March of 2006 I ran into a guy at a consulting gig. And after the typical male bonding routine (this usually involves beer) we started hanging out. His favorite place was Sherlocks Pub. He introduced me to the game of darts. I liked it. A lot. He has been playing darts on and off for 30 years. In fact once played a championship in Las Vegas and was ranked 200th in the country. Yeah he’s pretty good.
I got pretty good too, enough so that I started spending money on other sets of darts and bought a dartboard for home. This is mildly odd for me as my hand/eye coordination sucks. Even more strange: I enjoy it. Every once and a while I can even beat him a game or two.
We generally play two games, 501 and Cricket. 501 is easy as you just hit a double to start scoring. Then you start subtracting your way to zero. To win you have to be the first to exactly hit zero with a double. Tricky but doable. With 501 you just need something to keep track of the score on. With Cricket it helps to have a more structured score card. But the ones I found online I didn’t like the look of and most of them weren’t complete.
Some might argue but the “bull” is more traditionally called a “cork” and most boards I found online was missing the three scoring options that made it really interesting. This version of Cricket is referred to “Shanghai” or so I am told.
Shanghai’s additions to traditional Cricket include “Triples,” the inner ring, Doubles, the outer ring, and “Three in a Bed” (three darts in any one number).
This makes it a much longer game and requires additional skill, patience, time and beer. Fortunately the latter helps with the first three.
So I give up on finding one online that I like and make my own scorecard for playing Shanghai at home. My buddy notices it and remarks that I ought to post it as it is nice. This is what it looks like.
If you would like a copy of it, you can download a copy of it here. Feel free to use it, pass it around, etc. Just don’t sell it or claim authorship. That would be shitty and uncool. But if you do use it, drop me a line.
And now a week later I get an email from my Darts Buddy and it looks like my “assume I am right because it sounds right and anyway I am too lazy to actually, you know “research” something” writing habits have once again made me look like a fool.
BTW after reading your page I decided to do some checking online and found out I have been wrong all this time..
It seems Shanghai is just another name for the game around the world..
that is where you play 20 rounds and you throw 3 darts at the number of the round you are on.
Though I did checking I couldn’t find any mention of what to call the game we play other then long cricket.
So if you know drop me a line