Why Is a Dartboard Numbered That Way? The 1-20 Layout Explained

The Full Sequence

Starting at the top of the board and moving clockwise, the twenty numbers run in this exact order:

This sequence is not a house style or a regional variation — it is standardised by the World Darts Federation and used on every regulation board, steel-tip or soft-tip, from a local pub to the Alexandra Palace stage. Whatever board a player throws at, the numbers are always in this order.

The Logic: Punishing a Bad Aim

The number 20 sits at the top of the board and is the highest score available on a single dart (60 with a treble). If the layout simply climbed in order — 20, 19, 18, 17 — a player throwing at treble 20 who drifted slightly to either side would still land in a high-scoring segment. The actual design does the opposite: 20 is flanked by 1 and 5, two of the lowest numbers on the board.

That same principle repeats all the way round. 19, the second-highest number, sits between 3 and 7. 18 sits between 1 and 4. High numbers are consistently paired with low neighbours, so a dart that misses its target by even a small margin is punished with a much smaller score rather than a merely slightly smaller one. The layout rewards precision and makes careless or lucky throws far less profitable than they would be under a simpler arrangement — which is exactly the tension that makes the treble 20 bed such a high-risk, high-reward target in professional play.

Who Actually Invented It?

The popular story credits a Lancashire carpenter named Brian Gamlin, said to have devised the sequence in 1896 to punish inaccurate throwing, and to have died without ever patenting it. The story has been repeated in darts folklore for decades — but it does not hold up well under scrutiny. Darts historian Patrick Chaplin spent years searching English and Welsh census records and newspaper archives for any trace of a Brian Gamlin matching the story and found none, concluding the tale most likely originated as an invented anecdote rather than documented history.

A more credible, though still unproven, alternative points to Thomas William Buckle, a wire-maker, fireman and steeplejack from Dewsbury, Yorkshire, who is known to have made dartboards and dominoes commercially in the early 1900s and is linked to an earlier “Yorkshire board” layout that evolved into the numbering used today. Neither account comes with a surviving patent or contemporary record naming a single inventor, so the honest answer is that nobody knows for certain who first arranged the numbers this way — only that the layout had settled into its current, standardised form by the early twentieth century and has not changed since.

Why the Layout Has Never Changed

Once a scoring system becomes universal, changing it stops being practical. Every checkout chart, every player’s muscle memory for where treble 20 and treble 19 sit, and every board manufactured for competitive play depends on the sequence staying fixed. It is one of the few things in a sport that has otherwise transformed dramatically — bigger prize money, television coverage, a packed PDC calendar — that has stayed exactly as it was found over 100 years ago.

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