Darts Nerves: How to Stop Choking on Doubles
You have been here. Two darts at double 16 to win the leg, and you have hit it a thousand times in the shed. The first one goes into the 16 bed, low. The second goes into the 8. You walk back to the oche with that hot, slightly numb feeling in your throwing arm and no idea what just happened.
Nothing mysterious happened. Under pressure your throw changed, in specific and predictable ways, and nobody had ever shown you what to look for.
This article is about the mechanics of that. What actually changes, why the miss
goes where it goes, and three routines that hold up when it matters.
Choking is not a character flaw (Darts Nerves vs Choking)
The first thing to get straight is that this is not about wanting it more, or bottle, or any of the other things people say in the club afterwards.
What we call choking is a change in motor control. Throwing a dart well is an automatic movement, learned through repetition and run without conscious supervision. Under pressure two things happen at once. Your body dumps adrenaline into a system built for fine motor control, and your brain starts consciously supervising a movement that works best unsupervised.
That second one is the killer. The moment you start thinking about your arm, you are effectively a beginner again, running a movement manually that you had spent years automating. It is why the miss so often comes on the throw you cared about most.
Players who understand this stop treating a bad leg as evidence about their character and start treating it as a technical problem with a technical answer. That shift alone is worth a couple of points on an average.
What changes in your body with Darts Nerves
Four things, and you can feel every one of them if you know to check.
Heart rate and breathing. Both rise, and breathing gets shallower and higher in the chest. Many players hold their breath entirely on the throw at the double, which stiffens the whole upper body at exactly the wrong moment.
Grip pressure. This is the big one. Under pressure almost everybody grips harder. You will not notice, because the change is small and your attention is on the board. A tighter grip changes your release point and delays it fractionally, which sends the dart lower.
Fine motor control. Adrenaline is useful if you need to sprint or lift something heavy. It is actively unhelpful for a movement that depends on millimetres of precision in the fingertips. You are, briefly, working with slightly less resolution than usual.
Attention. Your visual attention narrows and your internal attention widens, which is the wrong way round. You want a narrow external focus, on the target, and instead you get a wide internal one, on your arm, the scoreboard, the opponent and what people will say.
What changes in your throw
Those four changes produce a fairly consistent set of technical faults.
The backswing shortens. Tension pulls the movement in. A shorter backswing means less time to accelerate, and you compensate by adding force, which is not the same as adding accuracy.
The rhythm speeds up. Almost everyone throws faster under pressure. The whole sequence compresses, including the part where you were supposed to be still and aiming.
The follow through collapses. You decelerate through the release rather than accelerating through it. Coaches call this steering, and it is the single most common pressure fault in darts.
The eyes leave early. You track the dart, or you glance at the scoreboard, or you look at where you want the dart to go rather than at a specific point. Head movement at release is small and expensive.
Why the miss is usually short
Take those together and the pattern makes sense.
Short and low is the classic. Late release from the tighter grip, plus deceleration through the follow through, plus a shortened backswing. The dart never gets the flight it was built for. If you are on double 16 and finding the 16 bed underneath, you are not misaiming, you are decelerating.
Narrow or pulled is the second pattern. Grip tension does not build evenly across the fingers, and the thumb or index finger dominates, which throws the dart slightly off line. On a double this shows up as landing in the adjacent single or across the wire into the neighbouring number.
Wild and high is the rarer one, and it usually means you consciously tried to fix the short misses by throwing harder. That is overcorrection, and it is why players who miss three darts at a double often miss them in three different places.
Here is the useful part: you can diagnose yourself from where your darts land. Keep a note of your last twenty pressure misses. If most of them are low, you have a deceleration and grip problem, and no amount of aiming practice will touch it.
Routine 1: build something you can repeat when your head is not working
The purpose of a pre-throw routine is not superstition. It is to give your body a fixed sequence to follow when your conscious mind has become unreliable.
Build it deliberately and keep it short. Something like: stand up to the oche and set your feet the same way every time, one slow breath out, find your aiming point, throw. Four steps, the same four steps, every visit, whether it is the first throw of a practice session or three darts to win a final.
Two rules. It must be identical under all conditions, because a routine you only use under pressure is not a routine, it is a tell. And it must be process only. No part of your routine should reference the outcome. The moment "I need this one" enters the sequence, the sequence has failed.
Practise the routine as a skill in its own right, not as a thing you tack on to your throwing. Fifty visits where the routine is the object of the practice and where the dart lands is secondary.
Routine 2: put your attention outside your arm
Motor skills run better with an external focus of attention, meaning your attention is on the effect you want rather than on the body part producing it. This is one of the more robust findings in motor learning research, and it is directly applicable at the oche.
Under pressure the default is internal. You start thinking about your grip, your elbow, your release. Every one of those thoughts degrades the movement.
The fix is to give your attention a specific external job so it has somewhere to go.
Pick a point, not a bed. Not "double 16" but a specific spot inside the wire, roughly a centimetre wide, and hold your eyes on it from the start of the routine through to the dart landing. If you can describe exactly where you were looking after the throw, your attention was in the right place. If you cannot, it was on your arm.
This is also the single easiest thing on this page to implement. Most players find it changes something within one session.
Routine 3: practise under consequence
You cannot learn to perform under pressure by practising without pressure. Throwing at a double for twenty minutes with unlimited darts and no consequence teaches you to hit doubles in conditions that never occur in a match.
Manufacture the pressure instead. Three ways, in ascending order of usefulness.
Single dart, no reset. One dart at each double from 1 to 20, in order. Miss and you go back to the start. The cost of a miss makes it real.
Score it and record it. Write the number down every session. Numbers you keep create pressure by themselves, because you know you are being measured.
Add a witness or a stake. Practise doubles in front of somebody, on a stream, or with something small riding on it. Social pressure is closest to what a match actually feels like, and it is the version most players avoid.
The goal is not to eliminate nerves. Nerves are a physical response you do not get to switch off, and the players you watch on television are experiencing them too. The goal is to make the sensation ordinary, so that when it arrives your throw does not treat it as new information.
The reset between visits
One small addition that costs nothing.
Between visits, particularly after a bad one, take one deliberate breath where the exhale is longer than the inhale. Something like in for three, out for six. This is not mysticism, it just nudges the physiological system that adrenaline has been winding up, and it gives you a fixed thing to do with the twenty seconds when you would otherwise be replaying the miss.
Then walk back with your attention on your routine, not on the scoreboard.
Three things that make it worse
Trying harder. Effort and precision are not the same quantity. Almost every pressure fault in darts is a result of adding force to a movement that needed rhythm.
Slowing down dramatically. Some players respond to nerves by taking twice as long over the throw. All this does is give the conscious mind more time to interfere. Keep your normal tempo.
Changing your darts. When a player's doubles desert them, the first thing they do is buy a new set. The darts were not the problem, and now you have added a new variable to a system you were already struggling to control.
Frequently asked questions
Why do I hit doubles in practice but not in matches?Because practice conditions and match conditions are different, and your throw changes under pressure in specific ways: tighter grip, shorter backswing, faster rhythm, collapsed follow through. Practising with consequence closes that gap.
Why do my darts go low when I am nervous?A tighter grip delays your release and tension shortens your follow through, so the dart is thrown with less acceleration than usual. Low misses under pressure are a deceleration problem, not an aiming problem.
How do you calm nerves in darts?You do not remove them, you make them familiar and give your body a fixed routine to follow regardless. A short, unchanging pre-throw routine, an external focus on a specific aiming point, and regular practice under consequence.
Is dartitis the same as choking?No. Choking is a temporary degradation of performance under pressure. Dartitis is a persistent involuntary difficulty with releasing the dart, and it needs a different approach.
How long does it take to improve under pressure?Attention and breathing changes often show up within a session or two. Building a routine that genuinely holds in a final takes months of practising under consequence, not weeks.
Pre-register for the book
Everything above is one framework out of a book I have been writing for the last two years.
Little Mental Frameworks for Better Darts is out in December 2026. It is a practical field guide rather than a motivational book: short, self-contained frameworks for the specific mental problems darts players actually have, including pressure at the double, recovering after a bad leg, throwing first in a decider, and playing somebody you think is better than you.
Pre-register below and you will get the launch price, one framework from the book sent to you before release, and first access on publication day.
Work with me at DartsMatt
If you have read this far, you probably already know that your problem at the oche is not your grip or your darts.
I coach players online and face to face from my studio in Worcester, from complete beginners through to county standard. I am a Sight Right qualified coach with a certificate in sports psychology, and the pressure side of the game is the part of my coaching most players tell me they had never had properly explained to them before.
We look at your throw, work out where your misses actually go and why, build a routine that survives contact with a match, and put a practice structure behind it that you can measure.
