Part I – Checkout advice: No 2: 50

Hello everyone,
You might have been expecting No. 2 of Part I to be about a 167 checkout, but I've decided to go a slightly different route (no pun intended) and cover the checkouts which are vaguely relevant for posts I've already written. In the last post, I mentioned the fact that if you're on 170 and hit T1 T20 T19, you're left on 50, but that that's not all that great. So here's the post on a 50 checkout.

To start, here's a video of Phil Taylor checking out 50.

Taylor goes 10 for Tops, which is quite common and has the following advantages:

1) A lot of people like Tops (D20), so it's good to get on it.

2) Your one-darter on the bullseye is so unlikely it's not worth thinking about.

3) If you do accidentally hit treble 10, then you're left with double 10, which is a very nice plan B.

You do, however, have other options. As my favourite doubles are double 16 and double 8, I would go a different route, namely 18 D16. This, however, isn't without its pitfalls, mainly that if you hit treble 18 by accident, then you bust your score, which is obviously worse than the equivalent mess-up on the 10 D20 route.

That said, I still recommend 18 D16 because it's as straightforward a two-darter as you're likely to get, and it goes onto my favourite double. And I'm really not very good on Tops.

The other neighbours of 18 are D18, 1 and 4. I won't be looking at neighbour misses in great depth but as a quick summary:

If you hit D18, you're left with 14, which is double 7, which I don't mind: D18 D7.

If you hit 1, then you're left with 49, so you just go single 17 for double 16. You have the same problem of a potential bust if you hit treble 17, but at some stage you should be hitting a fat single number: 1 17 D16.

If you hit 4, then you're left with 46, which isn't bad at all. It means you're looking at 14 for double 16, and if you do hit treble 14, then you can still check out on the same visit with a cheeky double 2, so: 4 14 D16.