In January 2008 Anastasia Dobromyslova beat Trina Gulliver 2–0 in the women’s final at Lakeside. Gulliver had won the title seven years in a row. Dobromyslova was 23, and a year earlier she had been the first Russian to play at the championship.
By the end of the year she had left the BDO.
From Kalinin to Ellesmere Port
She was born on 26 September 1984 in Kalinin, now Tver, and took up darts at twelve. She won the Russian national championship ten times; by her own account that was not hard, because hardly anyone in Russia played. The youth titles followed: the Girls’ World Masters in 2001 and the WDF Europe Youth Cup singles in 2001 and 2002.
She lives in Ellesmere Port and is married to Tony Martin, who played at Lakeside in 2005. She walks on to “Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence; the “From Russia with Love” tag is, by her own account, not an official nickname. Most commentators settle for “Anastasia”.
2004 to 2008
The first big final came at the 2004 World Darts Trophy, where she beat Gulliver in the quarter-finals and lost to Francis Hoenselaar. Her Lakeside debut in 2007 came as fourth seed and ended in the semi-finals, again against Gulliver. That autumn she won the women’s pairs at the WDF World Cup with Irina Armstrong.
In 2008 she beat Dee Bateman and Stephanie Smee, then Gulliver in the final.
Two Years in the PDC
That year she qualified for the PDC’s UK Open through the pub qualifiers and lost 6–5 to Robert Thornton. Later that year she became the first woman invited to the Grand Slam of Darts. In December, hours after losing the World Masters final to Hoenselaar, she joined the PDC full-time, taking a wildcard into the 2009 PDC World Championship.
She was the second woman to play in that championship, after Gayl King in 2001, and lost 5–3 in the preliminary round to Remco van Eijden. At the 2009 Grand Slam she beat Vincent van der Voort 5–4, her first televised win over a man. She did not qualify for the PDC World Championship in 2010 or 2011.
Back at Lakeside: 2012 and 2013
In January 2011 she returned to the BDO and said later that the reasons were financial. At the 2012 championship she beat Julie Gore, then Gulliver in the semi-final, and in the final came back from a set down against Deta Hedman to win 2–1.
In 2013 she beat Lorraine Winstanley in the quarter-finals and won the final 2–1 against Lisa Ashton. It was her third title.
Ashton then became her main rival. She beat Dobromyslova in the 2014 semi-finals after surviving six match darts, and in the 2018 final. Winstanley beat her in the 2019 semi-finals, and her last Lakeside match, in 2020, was a quarter-final defeat by Mikuru Suzuki. All of it is on the BDO women’s world championship page.
The rest of the BDO majors came in the same years. She won the Zuiderduin Masters in 2012, 2014 and 2016, and in 2014 both the World Masters and the BDO World Trophy. Her son Joseph was born in February 2017.
She also played soft-tip darts for Russia. At the 2012 IDF World Cup she won the 501 singles, which made her the first woman to hold the steel-tip and soft-tip world titles in the same year.
