Darts Near Me

I spent twenty minutes on it. The mapping apps gave me “sports bar,” and the review sites gave me places where someone had typed the word darts in a review about the wings. Two of the spots I found didn’t have a board anymore, and the one that did had it wedged behind a pool table with nowhere to stand eight feet back.

We ended up somewhere fine, but what stuck with me afterwards was that none of it was actually unknown. It was all sitting in people’s heads. The guy who plays Tuesdays knows every board in Queens, and the bartender knows the one in the back has been chewed to hell since March. Nobody had ever bothered to write any of it down.

So I started writing it down. I build software for a living, most of it at Google, so the site was never going to be the hard part. The hard part is checking, one bar at a time. It started in New York City because that’s where I throw. Somebody in Chicago is having the same twenty minutes tonight.

How we checked.

Every bar on this map earned its way on, whether that was a league roster, the bar’s own site, a photograph of the board on the wall, or a review from someone who actually threw there. Two independent sources had to agree before it went up, unless a league plays its matches there. If we couldn’t get to two, the bar stays off until we can. We’d rather show you fewer bars than round up.

We don’t guess either. A yes on food or TVs means a source we trust says so, and a no only means we didn’t find one, not that we went and confirmed there isn’t. If you know better than us, tell us and we’ll go look.

The three darts.

Every bar gets one, two, or three little darts next to its name, and it isn’t a count of the boards or a rating of the bar. Plenty of great bars get one and plenty of dull ones get three. What it answers is narrower: how much of a night can you actually get here?

One dart means there’s a board that somebody checked and people actually throw at. That’s the whole reason the bar is on the map at all.

Two darts means the room holds up around it. You can eat, or the game’s on, or there are other boards a short walk away when this one’s taken all night.

Three darts means the bar is built for throwing. A league plays there, the room is set up for it, and people come for the darts rather than finding them in the corner.

It starts from what we verified, and it moves when people who throw there rank the bar against everywhere else they’ve thrown, until eventually the players outweigh our checking entirely. That’s the right way round.

Three empty darts means we haven’t finished checking that one, which isn’t a bad score so much as us refusing to pretend we know.

Rules I gave myself.

Evidence sets the darts and nothing else moves them, not how many people saved the bar, not how close it is to you, and not money. Saving a bar nudges where it sits in the list, and it never touches the darts.

One narrow question. Whether a bar is any good is already covered by four hundred opinions better than mine, so mine stays smaller than that: is there a board, is there food, is there a league, and can you get on it.

The regulars know more than I do. Anyone can correct a listing, account or not, and when someone tells us a board is gone we believe them first and go look second.

Ravel Charles
Founder, Darts Near Me