How do you decide who throws first in darts?
Both players throw one dart at the bullseye. Whoever finishes nearer the centre throws first in the opening leg. That is the whole rule, and you will hear it called bulling up, throwing for the bull, or, in almost every pub in Britain, diddling for the middle.
What has changed is how the result gets judged at the top level, and that is where most people’s understanding of the rule is a decade or two out of date.
How the PDC bull-up works: zones, not distance
A PDC referee does not crouch down with a tape measure. The dart is sorted into one of three zones — the inner bullseye, the outer bull, or anywhere outside the bull — and the better zone wins. An inner bull beats an outer bull, and an outer bull beats any dart that finishes outside the 25 ring. Two darts in the outer bull are treated as equal no matter which one looks closer to the middle.
It is a deliberately blunt instrument, and it is blunt for a reason: it removes the referee’s judgement from the equation in all but the rarest cases. The target it is sorting into is small to begin with — the bull sits at the exact centre of a board whose overall diameter is 451mm, and the measurements for every ring are covered in our dartboard height and setup guide.
What happens if both darts land in the same zone?
They throw again. The neat detail is that the order reverses: the player who threw first in the tied attempt throws second in the re-throw, which stops anyone gaining a permanent advantage from going second and having a dart to aim at. The WDF’s published playing rules add two further triggers for a re-throw — if the referee genuinely cannot separate the two darts, and if a dart does not stay in the board. A dart has to remain in the board to count at all, so a bounce-out is simply thrown again until one sticks.
Why the first dart comes out of the board
The dart that is thrown first is pulled out before the second player throws. This matters more than it sounds. A dart left sitting in or beside the bull is a marker, and a marker in the middle of the board is worth something to the player aiming at it — both as a sighting point and, if it is sitting proud, as an obstruction. The WDF rules spell out that a dart landing in the single or double bull is removed before the opponent throws, and the PDC follows the same procedure.
| Situation | PDC | WDF rules |
|---|---|---|
| Deciding the throw | Zone the dart finishes in | Dart nearest the bull |
| First dart removed before opponent throws | Yes | Yes, if it hits the bull |
| Both darts in the same zone | Re-throw, order reverses | Re-throw, order reverses |
| Dart falls out of the board | Thrown again | Thrown again until it stays in |
| Who starts later legs | Alternates leg by leg | Bull winner starts odd-numbered legs |
| Deciding leg of a set | No fresh bull-up at the World Championship | Second bull-up under Americas Cup rules |
Who throws first in the second leg?
The player who did not start the first one. After the bull-up, the throw alternates all the way through the match, which is why you only ever see one bull-up per match and why commentators can tell you three legs in advance whose throw the next leg is on. The WDF wording is the clearest statement of it: the winner of the bull throws first in the first leg and in every odd-numbered leg after that, the loser starts the second leg and every even-numbered one.
If you are hazy on how legs and sets stack up in the first place, our guide to darts scoring, legs and sets covers the formats the PDC actually uses.
What happens in a deciding leg or set?
This is the part that has genuinely changed, and the change came out of the most famous match the sport has produced.
At the 2007 PDC World Championship final, Raymond van Barneveld beat Phil Taylor 7-6 after trailing 3-0 in sets. The deciding set reached 5-5 in legs, and under the rules of the day the two men went back to the board and bulled up again to decide who would throw first in the sudden-death leg. Van Barneveld won the bull, won the leg, and took the title.
A deciding set at the World Championship no longer works that way. At 5-5 the match goes to a sudden-death leg with no fresh throw for the bull at all, so the single bull-up at the start of the match is the only one there is. The full structure, including the tie-break rules inside a set, is laid out in our World Championship format explainer.
Grassroots darts has not standardised on that. Some WDF-affiliated rule sets — the Americas Cup rules among them — still call for a second bull-up before the deciding leg of a three or five-leg set, with the original bull winner choosing whether to throw first or second at that bull. If you are playing in a league, the local rules are the ones that count.
How much is the throw actually worth?
A lot more than a coin toss. Christopher Kempf, the PDC’s statistics analyst, went through the 2025 season and found that players won only about 38% of the legs in which they threw second. Put the other way round, roughly three legs are won on throw for every two won against it.
The reason is arithmetic rather than nerve. A player throwing first who wins their leg in 15 darts has given the opponent no opening at all; to break throw, you generally have to turn your own 15-darter into a 12-darter, and 12-dart legs are rare even among the best in the world. That is why holding throw dominates short formats: win the bull, hold six times, and a race to six is over regardless of what your opponent averages.
Source: PDC Stats Analysis by Christopher Kempf (pdc.tv), as reported by DartsNews
Luke Woodhouse had the widest split Kempf found: 67.86% of his legs won when throwing first against 35.06% when throwing second. Michael Smith was almost identical at 66.99% and 35.43%. The pattern behind it is intuitive enough: a player whose game is built on getting to a finish quickly gets the most out of going first, and suffers most when the other man is already there.
The flip side is that the very best break rates belong to players who combine a hold rate above 70% with real pressure on the opponent’s throw, Gian van Veen and Damon Heta among them. Even so, across the 2025 Players Championship events, no player who contested more than 100 legs won a majority of them with breaks of throw.
Which event undoes the advantage?
One, and it is the reason the World Grand Prix feels so different to watch. Because every leg in Leicester has to be started on a double as well as finished on one, the player throwing first can spend three, six or nine darts failing to get in, and the throw stops being the asset it is everywhere else. Kempf’s 38% figure covers 501 events other than the Grand Prix for exactly that reason — the double-in requirement narrows the gap. The World Grand Prix format is the only major on the calendar that does this.
Does anyone choose to throw second?
The bull-up winner has the right to, and essentially nobody takes it. It surfaces occasionally as a piece of gamesmanship — a player handing over the throw to unsettle an opponent — but against the 38% number it is an expensive way to make a point.
Worth knowing if you are playing rather than watching: the bull-up dart does not score, it has no bearing on the leg, and the leg starts from 501 for both players whatever happened at the bull. If the vocabulary around all this is new, our darts terminology glossary has the rest of it.