Hello everyone.
Today's checkout we'll be discussing is 170. To get started, here's a video of Raymond van Barneveld checking out 170.
Now, 170 is probably one of the least interesting checkouts to talk about, because there's only one way of finishing it: T20 T20 BULL.
There's no getting around the fact that your first dart has to aim at treble 20, that if you hit your next dart has to aim at treble 20 and, if you hit that, your last dart has to go for bullseye.
So what I'm going to talk about is what you do if you miss with your first dart and hit the single 20, which will happen a lot of the time. Clearly, you might also hit 1 or 5 or treble 1 or treble 5 (or something else way off), but if I really went through all the possible ways of missing, then these blog posts would get too long. So I'll look at what to do if you hit the single 20, the treble 1 or the treble 5, as those are the three neighbours of treble 20.
Single 20 with first dart
Clearly, you're not going to be able to check out at this visit, as you're sitting on 150 with two darts in your hand, so you want to put yourself on as reasonable as finish as possible. Some people will tell you to go T20 BULL with your next two darts, thereby leaving Tops. However, for this blog, we're assuming that we're highly unlikely to hit a bullseye (see introduction), so we're not going to do this. Other options are (I'm including the first single 20 each time):
1) 20 T20 T20 – this leaves you with 30, which is double 15. This is a double, which is good, but it's not great, because double 15 isn't one of my favourite doubles. See also the post on 30. Maybe there's a better way.
2) 20 T20 T18 – leaves you with 36, which is double 18. This is preferable to double 15, so rather go with this than option 1.
3) 20 T19 T19 – leaves you on the same score as option 2 – 36 – but it's probably easier to hit two treble 19s than a treble 20 and then a treble 18, so rather go for this. Also not a terrible idea to get away from treble 20 if you've shanked your first dart into the single (and possibly even blocked your route partly to the treble bed).
Those are all the options you have to get down to a finish, so here my recommendation is 20 T19 T19.
Treble 5 with first dart
As above, you now can't check out at this visit, because you've only scored 15 points and still have 155 to get rid off. But can you get down to a sensible finish?
The answer, I'm afraid, is not really.You can't score 115 with two darts (which would leave Tops). The only way to leave a one-dart finish is to fire in treble 20 and treble 19 to leave 38 for double 19. Double 19 isn't great (see also the post on 38 [reminder to add link]) but it's still your only real option here: T5 T20 T19.
Treble 1 with first dart
Terrible luck obviously to hit treble 1 with your first dart, but that's what tends to happen when you aren't very good at darts. This leaves you with 167, which means that even treble 20, treble 19 will leave you on 50, which is theoretically a one-dart finish (bullseye), but easily the worst one-dart finish for people at my level so that I wouldn't even recommend trying to one-dart it (see also post on 50. In fact, as 50 is so terrible, you might as well be on 47, so I would just recommend just trying to knock off points, which means going for two treble 20s. So my recommendation here is T1 T20 T20.
That's the end of my discussion of how best to approach a 170 checkout. Let me know what you think in the comments box.
Herr Bench
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