How do you checkout 150?
— Darts Checkout Assistant (@DartsCheckout) March 14, 2018
This site prefers the T19-T19-D18 route, but the poll respondents overwhelming prefer to start with T20. This is fine, but I question staying on T20 with the second dart. Over two-thirds of these players stay on T20 to leave themselves a D15 checkout, which is not considered a favorable out shot.
This chart, from @ochepedia, shows how often PDC players finished on each double in stage matches since December 2016:
Gary Anderson’s leg won on D17 last night was only the 15th such leg out of the past 14,336 played on stage.
Here is the prevalence of each winning double, by number and percentage of the total, since December 2016. pic.twitter.com/6LACvXl75g— Christopher Kempf (@ochepedia) March 9, 2018
Over 14,000 Doubles hit to win a leg and less than 70 of them were on Double 15. Compare that with nearly 900 on Double 18 and it’s pretty clear that the best dart players in the world would rather finish a leg on Double 18 than Double 15. So keep that in mind when you’re building a path to a checkout. By choosing to throw T20 with your first two darts, you’re also choosing to finish on Double 15 over other, arguably better, options.
The better option, in this case, is to finish on Double 18. Since T20-T18 and T19-T19 are both worth the same number of points (114), it’s just a question of whether you’re more comfortable switching from T20 to T18 or throwing both of the first two darts at T19.
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