Imagine you’re a professional darts player (not so difficult if you are, of course!). You’re playing OK, but somehow not quite getting the results, just missing that crucial checkout or straying into the treble 5s and 1s once too often. What do you do?
You might decide to practice harder. Or cut down on the fried food, go down the gym and get fit. Or visit a sports psychologist, maybe learn to meditate. And one, or even all, of those measures might work. But there’s another thing you could try that it’s tempting to believe could yield quicker results You could change your darts.
Now in my experience sports professionals are generally less fickle about their equipment than recreational players. For instance, although top tennis players may have their favourites from ten seemingly identical racquet frames, and even insist on that particular one being re-strung during a match, they will generally choose (perhaps after asking for modifications) a racquet model from whichever manufacturer offers them the best sponsorship deal and stick with it for some time. It’s the amateur who changes equipment after one bad result, believing it will make a huge difference to their game. The professional usually realises the difference is likely to be small compared to the variations caused by their own mental attitude and physical condition.
However, in any sport, professional or amateur, once a player’s attitude and condition is right, every small additional advantage is worth having. And there is no sport for which that applies more than darts, where a millimetre here or there is often decisive. And that’s why, as The Big Boss has frequently made clear, Team Unicorn players are always free to play with any design of Unicorn dart they like, with any combination of shaft and flights that suits them. Which is where, just occasionally, I come in.
By looking at a player’s throwing style, maybe with the aid of slow-motion video, I can work out their individual “launch conditions” and feed them into my trusty laptop. Then, by running a dart trajectory program combined with a supercharged version of uniLab, I can try to predict the effect on the flight of their darts of using any given shaft and flights combination with the type and weight of barrel they prefer.
The question now is exactly what effect is desired, and this is not always that obvious. If a player is grouping fairly well but suffering from slightly inconsistent board entry angles, the yaw wavelength of their darts could be tuned so that they reach the board at a yaw “node” (sorry, maths word!) which minimised those angles. But this could be an illusory advantage as the throw variations which caused the inconsistency would still be there causing inaccuracy due to aerodynamic lift. Better results might be obtained by tuning the yaw wavelength of their darts so the entry angle sneakily compensated for the lift deviation (see my “The Adventure of the Three-Quarter” blog).
A corollary (another maths word, honest, not a Toyota!) of this is that a player who suffered from a similar type of throw inconsistency, but whose darts already hit the board at a yaw node, might have fairly repeatable impact angles but worse grouping and might actually benefit from “three-quarter wavelength” darts with more impact angle variation.
Well, can you imagine the stick I’d get from darts commentators worldwide if it became known that I recommended a top player changed to darts that hit the board at slightly different angles? My name would be mud for a while – at least unless and until the results started rolling in (funny, that scenario sounds strangely familiar!).
While we’re talking about impact angles, there’s another non-obvious aspect to these that it’s worth mentioning. A dart that lands horizontally in the board might look like it’s flown “straight”, but it probably hasn’t. In fact, it’s most likely to have landed yawed (”pitched”, for any aerodynamic pedants out there!) upward at around 20 degrees, which would compensate for the downward angle of its near-parabolic trajectory at that point. Thus, far from, as it appears, presenting the minimum obstacle to following darts, it is effectively skewed upwards across their path.
Are horizontally-landing darts are a bad thing, then? Well, not necessarily. They may be a bit in the way of a following dart, but they are not in the way of the player’s sightline. And being able to see the target bed past previous darts can be a big advantage. Ask Phil Taylor!
So there’s something for you all (including dianne s as she experiments to get the right shaft and flights combination for her Sigma 950s) to think about until next time!