Darts Blog

Bravo proudly welcomes on board famed stand up comedian and legendary darts fanatic Dave Gorman who will be using his own unique wit to give us a passionate fan’s eye view of the tournament. Joining him is former Football Italia presenter and sports journalist James Richardson. Both are set to bring a huge amount of energy and a fresh approach.

Four nail biting days, tense live action and plenty of suspense as the competitors go head to head: This is darts at it best!

The Professional Darts Corporation’s (PDC) top 16 players at the start of July will qualify automatically for the European Championship, headed up by the current champion Phil “The Power” Taylor, who has won the title in both 2008 and 2009 since the tournament’s launch.

Emotions will be running high as they will be joined by eight European-based players from the PDC's European Order of Merit, comprised from events held in Gibraltar, Germany, Holland and Austria, which is likely to include former Lakeside Champion Jelle Klaasen, Dutch stars Vincent van der Voort, Michael Van Gerwen and Co Stompe and German pair Tomas Seyler and Andree Welge. The final eight players will come from the Players Championship Order of Merit, which could include former World Championship runner-up Mark Dudbridge, Scottish star Gary Anderson and the 2009 European Championship finalist, Steve Beaton.

I enjoy living in a very dry city in the driest state on the driest continent on the planet even with our current water restrictions but today, when I knew I had to walk to David Fay’s house to interview him for his Player Profile, it was anything but dry. It was raining constantly outside and the wind was shaking the house quite a bit too.

Oh well, I thought, “a change is as good as a holiday,” as they say! So I packed my gear in water-resistant bags, put on my raincoat and set off on my little adventure. I arrived at the address that my good buddy Gordon had supplied me with and knocked on the door. Wrong house!

I stood in the driveway (of the wrong house) soaking wet and rang Gordon on my mobile to find out where I went wrong. “Oh yeah,” says Gordon casually, “it’s not number 42.” “Didn’t I tell you?” “Its number 34!” So anyway, I arrived at number 34 looking like a drowned rat and was welcomed into the immaculate Fay residence by Dave’s wife Maureen.

Dave gave me the grand tour first showing me all of his animals, which I quite enjoyed because I am an animal lover myself, before settling down with a beer each in his very comfortable, open dining area.

I was immediately made to feel at home and I unpacked my gear ready to begin an interview with a dart player that I had looked up to from the very beginning of my darting life. Dave has a unique but very impressive throwing style which many have tried to imitate because it works so incredibly well for him.

We talked for several hours about Dave’s darting achievements, the history of darts in Whyalla, his battle with cancer and of many other darting matters of interest until the question arose; what weight are your darts?

Dave’s well worn darts started out at 20gms but weighed in at only 17gms at the time when he had them re-pointed. He told me how they were very smooth now and he needs to lick his fingers to try to get some grip happening while he’s throwing.

As it happened I had a recently purchased set of very grippy, 17gm darts in my camera/darts bag that I had with me and so I removed them and handed them over for his inspection.

Well now… with all of this darts talk and a new set of darts to try out we entered Dave’s trophy room, that also served as a practice room, so he could give them a try. He liked the darts and so we had a game of 501, first to 8 legs, to really test them out and satisfy our ever-growing need to bang a few into the board.

It was one of the most inspiring moments in my life and I felt the urge to try and imitate that style of his once again!

We moved back to the dining area and continued our discussion. Dave didn’t want me to mention his illness on the web site at first but we decided that it could inspire other prostate cancer sufferers and it was important for them to know that life can go on even when you are undergoing potentially crippling radiation therapy and have undergone surgery.

I was amazed to hear that Dave had had to travel to Adelaide, our closest capitol city, to attend radiation treatment over a period of three weeks and actually played in the super-league darts competition about a week into the treatment. The folks at the treatment centre warned him that he wouldn’t be walking anywhere a few days into treatment but there was Dave playing South Australian super-league and enjoying it!

Thanks Dave for a very enjoyable, informative and inspiring day.

See Dave Fay’s Player Profile!

Footnote: I have decided to donate the prize-money that Mike Burgess won in our “Best Darts Photo” competition, that Mike instructed me to donate to charity, to The Prostate Cancer Foundation Of Australia and will add a few dollars more on top.

Comment Submitted 22 Nov 2009

Nice piece on Dave Fay. He gave me my very first set of darts back in the early-mid 70s. Brass 17g, if I recall correctly. They gave me many years of great service, as I could never quite make the transition to tungsten as easily as others. Managed to win many competitions and represent the State with them too. My late father liked Dave and spoke of him often when we chatted about the old darts days in Whyalla.

Ozzie's son

The winner of the "Best Darts Photo" competition has been announced so have a look at the Competitions page to see who won and have a look at the Best Darts Photo page to see the winning entry. The competition is ongoing too so keep sending in your best darts photos because there is a bigger prize for the next one!

We didn't have any responses to the Wallpaper Competition so there will be no winner for that one. If there are enough expressions of interest I may give it another try in the future.

Firstly the new Cheap Darts page. I created this page by searching for the cheapest, quality, tungsten darts that I could find and then picking out the ones that I thought were the best.

I’m talking about Unicorn, Designa and and other reputable brands that I would recommend to any dart player at any level, even professional. You'll find the link to this page on the Darts Equipment page.

We now have a Darts Videos page with some very inspiring video clips including 9 darters by Phil Taylor and other PDC champions.

There is also a new “Other Darts Equipment” page with repointing tools for replacing darts points and various types of grip wax to help with your grip.

We haven't received any entries to the "Best Wallpaper" competition yet so get cracking if you want some easy money! What could be simpler? You make a pretty picture with the Darts Addiction theme then you email it in...easy!

I normally use M$ PowerPoint to create my graphics, save as a picture then use Adobe Photoshop to adjust brightness, contrast, colour and to resize it all before saving it in whatever format allows for the best quality at the smallest file size.

If you don't have access to Photoshop then you could use Paint.Net which is a great little graphics application that is completely free! To see the minimum system requirements and to download it click on this logo:

Click here to visit the Best Darts Photos page to see the latest entries! Check back soon for our next darts blog.

We also now have a second Darts Photos page and will shortly have a Wallpaper page too. To see the new photos page you will need to go to our original Darts Photos page to find the link...or you can click here to go straight there.

I wish you all the best of luck in our competitions and in your competition darts too!

I am pleased to announce that we now have a "Darts Photos" page with our first instalment of photos already in place. I have some more to post on there and will do so as time permits.

The next lot of photos includes a photo of a very special darts team with an average age of 72.67. If you think that's impressive they won a league division trophy a short time ago to gain promotion to the first division...again!

We also have a links page now too with links to our friends in the virtual darts world. I recommend having a look at "The Oche" darts news website if you would like to read the very latest in world darts news.

I also highly recommend visiting "Part's Darts". There is a great piece written by John Part himself the three times world darts champion. There is a six part article that explains how to train to become a great dart player and includes detailed explanations of how to train to throw at your best.

I would like to invite all the Whyalla darts leagues, men's and ladies, to send me their darts results for posting on this site. If they have a write up that they would like me to post on here I will include that too. Please use the Contact us link to let me know and I will give you an email address to send them to.

Please use a text editor program and use spell check before sending me the results/ write ups in either .txt, .doc or other M$ office created formats up to the 2007 version.

Please note that I cannot deal with hard copies (paper versions) as it is too time consuming to type them out and then convert them into HTML for the web.

At this time I am only offering this service to Whyalla leagues but may expand this to other darts leagues if it doesn't turn out to be too time consuming.

The original look & feel was a template supplied by my web host, SiteSell, who I am grateful to. If you are looking to start your own web site then I would wholeheartedly recommend them.

I played darts again this week at the Whyalla Darts Club and had a ball as always. Many thanks to Olive Blackburn (my 2nd Mum) and Belle Mcgowan for being the perfect hosts!

I renewed my membership at the Whyalla Darts Club on my first night back to show my continued support for this fantastic club and I urge other dart players to renew theirs as soon as possible too.

Our team, Pete’s Boys, had a couple of our favourite supporters out to cheer us on which we appreciate a lot. Thanks Robyn and Trish. Trish Bradtberg is a dart player too and plays in the local ladies darts association (she’s also my niece) and Robyn Discombe has played at State level on six occasions.

Our team was beaten by a very worthy side, The Stagers. We were missing two of our star players, leaving us short a player, but I don’t want to take anything away from the Stagers who have a star line-up.

One of those players is Mark Simmonds who is the best dart player that Whyalla has ever seen in my humble opinion.

Mark Simmonds has agreed to an interview with Darts-addiction.com and we will feature him here in our darts blog as well as in our Player Profile page soon. I will be prying some valuable throwing advice from Mark so be sure to check back here to see what his secret is.

The Bandits are of similar design to my Dad’s darts although shorter in length which I thought would be better still and the 17gm Ultralites are an experiment to see if I can handle even lighter darts and also to experience this “razor grip” design first hand!

The Bandits experiment didn’t work out how I expected either, they are around the same weight that I expected but I was wrong about shorter being better for me. I borrowed my Dad’s darts back and played comp’ with them again.

I was browsing through a darts equipment site recently and I stumbled upon these things called “Add A Grams.” They are short brass extensions that screw into your dart where the stems usually go and the stems screw into the Add A Grams. I was quite taken with the idea and added them to my wishlist for the next time I order some new darts stuff.

The plot thickens…

I mentioned the Add A Gram things to my Dad the other day (Thursday) and he said, “I’ve got a couple of sets of them in the kitchen draw!” Of course my Dad, who is also a darter although retired for the time being, offered them to me.

I tried them on my new Bandits and now the balance is fantastic but they are, of course, a little heavy for me now. It turns out that I needed to go longer not shorter after all!

Gordon Ashworth (there’s a player profile of him on this site) comes over to my place every Friday night for a few games of darts and a beer or two and I mentioned these Add A Gram things to him. He said, “oh yeah, those things! I used to use ‘em years ago but I gave mine to your Dad.”

Ok, so what did I gain from all this? Very important information on how to find the ideal darts for myself and how to pick them out from the other side of the world with some degree of confidence.

The darts I picked out were exactly the size and weight I expected they would be. The only mistake, if you could call it that, was going for a shorter dart rather than longer.

I will write an article in this darts blog soon on how I chose the darts, because it just may help someone else one day and us darts addicts have got to stick together, right?

If you have anything you would like to add to this darts blog, or any of the other darts blogs on this page, then please feel free to do so by clicking on the link below.

We lost the match by 1 point to the City Blades who had about 11 players turn up to a six-a-side match with sub’s permitted. Meanwhile our side, “Pete’s Boys,” started out with six including myself. I was asked to play so they wouldn’t be short a player. A final player for our side, Colin Davies, turned up after work later in the evening.

I scored quite well throughout the evening hitting a 180 at a crucial time in a game and pegged without any trouble too. Overall I was pretty happy with my performance. I did feel a bit rusty though and think I will do much better in the future.

Something really weird happened though. I was walking back from the bar when I noticed a set of Nodor Hexoset 1803’s sitting on a table. I actually wrote about these same darts on this site in the professional darts section and my brother-in-law bought some online from A180darts.com. Gordon is featured on the Player Profile page too!

I asked who’s darts they were and Clay Bodonback came forward saying they were his. He told me he bought them online at a bargain price from A180darts! Wow, coincidence or what?!

Anyway my singles game came up and guess who I had to play against? Yep, Clay with his Hexoset’s! So I have not only tried these darts out myself, thanks to Gordon, but I got to see someone throw them in competition against me!

I would like to use this opportunity to thank the ladies from the Whyalla Ladies Darts Club for being great hosts and providing such a great club to play at. It is the only club in our city dedicated solely to darts.

The only bad thing about my return to darts was that it ended all too soon and I was left with a deep longing for the next match in a weeks time. (Oh yeah and we lost…)

I will be adding to this darts blog on most days for a while because I have some interesting darts events coming up. I would also like to tell you about my new darts and how I picked them out from Australia on a web site in the UK!

I know that the players in the two darts leagues that I played in will all have their own opinions as to why I made the decision to take a break. One reason, and the main reason I suppose, was that I stopped enjoying playing in my local competitions to the point where I couldn’t wait for the darts nights to be over. It should never feel like that of course, so I quit.

Another very good reason, was that I needed to concentrate on developing this web site to make my dream of having my own darts web site come true. This web site was created so that I could share my greatest passion and addiction with others with the same passion/addiction.

I never lost my love for throwing darts for one minute though and my best darts-loving buddies, Robyn Discombe and Gordon Ashworth, will vouch for that.

I have kept developing my throwing technique and hammer the board nearly every day while I: wait for the kettle to boil, wait for my food to cook, stretch my legs, clear my head and for the simple fact that I love how it feels to throw darts.

I’ll take this opportunity to thank them both for providing me with the practice that I need to keep my game up and also for providing me with inspiration to keep going with my pursuits. I know that they enjoy the games as much as I do and we catch up on a weekly basis.

I will have some more news soon because I’ll be making my comeback tomorrow in the Monday league, first division competition with Gordon Ashworth as my captain. Not long before I quit my Dad, Peter Elsby, was the captain and I was vice captain of the team. (More on that later.)

I will also be receiving my new darts this week which I ordered from Darts Corner I ordered two sets of darts and I am beside myself with anticipation! Talk about darts-addiction, I’m climbing the walls! That’s my darts blog for now folks, stay tuned…

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