Dartboard Heatmap

When you’re playing darts, where should you aim?

A complete novice might assume the bullseye is the best target. But if you’ve watched professionals like Peter “Snakebite” Wright or Gerwyn “Iceman” Price, you’d know that treble-20 offers the highest reward on the board.

So should you aim for treble-20? Well, maybe. The complicating factor is that 20 is sandwiched between 5 and 1 on a dartboard. It’s like walking a balance beam with a two-storey drop on either side – any slight error is punished. If you have a large radius of accuracy, then a more forgiving region of the board could be a better bet.

To this end, I created an animation based on simulated darts throws with different accuracy levels:

The Matlab code is here. Now to plot my radius of accuracy as a mathematical function of alcohol consumption, and darts will be a solved game!