Whenever the subject of practice comes up, this is always an immediate question. The answer mainly depends on your personal weaknesses.

Many player's practice is mainly hammering 60s, then going around a few doubles or bulls and then back to 60s. This is of course nonsense. In many X01 leagues or tournaments you will see players scoring great but missing on the double. Unless you play at professional levels, most games will be decided on the double, not on score. So the main weakness of "normal" players is hitting doubles. This means the most important practice for all kinds of players below pro level is practising doubles in any form, and for beginners additional practice on singles is required.

A good practising game must:

• Improve your accuracy all over the board,
• Be suitable for solitaire,
• Focus on doubles and singles for x01 and on trebles and singles for cricket,
• Challenge you and be demanding to your level of play,
• Not be awkward, difficult or frustrating,
• Be encouraging, fun and competitive,
• At best, not require chalking between throws as this will help to keep you in rhythm.

So we can discard any '60 hammering' right from the start, and we can discard 501 itself as 501 practice because it focuses too much on scoring.

Some nice games will follow shortly, but at the moment here are some more notes on the 'encouraging, fun and competitive' point. This is very important, because as stated above your practising sessions should be motivating. So you have to give yourself some aims in practice, especially for your longer practice sessions. This is done best by monitoring your progress in some way. Monitoring however, requires that one thing few of us are able to keep when we are monitoring themselves: OBJECTIVITY.

The best way to remain objective is writing down your achievements in a notebook, a spreadsheet or database. To do this your games must have a point system or you must invent one for them. For more information on how to run such 'scorebooks' visit www.alt.sport.darts.com and read the 'Games FAQ." Section. There also are some practice games and regimes available.

And finally here are some suggestions for practice games: