Excuses For Not Using Chalk

See Other Articles About Scoring And Chalk- Death Of Chalk, Chalking Up Another Good Christmas, Electronic Scoreboards, Playing Darts With A Laptop, Colour Prejudice And Darts Marking A White Board.)

As I have written before, my team, like so many others has great difficulty in persuading players to mark the board for our home matches. Basically, most of us can’t count well enough and the other players, rightly so, feel they shouldn’t have to mark all the games between them, so we use an electronic scoreboard most weeks. This week we were playing a visiting Team who had nearly started a fight on their last visit to our club with their insistence that we should use chalk to score with, although the League rule banning the use of electronic scoreboards had been changed many years ago and they are now permitted. 

We were all feeling in a rebellious mood and decided the best course of action was to write on the black board, “Wet Paint,” but we realised that that wouldn’t fool them for long because if the paint was wet we couldn’t write “Wet Paint,” on it! Unbelievably we had not had many beers before coming up with that one!

The next idea was to unscrew the chalk scoreboard from the framework and simply remove it so it would be impossible to score with chalk. Obviously nobody had a screwdriver on them so that idea was just as useless!

One comedian ended up putting a big white cross over the chalk-board and writing, “Out of Order.” How they thought it could be out of order I don’t know, but it was left up for the arrival of our visitors. The Away team Captain asked the inevitable question to which I replied, “It was a health and safety issue with the chalk dust and we had been told not to use it.”

Needless to say he didn’t buy it, but I think our efforts didn’t go un-rewarded as no one pressed the issue and we got away with using the electronic scoreboard. However, the visiting captain did start a debate about how our scoreboard would not show the number of scoring darts for a 9 darter to be claimed with the previous scores recorded. Hastily, I pointed out that there was a memory on the machine, but no one knew how to use it and a 9 darter is over so quickly you could hardly not be aware of it from the scores shown. Then I realised that virtually no chalkers actually register nil scores if a player misses with their first 3, or 6 darts, so quite often you couldn’t tell if it was a true 9 darter using chalk anyway. The point won the day and I built on my argument in favour of electronic scoring systems by adding that with some of them you have to register a nil score by each thrower to change the next score to the correct side of the machine. I added that the computer program and scoring system that we are going to use for our future matches upstairs does actually show the nil score scores to give the correct darts thrown and indeed records the exact number of darts thrown to finish the double whether it was one, two, or all three. This point sealed the argument and peace ensued although I don’t think he was really satisfied. He still favoured chalk.