How to Aim a Dart: Dominant Eye, Aiming Line and Focus Point

Aiming a dart is not sighting a rifle

The most widespread idea of aiming comes from shooting sports: you line up a sight on a target and pull the trigger. In darts that does not work, and the reason is simple. There is no sight that stays stable during the movement. The dart travels from the starting position back towards your face and forward again. The line you saw at the beginning no longer exists at the moment of release.

Aiming a dart properly therefore means this: establish a starting line, then execute a movement that reproduces that line reliably. Aiming provides the direction, technique provides the repeatability. Players who want to improve their grouping usually need to work on the second half, but look for the fault in the first.

Finding your dominant eye

Both eyes see from slightly different angles, and your brain favours one of them for depth perception. Which one it is partly determines how you stand at the board. The test takes twenty seconds.

Stretch out both arms and form a small triangle with your hands. With both eyes open, fix an object through that opening, the bullseye for example. Now close one eye at a time. With one eye the object stays inside the opening, with the other it jumps to the side. The eye where it stays put is your dominant one.

In practice this means the dart should sit in line with your dominant eye in the starting position. For most right handed players the right eye is dominant, which suits a slightly side on stance. With cross dominance, a right hander with a dominant left eye, a somewhat more square stance is often more comfortable.

The aiming line: three points on one straight line

The starting line consists of three points: your dominant eye, the tip of the dart and the segment you are targeting. When those three sit on one straight line, the direction is right. The crucial part is often overlooked: this line has to be identical on every throw, which means the dart has to sit in the same place in front of your face every time.

The most common source of error is therefore not the line itself but the starting position of the hand. If the hand drifts by a couple of centimetres from throw to throw, the line drifts with it, even though you subjectively aimed just as carefully. Deviations of exactly this kind are what throw analysis makes visible while they disappear in your own perception.

Where to aim: treble 20, treble 19 or the centre?

So far this has been about how you aim. The second question is what you aim at. When scoring, most players automatically aim at the treble 20 because it scores the most. Whether that is the best choice for you depends on how much your darts spread.

Three statisticians at Stanford University, Ryan Tibshirani, Andrew Price and Jonathan Taylor, worked this out in their paper A Statistician Plays Darts. They describe a player's spread as a standard deviation in millimetres and calculate, for every point on the board, how many points you can expect on average when you aim exactly there. The answer depends heavily on the spread:

• About 5 millimetres of spread: the best aiming point remains the centre of the treble 20.
• About 27 millimetres of spread: the best aiming point is in the treble 19, close to the border with the 7. The 20 sits between the 1 and the 5, the 19 between the 7 and the 3. A sideways miss therefore costs less at the 19.
• About 65 millimetres of spread: across a large area around the centre the expected score is almost the same. The best point in theory is then below and to the left of the bullseye.

For scale: the board has a radius of 17 centimetres. The values of 27 and 65 millimetres are the estimated spreads of two of the paper's authors, who say themselves that they are not expert dart players. To estimate your own spread, they suggest throwing about 50 darts at the bullseye and writing down the scores.

Without any maths, one simple observation helps: if your darts aimed at the 20 regularly land in the 1 and the 5, try the 19. This only applies to scoring. When checking out, the game sets the target, and the aiming point changes nothing about your technique. The aiming line and repeatability from the sections above stay the same.

Where do you look: the board or the dart tip?

This question sparks debate in every club, and the answer is unsatisfying: both work, but not at the same time and not alternating.

The majority of top players focus on the target and perceive the dart tip only blurred in peripheral vision. That fits the research on the so called quiet eye, the final steady fixation on the target just before the movement. Studies on the dart throw, starting with Vickers, Rodrigues and Edworthy in 2000, link a longer and earlier final fixation with accurate throws and with higher skill levels. That is an association, not proof that looking longer is what produces the hits. The gaze rests on the target, not on the tool.

A smaller group focuses on the dart tip and perceives the target blurred. That works very well too. What reliably works worse is switching: jumping back and forth between tip and target several times during the aiming process loses the stable reference and stretches the aiming time. Pick one variant and stay with it.

How long should you aim?

Aiming too briefly means the starting line is not properly set. Aiming too long means something else: the arm tires in the holding position, concentration shifts from the target to the execution, and the movement gets consciously steered instead of automatically recalled. Both cost accuracy.

A workable range sits at roughly one to three seconds between taking the starting position and beginning the pull back. More important than the exact value is the consistency. If you take two seconds on the first dart of a visit and five on the third, what usually changed is not your aiming but the pressure.

This aiming duration is one of the quantities that can be captured objectively. Evaluations regularly show that poor scoring series do not stand out through different angles but through longer and more uneven aiming times. Players who have seen this in their own data pay different attention to their movement sequence afterwards.

Separating aiming from throwing

One mistake accompanies many players for years: they correct mid movement. The throw has started, a feeling says "that will be too high", and the hand tries to steer against it during the acceleration phase. The result is regularly worse than the uncorrected throw, because a movement already underway cannot be altered cleanly.

The clearer split is this: aim before the throw, only execute during it. If the starting line is not right, it is better to abort, take the position again and start over. That costs a few seconds and is almost always better than a correction in the middle of the movement.

Three drills that improve aiming

• One segment across 30 throws. Throw exclusively at a single segment, the 20 for example, and count only how many darts land in the correct segment, regardless of single, double or treble. This trains horizontal accuracy, which depends almost entirely on the aiming line.
• Only the first dart counts. Across ten visits you score only the first dart of each. The first throw of a visit is the most honest test of your aiming process, because it works without any correction impulse from the previous darts.
• Even aiming duration. Count internally until you throw and keep that number constant across a whole session. The goal here is not accuracy, it is rhythm.

How drills like these fit into a complete session with scoring and doubles is shown in darts practice drills.

Common mistakes when aiming

Four patterns show up particularly often, and all four can be fixed without any technical change.

The first is a wandering stance. Players who do not take the exact same spot at the oche on every throw aim from a different angle each time. A marker on the floor solves it immediately.

The second is looking at the result. Many check where the first dart landed before bringing the second into position. That abandons the aiming line and forces you to rebuild it.

The third is aiming with the whole body. When the torso adjusts during aiming, the starting position of the hand moves with it. Fine adjustment belongs in the arm, not in the trunk.

The fourth concerns the head. A slight head movement during the pull back shifts the eye position and with it the entire aiming line. In slow motion it is obvious immediately, during a game nobody notices.