Why do darts players start at 501 and not 500? This is the story of why darts is 501: where the original 301 came from, why the last dart has to land in a double, why a leg takes at least 9 darts, and how the soft-tip 01 games on the machines differ from the steel-tip 501 you see on TV. Next time you start a game, every number will make sense.
Why darts is 501: it started as 301, on a wooden board
The first 01 game that caught on was actually 301. According to darts historian Patrick Chaplin, early English pubs kept score on the board from a card game: the cribbage board. Each side has two rows of 30 holes, so one lap is 60, plus one extra hole at the finish.
That means any game scored on it lands on "a multiple of 60, plus 1". Five laps is 60 x 5 + 1 = 301. Later came 501, 601, 701 and 1001, and every one of them kept that trailing 1. Exactly when 501 appeared, and why it replaced 301 as the tournament standard, isn't clearly recorded. What we do know is that pro events today almost all play 501.
What the 1 at the end is for
Chaplin points to a practical reason too. If the starting score were a round number, a strong player could just keep hitting 20 and the game would get boring. The trailing 1 means sooner or later you have to leave the 20 and aim somewhere else to clean up the odd remainder.
That ties into the finishing rule. The most common explanation is that double out (your last dart must hit a double) exists so the finish takes accuracy too, not just endless T20s. A double always scores an even number and 501 is odd, so somewhere along the way you have to hit an odd score to set up a finish. Accounts differ on exactly when double out began, but PDC and WDF steel-tip events all use it today.
Why 501 takes at least 9 darts
The highest single dart is T20 = 60. Eight perfect T20s only make 480, still 21 short, so 9 darts is the theoretical minimum. That's where the "nine-dart finish" comes from.
Wikipedia's figures put the number of ways to check out 501 in nine darts under double-out rules at 3,944, with 2,296 of them finishing on the bullseye (in steel-tip, the inner bull's 50 counts as a double). The first nine-darter on TV was thrown by John Lowe at the 1984 MFI World Matchplay. For more famous ones, read our nine-dart finish history.
Soft-tip 01 rules vs steel-tip 501
The 01 games on an electronic dartboard use the same numbers, but the rules are often looser:
| Item | Steel-tip pro events | Soft-tip machines (e.g. Phoenix) |
|---|---|---|
| Starting score | Usually 501 | 301, 501 or 701, your choice |
| Finish | Double out | Default is often open out (any single finishes), can switch to master out or double out |
| Bull | Outer 25, inner 50 | Often fat bull: the whole bull is 50; can be set to separate bull (25/50) |
| Scoring | Kept by hand | Machine does it |
Fat bull turns the bull into a big, friendly 50, so soft-tip players often go straight for it to finish, unlike steel-tip players who are used to aiming at D20 or D16. Even with a 50 bull, the best single dart is still T20 for 60, so the 9-dart minimum for 501 doesn't change. You can pick the rules when you start a game on the AI DARTS machines; the actual default depends on the machine on site. For the full rules, see how to play Cricket and 501.
Now that the logic is clear, the fastest way to test it is to play a leg of 501 yourself and count how many darts it takes. The Phoenix electronic dartboards at AI DARTS run 24 hours, and if you log in as an AI DARTS member your scores go onto the leaderboard.