History of Darts

Series Summary

Darts is a variety of games in which a dart, a small pointy arrow-like object, is thrown at a wooden or rubber board. The board is traditionally divided into 20 sections with a "bull" in the middle. the story goes that British soldiers one day started throwing broken off arrow tips at stumps to pass the time and eventually developed it into different games. In 1896, Brian Gamlin, developed the traditional dart board that is still used today in bars and pubs all throughout the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States. Dart games can be a lot of fun, but are not easy to master, tips on strategies are never a bad idea for those wanting to dive into the exciting world of dart playing.

In this free video series, watch as professional dart player Richard Buccola teaches how to play darts. Learn the history of darts, the different parts of the dart, how to throw darts, how to play the games cricket, 301.501, baseball, dead presidents, killer, and secret killer, and how to maintain darts. Darts are not only a great way to have fun with your friends at the local bar, but also an easy way to scam money out of helpless, poor saps, so let the experts at ExpertVillage help you improve your dart game with these free tutorials.

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Rich Buccola here in historic Queens at the world's famous Doyle's Corner, and on behalf of Expert Village, today we're gonna show you how to throw some darts. Okay, I'm gonna talk about what you need to play darts. First of all, all you need is really just three darts, a dartboard, and a light, and you got darts. A real inexpensive game. What makes darts so famous and so, you know, played all around the world is that no matter what your age is, your height, your weight, your endurance, your capabilities physically, it doesn't really matter. Because you could be 3 foot 2 or 6 foot 7, and still throw darts bad or good. So that's what makes it such a great game. Darts goes back hundreds of years. It was said that the soldiers or the warriors would play with these short darts, these short like spears, and they would throw it in to the sides of wine barrels. But as the game got more complex, what they would actually do is cut down trees, saw the tree so you would have a, you know, the roundness of the tree where the lines of the actual tree actually become, later on, become your dart board, and that was how they could get in close with that. It was even said that they played darts on the Mayflower coming here. Some people will say it's, it's bogus, I don't really know. It's, it's a lot of you know, it's a lot of speculation. There's really no determined factors that they've said they did play on the Mayflower. But, you know what? They're playing it more and more now, and what happened was, I think, is, they would play these tournaments when they started playing into the tree as, as targets. As it got cold, they couldn't play outside, the game came indoors. And as the game came indoors and we progressed, it became darts as we know. We come back, I'll go over every aspect that I know about darts."