In December last year, David Munyua made history by becoming the first Kenyan to feature and win a match at the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) World Darts Championship.
The PDC World Championship is the most prestigious annual tournament in the sport, attracting the world’s elite throwers and millions of viewers worldwide.
Yet despite Munyua’s landmark achievement, darts remains a mystery to many, with few understanding how the sport is played, scored, or where it all began.
On today’s edition of Know Your Sport, we step into the fascinating world of darts, unpacking its rules, scoring system and rich history.
Darts is both a professional precision sport and a traditional pub game, blending razor-sharp accuracy with intense mental focus.
Competitively, it is played by two or more players who throw small, sharp-pointed projectiles, known as darts, at a circular target called a dartboard.
The official throwing distance from the face of a steel-tip dartboard to the front of the oche (throw line) is precisely 7 feet, 9.25 inches, a measurement standardised across professional competitions.
Scoring in darts is based on accuracy and strategy. Players throw three darts per turn at a numbered board divided into 20 segments, each carrying a value from one to 20, along with specialised scoring rings. The thin outer ring doubles the segment hit value, while the thin inner ring triples it.
At the centre sits the bullseye, the inner bull is 50 points, and the outer bull is worth 25.
The most commonly played format is the 501 game, where players start with 501 points and race to reduce their total to exactly zero.
Victory, however, demands precision to the very end, as players must finish on a double.
Darts traces its roots back to medieval England in the 1300s, where it began as a military pastime.
Soldiers passed the time and sharpened their aim by throwing shortened arrows or spearheads at tree trunks or wine barrels.
Over the centuries, the activity evolved into a popular pub game, with modern and standardised rules emerging in the early 20th century.
The sport’s transformation into a professional spectacle gathered momentum in the 1970s and 1980s, sparked by the formation of the British Darts Organisation (BDO) in 1973 and the launch of the first World Darts Championship in 1978.
Television exposure elevated darts from smoky pubs to packed arenas, a rise further accelerated by the formation of the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) in 1992.
In Kenya, darts has followed a quiet but steady evolution from a bar-room pastime in the 1940s to an organised sport under the Kenya Darts Association.
Today, it is gaining international recognition, driven by trailblazing performances from players like Munyua and Peter Wachiuri, whose success has ignited fresh interest and professional ambition within the local darts community.
Further, Kenya has a rich history in darts globally, producing 70 per cent of the world’s tournament-grade bristle (sisal) dartboards at Athi River’s Export Processing Zone (EPZ).
by TEDDY MULEI
