301 darts scorer
The shorter game. Everyone starts on 301 and the first to zero on a double takes the leg. The scoreboard is already running, and if your house plays double in, that is a switch in the options.
- avg
- —
- darts
- 0
- avg
- —
- darts
- 0
What is the difference between 301 and 501?
The starting score, and nothing else. 301 is 200 points shorter, so a leg runs about a third fewer darts and you are on a finish much sooner. That is why juniors and casual players tend to play it: you get to the doubles, which is the part that actually needs practice, instead of grinding the treble 20 bed for nine darts first.
Maths mode
Switch it on for one player and the scorer stops telling them what they have left. After each visit it asks. They type an answer, it says whether that is right, and either way it shows the subtraction and the leg carries on.
Nothing is blocked and nothing is penalised. A wrong answer still records the correct score, because the point is the practice and not the test. There is a quiet running count of how many they have got right, and that is as much ceremony as it gets.
It is a per-player setting. A parent can play with it off while their kid plays with it on, on the same scoreboard, in the same leg. That is the whole reason it works: the child is not doing an exercise, they are playing darts against someone, and the arithmetic is the price of a turn.
301 suits it better than 501. Taking 45 off 256 is a real sum a nine-year-old can do standing up; doing it eleven times before anyone gets near a double is how you put them off.
What the player sees
You scored 45. What have you got left?
That is right.
256 − 45 = 211
Double in, and why 301 argues about it more
Double in means nothing counts until you hit a double. Throw a 180 before you have opened and it scores nothing at all. The dart that finally lands in a double both opens you and counts for its own value, so a double 20 to open puts you on 261.
It comes up far more in 301 than in 501, because a short game with no way in can be over in six darts and that suits nobody. It also produces the longest silences in pub darts, when someone spends four visits failing to open.
Whichever way your lot play it, agree before the first dart. The options above lock once the game starts, which settles the argument that otherwise arrives at the worst possible moment.