A Fun Practice Night.

The team that I have played with for the last few seasons are all youngsters and like many young darters they haven’t learnt to mark the board properly, so this season we moved to a smart little club in the adjacent village that has a bright, colourful, electronic scoreboard. (Link) Last season we were using a Lap-Top computer with a separate screen for marking, (See Article) but decided that, as space round the board was limited, it wasn’t very safe with wires trailing everywhere. The electronic scoreboard at the club seemed a great solution, however after only one match, we are already having to resort to chalk halfway through some legs when the score gets mixed up and no-one can decide how to put the scoreboard right! Another discovery dawned on us when we tried to play a few, fun, friendly, legs of 1001. The scoreboard only displays 3 digits, i.e.: - 999. The solution, of course, is to take away 2 less than the first score made on each side to make it correct, but that is only O.K. as long as the scorer remembers! Admittedly, we rarely play serious games of 1001, except occasionally in a team game for the gallon after a match and that really is serious!

This second week into the new season we had a BYE due to the odd number of teams in our division and decided to have a practice night. Young Beckie is not the best of players at the moment, but is improving rapidly and is keen to play, as well as being happy using the electronic scoreboard, so she marked quite a few of the games. Unfortunately she often drifts away into a little world of her own while marking and starts dancing, next to the oche, to the piped music. This happened as usual and after a while she suddenly seemed to wake up when we told her the CD had been stuck for 10 minutes. She then trotted off to the elderly barman to get it fixed and his comment was that he thought it was – “supposed to be like that, because it was one of those new DJ track mixes!” Somebody else called out that he should get his hearing aid fixed and yes he did have one!

Boredom soon set in playing monotonous games of 301, so it was decided to play “Leave It,” or “Big Un’s and Little Un’s.” The player’s names and their “lives” were chalked up on the board and the whole atmosphere of the night livened up. Not surprisingly however, the player whose bright idea it was to play the game hit 3 rather good “Leaves,” one after the other, that just about finished everybody off. (T11, Bull and D17.) Those 5 little soldiers next to all the names soon got rubbed off in quick succession! Our only consolation was that as each of us only put 50p in the pot, he had just about enough for one beer and a packet of crisps after the latest price rises!