Darts
Darts has been a pub game for centuries. The version you play today — with that specific number arrangement on the board — was largely settled by 1896.
The earliest evidence of dart-throwing as a game points to medieval England, where soldiers are said to have thrown short arrows at the bottom of wine barrels or the cross-sections of felled trees. The rings in the wood created natural scoring zones. Whether that story is entirely accurate is debated, but what's clear is that by the time written records appear, darts was already well established in English drinking establishments.
Cross-sections of elm trees — which display concentric rings as they dry and crack — are the most commonly cited precursor to the modern dartboard. The wood would split along natural lines, forming segments not entirely unlike what you see on a board today. Elm was the preferred material for boards well into the 20th century.
The numbering sequence on a standard dartboard — 20, 1, 18, 4, 13, 6, 10, 15, 2, 17, 3, 19, 7, 16, 8, 11, 14, 9, 12, 5 — is widely attributed to a carpenter from Bury, Lancashire named Brian Gamlin, who is said to have devised it in 1896. The arrangement is deliberately punishing: high numbers are flanked by low ones, which means a slight miss to either side costs you dearly. A 20 sits next to a 1 and a 5. A 19 sits next to a 7 and a 3.
That design philosophy — rewarding accuracy and punishing imprecision — is what separates darts from a pure luck game and explains why it has sustained serious competition for well over a century. Gamlin died in 1903 before he could patent the arrangement, and the attribution itself has been questioned by some historians, but his name remains attached to it in most accounts.
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, darts was a fixture of English pub life. In 1908, a landlord in Leeds named Anakin successfully defended a darts game against a local magistrate's claim that it was a game of chance rather than skill — by having a dart player hit the numbers the magistrate called out. The court agreed: darts was a skill game. That ruling mattered, because games of chance were subject to gambling restrictions; games of skill were not. Pubs could keep their boards.
The National Darts Association was founded in Britain in 1924, and the News of the World Individual Darts Championship — one of the sport's earliest major competitions — began in 1927 and ran until 1990. For much of the 20th century, darts was broadcast on British television in a format somewhere between sport and light entertainment.
Organized international competition arrived in 1976 with the founding of the World Darts Federation (WDF). The first World Darts Championship followed in 1978, held at the Heart of the Midlands Club in Nottingham. Leighton Rees of Wales won. The championship quickly became the sport's premier event, with the venue later moving to Alexandra Palace in London — which remains its home for the BDO/WDF championship to this day.
In 1992, sixteen of the world's top players broke away from the WDF's British Darts Organisation over disputes about prize money and professionalism. They formed what became the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC), which held its first World Championship in 1994.
Phil Taylor — "The Power" — dominated the sport from the early 1990s through the 2010s, winning 16 PDC World Championship titles. His rivalry with players like John Part, Adrian Lewis, and eventually Gary Anderson and Michael van Gerwen elevated the sport's profile enormously. Taylor is widely considered the greatest darts player of all time, though van Gerwen has mounted a serious case for that title in the years since Taylor's retirement.
The PDC today runs the most commercially successful darts competitions in the world, with the Premier League Darts — a traveling league format played in arenas across the UK and Europe — drawing crowds that would have seemed impossible for a pub game thirty years ago.
Electronic dartboards changed the accessibility of the game significantly — automatic scoring, multiple game modes, and coin-op operation made darts viable in any bar, not just those with staff who could run manual leagues. But steel-tip darts and traditional bristle boards (now made from sisal fiber rather than elm) have maintained their following, particularly in league play.
Bar dart leagues remain one of the most reliably recurring events on a venue's weekly calendar. Teams are small, setup is minimal, and players tend to be loyal — the same people show up week after week. That's been true for well over a century, and the game's fundamentals haven't changed much since Brian Gamlin arranged those numbers in 1896.
Sources
LeaguePour handles online signup, entry fees, standings, and player communications for bar dart leagues. No spreadsheets.