a route that exists, and it is a route no sane player attempts. Consider what it asks. Three bullseyes in three visits, each one thrown as the last dart of the visit with no margin for a 25 instead of a 50. A 25 leaves the score 25 short of a multiple of 167 and the leg is finished as an ordinary one. Compare that with the standard route, which asks for one dart at a double at the very end and nothing harder than a treble before it.
The bull routes matter for a different reason, though, which is that they dominate the enumeration. Of the 3,944 distinct nine-dart routes to 501, well over half end on the bullseye rather than on a numbered double. That is not a statement about how perfect legs get thrown. It is a statement about how many ways there are to arrange eight scoring darts when the ninth is allowed to be worth 50.
There is one context in which the bull finish stops being a curiosity, and that is the double-start format, which is covered further down this page. Everywhere else, a nine-darter that ends on the bull is a leg in which something unplanned happened earlier and the player found the only way out.
How many ways there are to hit a nine-darter
The figure usually quoted is 3,944, and it needs its definition attached or it means nothing. It counts ordered sequences: treble 20, treble 19, double 12 and treble 19, treble 20, double 12 are two routes, not one, because the darts are thrown in an order and the order is part of the leg. Collapse the orderings into unordered combinations and the number drops sharply.
The enumeration also includes a great many sequences that no coach would describe as routes at all. Anything involving a dart in the treble 3 or a single 7 to set up an exotic finish counts if the nine darts sum to 501 with a legal double at the end.
| Starting score | Fewest darts | One route that achieves it |
|---|---|---|
| 301 double-out | 6 | 180, then treble 20, treble 11, double 14 |
| 501 double-out | 9 | 180, 180, then treble 20, treble 19, double 12 |
| 701 double-out | 12 | 180, 180, 180, then treble 20, treble 17, bullseye |
| 1001 double-out | 17 | Five maximums, then treble 17 and double 25 |
What a working player carries is not 3,944 routes. It is one primary route, one alternative close for 141 in case the eighth dart finds the wrong treble, and the knowledge that 144, 147 and 150 are all three-dart finishes should the second visit land somewhere unexpected. That is five or six pieces of information, and they cover essentially every nine-darter ever thrown on an English stage.
Why the big number gets repeated
3,944 is a satisfying statistic because it makes the feat sound approachable, and the effect is the opposite of the truth. A larger count of theoretical routes does not raise the probability of a perfect leg, because the extra routes all pass through beds nobody aims at. The real constraint is that the useful routes require six consecutive darts in a bed roughly the size of a postage stamp, and the number of ways to do that is one.
Where perfect legs break down, and why the eighth dart is the cruel one
Six perfect darts happen on every televised night of darts in Britain. Seven perfect darts happen often enough that commentators have a settled way of handling them. Nine happen in a different order of frequency altogether, and almost all of the attrition is concentrated in two darts.
The sixth dart is the first real gate. Treble 19 instead of treble 20 keeps the leg alive, because 144 is left and 144 goes out in three. A single 20 does not: the visit comes to 140, 181 remains, and nothing above 170 can be checked out with three darts. The odd case is a dart in the 20's double, which makes the visit 160 and leaves 161, a three-dart finish only by way of treble 20, treble 17, bullseye. Technically a nine-darter is still in prospect there. It is also a sequence that asks for a bull under maximum pressure, and most players in that position quietly take the ordinary leg.
Then the eighth. A player who has thrown seven treble 20s is standing at the oche with 81 left and the whole room on its feet, and the dart required is not another treble 20. It is a switch to the foot of the board, to the treble 19, with a crowd noise that has changed character entirely between the sixth dart and the seventh. The adjustment itself is one every professional makes dozens of times in a session. The circumstances are as adverse as darts gets.
The ninth dart is the easiest one
Double 12 from 24 is a routine dart. A county player finishes on it without thinking. What makes it hard in a nine-darter is that it is the only dart in the leg where missing ends the attempt outright: a treble missed on dart two or dart five can often be recovered into a different route, and a double missed on dart nine cannot be recovered into anything. Players describe the ninth dart as the slowest part of the leg, which is a reasonable thing to say about a dart thrown while several thousand people wait for it in silence.
A useful comparison is the final black in a maximum break at the Crucible. The shot itself is one a professional pots without comment in any other frame, and what changes is nothing about the table.
How rare a nine-dart finish is, and why it has stopped being unheard of
Lowe's leg in 1984 stood alone on British screens for a long time. Lim's at Lakeside in 1990 was the second thrown in a major televised event and, as it turned out, the only one the BDO World Championship ever produced across its whole run at Frimley Green. Through the eighties and into the nineties a nine-darter was the sort of thing a darts fan might see once a decade.
It has become more frequent, and the reasons are structural rather than mysterious.
Scoring power across the professional game has risen. The averages that won major titles in the eighties would, by the 2010s, lose early rounds in the same events, and a population of players averaging above a hundred produces maximums at a rate the previous generation did not. A nine-darter is a tail event of a scoring distribution, so shifting the whole distribution upwards makes the tail thicker.
The number of legs being thrown in recorded competition has also grown enormously. The PDC's floor programme, the European Tour, the ranking events and the televised majors between them stage a volume of professional darts that did not exist in 1984, when a handful of tournaments a year carried a camera. More legs at higher averages produces more nine-darters without anybody getting better at throwing them specifically.
Two things have not changed. The first is that the feat still stops a room, which is why the PDC still treats one as a news item and why the roll of televised nine-darters is kept as a list rather than a count. The second is that outside the professional circuit it remains extraordinary: a Super League or county player who throws one has done something they will be asked about for the rest of their playing life.
This page deliberately does not state a running total of nine-darters thrown. Any figure would be out of date within weeks, and a stale number in a reference page is worse than no number at all.
The double-start nine-darter and why the bull has to be first or last
One PDC major requires a double to open the leg as well as to close it, and that single change rewrites the arithmetic completely. The format, its history and its draw are set out on our page about the World Grand Prix format; what matters here is what the rule does to a perfect leg.
Under double-in, double-out, the first dart must land in a double and the last dart must land in a double. The maximum numbered double is 40, from double 20. So if a nine-dart leg used double 20 to start and double 20 to finish, the seven darts in between could contribute at most 420, and the total would be 500. One point short of 501.
That is a genuinely elegant piece of arithmetic, and the consequence is strict: a double-start nine-darter must use the bullseye, and it must use it either as the first dart or as the ninth, because those are the only two darts in the leg that are required to be doubles.
In practice the route is settled. Double 20 to open, then two treble 20s, which is 160. A maximum for the second visit. That leaves 161, which closes with treble 20, treble 17 and the bullseye. Brendan Dolan threw exactly that on 8 October 2011 at the Grand Prix in Dublin, in a semi-final against James Wade, and became the first player to complete a perfect leg under double-start rules.
| Visit | Darts | Score | Left |
|---|---|---|---|
| One | Double 20, treble 20, treble 20 | 160 | 341 |
| Two | Treble 20, treble 20, treble 20 | 180 | 161 |
| Three | Treble 20, treble 17, bullseye | 161 | 0 |
The alternative shape, opening on the bull and closing on a numbered double, is legal and nobody throws it. Open with the bull and 451 is left for eight darts, the last of them a double. Seven darts cap at 420, so the closing double has to be worth at least 31, which rules out every bed below double 16. One sequence that does work is the bull, six treble 20s, treble 19 and double 17. Legal, arithmetically sound, and it asks a player to open a leg on the bullseye, which is why all three double-start perfect legs thrown at the Grand Prix took the bull as their ninth dart instead: Dolan in 2011, then James Wade and Robert Thornton in the same match in 2014, the only time two players have managed it in one game.
Perfect legs in other games: 301 in six, 701 in twelve, and the 147
501 is the professional standard, and the reasons for that are covered in our guide to the rules of a leg of 501. Other starting scores have their own arithmetic floors, and they are worth knowing because pub and league darts in England still plays plenty of 301 and the occasional 701.
301 double-out has a floor of six darts. Five darts cannot reach it, because four at 60 plus a closing bull is 290. Six can: a maximum, then treble 20, treble 11 and double 14 for 121. That one gets thrown in practice rooms more often than you would guess, because 121 is a finish league players know.
701 bottoms out at twelve. Eleven darts cap at 650, which is ten at 60 plus a bull, so eleven is impossible. Twelve works as three maximums and a 161 finish on the bull.
The comparison darts fans reach for most often is not another darts game at all. It is snooker's 147, and the parallel holds up better than most sporting analogies. Both are the arithmetical maximum of a single unit of play. Both were once almost unknown on television and have become materially more common as the professional standard rose. Both end on a shot the player concerned could make blindfolded in any other context.
Where they differ is instructive. A 147 takes thirty-six shots and several minutes, with the chance to lose it at every one of them, and the player has time to think about what is happening. A nine-darter takes nine darts and about a minute. Lim's was timed at sixty-seven seconds from first dart to last. The snooker maximum is an endurance of concentration; the perfect leg is closer to a single sustained action, which is why players so often say they have no memory of the middle of it.
What counts as a nine-darter: the referee's call and the recorded-competition test
A perfect leg thrown on a board in a garage is a perfect leg. It is not a nine-dart finish in the sense the sport keeps records of, and the distinction is about verification rather than merit.
For a nine-darter to enter the published lists it has to be thrown in competition, with an official on the oche calling the scores, under the playing rules of the body running the event. The referee's role is doing real work there. They call each visit aloud, they confirm the checkout, and in a stage event their call is the record of what happened. A leg where the scoring was marked wrong and corrected afterwards is a leg where nobody can say with certainty what was thrown.
The categories recognised in practice break down roughly like this. A televised nine-darter is one thrown in a stage event with a broadcast, which is the shortest and best-documented list. A floor nine-darter is one thrown at a Players Championship or European Tour qualifier, recorded by the official scoring but usually without pictures. A county, Super League or open nine-darter is logged by the organising body, and these outnumber the professional ones by a wide margin simply because far more amateur legs are thrown.
Practice nine-darters are not recorded by anyone, and professionals are candid that they happen. A player working through a scoring routine on a board at home with nobody marking is throwing legs by the hundred, and the ones that come out perfect are a private matter.
There is one more wrinkle. A leg in which the ninth dart is thrown into a double that the player had not intended still counts, because the rules care about the score and not the plan. If the eighth dart finds treble 18 instead of treble 19, leaving 27 rather than 24, and the ninth lands in double 13 or a single 1 and then a double is not available, the leg is simply not perfect. There is no partial credit in the record, and that is why the published lists are shorter than the number of nine-dart attempts that reached the eighth dart alive.
Lowe, Lim and Greatbatch: the landmarks, kept short
The full roll belongs with the tournament pages rather than here, and the individual stage legs are set out on the page about televised perfect legs linked earlier. What follows are the firsts, because they mark the stages by which the nine-darter went from theoretical to expected.
| Date | Player | Event and venue | Why it mattered |
|---|---|---|---|
| 13 October 1984 | John Lowe | MFI World Matchplay, Fulcrum Centre, Slough | First nine-darter thrown on television |
| 9 January 1990 | Paul Lim | BDO World Championship, Lakeside, Frimley Green | First at a world championship, and the only one in that event's history |
| 3 February 2002 | Shaun Greatbatch | Dutch Open final, Veldhoven | First broadcast live rather than recorded |
| 1 August 2002 | Phil Taylor | World Matchplay, Winter Gardens, Blackpool | First shown live on British television |
| 8 October 2011 | Brendan Dolan | World Grand Prix, Citywest, Dublin | First under double-start rules |
A note on the 2002 entries, because they get conflated. Greatbatch's leg in the Dutch Open final was carried live by Dutch and European broadcasters in February. Taylor's at the Winter Gardens six months later was the first carried live by a British broadcaster, which is why both are sometimes described as the first live nine-darter. Both claims are correct with their qualifier attached and wrong without it.
Taylor's wider record is the one that reframed the feat. He threw more perfect legs than any player of his era, including two in the same match in the 2010 Premier League final against James Wade, and in doing so turned the nine-darter from something that happened to a career into something that happened repeatedly within one.
The judgement worth making is this. Lowe's 1984 leg is still the most significant of them, and not because it was first. It was thrown for a prize that dwarfed the rest of the sport's prize money at the time, in front of a camera, by a player who had to work out his own route to 141 with no coaching orthodoxy to fall back on. Everything since has been thrown by players who knew exactly what the nine darts were before they threw the first one.
More on the formats these legs are thrown in, and on the rest of the sport, sits across our England sport guides, and the editorial desk writes about changes to the professional calendar on the blog.