Nine darts. Five hundred and one points scored, finished on a double, and not a single dart wasted.
That is the whole definition, and it is the sport’s summit — darts’ answer to snooker’s 147 break, except arguably crueller, because the ninth dart has to find a bed a few millimetres wide with the previous eight already perfect. Miss with the first and nobody ever knows what might have been; miss with the ninth and the whole room groans. The perfect leg has a history of its own, and for anyone whose heart belongs to the BDO years, that history turns on two dates: 13 October 1984 and 9 January 1990.
What Nine Perfect Darts Actually Require
Under standard 501 rules, a leg begins at 501 and must end on a double. Nine darts is the mathematical minimum, and there are exactly 3,944 different ways of doing it — 2,296 of them finishing on the bullseye. In practice, almost everybody follows one path.
The classic route is 180, 180, 141. Two maximums — treble 20 with each of the first six darts — leave 141 after two visits, and 141 comes down in three darts five different ways:
- Treble 20, treble 19, double 12
- Treble 20, treble 15, double 18
- Treble 19, treble 16, double 18
- Treble 17, treble 18, double 18
- Treble 20, treble 17, double 15
The best-known alternative is three identical visits of 167 — treble 20, treble 19, bullseye, three times over — which has the elegance of symmetry and the inconvenience of requiring the bull under pressure three separate times. Whatever the route, the arithmetic slightly misses the point. Plenty of decent players can hit a 180 on a good night. Hitting nine perfect darts in a row, on a stage, with an opponent at your shoulder and the crowd falling silent somewhere around dart seven — that is a different sport entirely.
13 October 1984: £102,000 for Nine Darts
John Lowe threw the first televised nine-darter on 13 October 1984, at the MFI World Matchplay, against Keith Deller. The route: two maximums, then treble 17, treble 18, double 18. The reward: £102,000 — a sum so far beyond the sport’s usual scale in 1984 that it remains one of the most famous single cheques darts has ever written. The oddity, to modern eyes, is that the moment wasn’t even broadcast live.
That cheque did something important. It put a price on perfection, and the price said: this is the rarest thing in the game, and it may never happen again.
9 January 1990: The One Lakeside Saw
Six years later, it happened on the stage where it mattered most. On 9 January 1990, Paul Lim hit a nine-darter at the BDO World Championship, against Jack McKenna — two maximums, then treble 20, treble 19, double 12, textbook from first dart to last. The full story is told in the account of Paul Lim’s 1990 nine-darter, and it deserves the telling, because no single moment in the tournament’s history is quite like it.
The £52,000 bonus Lim collected was more than double the £24,000 the champion banked that year. Sit with that for a second: the perfect leg was worth over twice the world title. Rarer than the championship itself, and priced accordingly.
And that was it. Across the entire history of the BDO World Championship, Lim’s remains the only nine-darter ever thrown. One perfect leg in more than four decades of the sport’s most storied tournament.
Why Only Once?
Partly mathematics, partly nerves, mostly era. A world championship gives a player dozens of legs across a fortnight, but a nine-darter demands nine consecutive perfect darts at the precise moment the scoreboard allows it — and the scoring standards of the 1980s and 1990s simply produced fewer maximum-heavy legs than the modern game does. Add the peculiar pressure of that stage, where every dart carries a season’s worth of consequence, and the feat becomes vanishingly unlikely.
How unlikely, exactly? Consider Phil Taylor. He threw a record eleven televised nine-darters, the first of them on 1 August 2002, and made perfection look almost repeatable — yet he never managed one at a World Championship in his entire career. In his very last match, the 2018 final, his attempt died on the outside wire of double 12. If the greatest scorer the game has produced couldn’t do it on that stage, Lim’s afternoon in 1990 starts to look less like a footnote and more like a miracle.
From Miracle to Milestone
Because everywhere else, the nine-darter changed. From Taylor’s 2002 breakthrough onwards, televised perfect legs became — not common, exactly, but no longer once-a-decade events. Taylor threw two in a single televised match in 2010, and Michael van Gerwen matched that in 2017. In 2011, Adrian Lewis became the first player to hit one in a World Championship final, against Gary Anderson. In 2023, Michael Smith did it again in the final against Van Gerwen, in a leg where Van Gerwen himself came within one dart of a simultaneous nine-darter — an exchange widely called the greatest leg ever played. By 2024, the youngest player to throw one on television, Luke Littler, was sixteen.
The meaning shifted with the frequency. A modern nine-darter is a highlight — replayed, celebrated, clipped, then filed. Lowe’s was a fortune, and Lim’s was a legend. That is the strange arithmetic of the perfect leg: the better the world got at throwing it, the less each one could mean. The two from the BDO years keep their value precisely because the era around them made perfection nearly impossible. One perfect leg in the championship’s whole history — and nobody at Frimley Green ever saw a second.
