Bob's 27: The Best Doubles Practice Game in Darts | Oche

Ask serious players for the single best practice routine and a lot of them will say the same thing: Bob’s 27. It’s brutal, it’s addictive, and it does something no casual game does — it puts a hard number on how good your doubles actually are.

The setup

You start with a bank of 27 points and work through every double on the board in order:

D1 → D2 → D3 → … → D20 → Bull (D25)

For each double you throw three darts at that target only.

The scoring rule

This is what makes Bob’s 27 so unforgiving:

• Hit the double — add twice its value for every dart that lands. (Two hits on D16 = +64.)
• Miss with all three darts — subtract twice its value from your score. (Blank D16 = −32.)

Because misses are punished as hard as hits are rewarded, your score swings wildly. And there’s a sudden-death clause: if your score ever drops to zero or below, you’re out — the routine ends right there. The complete rules sit on our Bob’s 27 page.

Why it works

Most doubles practice lets you cherry-pick the doubles you already like. Bob’s 27 doesn’t. It marches you through all 21 doubles, including the awkward odd ones (D3, D7, D11) you’d normally avoid. Combined with the survival penalty, it forces genuine focus on every single target — the closest thing to real checkout pressure you can manufacture alone.

It pairs naturally with broader doubles training, and the finishing confidence it builds shows up directly in your 501 checkouts.

How to use your score

The number at the end is the point. Log it every session and watch the trend:

• Surviving the whole board is a real achievement when you start.
• Triple figures means your doubling is becoming reliable.
• A stalling or falling average tells you which doubles to drill next.

Track every attempt automatically

The hardest part of Bob’s 27 by hand is the running maths — doubling values, adding, subtracting, and watching for the zero cut-off. The Oche Bob’s 27 mode does all of it, records your final score each session, and charts your progress over time, so you can see your doubles genuinely improving week by week.