Every now and then I like to add a game from the big catalogue of games Mikko Laiho created, while he was working as a professional darts coach. Some games are picked from the book “More about darts” (“Enemmän dartsista”) he wrote about darts training, and some from our many hundreds of emails discussing the development of GoDartsPro. The new game “9 Darts Out” is from one of our emails.

Mikko always said “Playing only 501’s isn’t really that good of a practice”. Naturally, you need to be able to finish a leg of 501 in a certain amount of darts, all depending on your level. But the fact is that the more you miss and the more you fail to finish the leg with 20 darts the less you believe in yourself, and the dreaded ‘Scar-tissue’ takes its scary place.

Instead he advocated for dedicated training games where you have a clear focus and goal, and you work on this goal by playing the game repeatedly. Therefore he created many different, short and effective training games while coaching players.

One of the games he suggested for this was the “9 darts out” game.

You have 9 darts and 3 lives (optional) to finish the current out. It starts at 121 (optional), and if you manage to finish the current out the next out will be increased by one. If you don’t finish the current out, you will lose a life and you play until you’re down to 0 lives.

If you finish the out in 6 darts you will get 1 extra life!

If you finish the out in 3 darts you will get 3 extra lives!

As Mikko said: “Play as long as you can until all lives are gone. 501 is the last out, and if you get that in 9 darts we’ll call that a day.”

How far can you reach? Click the button below and find out today!

There are many finishing games already on GoDartsPro but there are a few aspects of this game that makes it very useful and fun. First of all, if you practise the end part of a leg of 501 more instead of playing full games of 501, you will improve faster. You will by repetition learn how to leave a good double after 3-6 darts, and learn the the fastest way to go from 121 and above to a finish.

If you are good, this game can take quite a while to finish! So make sure to take a break every 20-30 minutes or so, or come back to the game again later.

Sadly, Mikko Laiho passed away in 2019, but his legacy and great games lives on, on GoDartsPro!

Play the game a few times and see how far you can get! Get back to the game every now and then and see if you can better your best result.