I have always complained that we do not get enough Darts coverage here in South Africa. The sport is entertaining to watch and really lends itself to betting and when you look at the atmosphere in the Ally Pally in the UK it is hard not to want to attend something similar.

It came as no surprise to me to see that Darts is one of the sports that has managed to innovate during this COVID-19 Pandemic. To quote from a BBC article “Darts secret weapon right now is that to compete against someone, you don’t need to be in the same room as them”.

An online Tournament has been launched called the MODUS Icons of Darts and it streams for 9 hours a day. Basically players live stream their Darts and so can play against each other despite being trapped in their homes and potentially thousands of miles apart. All the players need is a dart board and a decent Wi-Fi connection and I did see an article somewhere that one of the players actually withdrew from the Tournament because his Wi-Fi wasn’t good enough.

The Darts Governing Body has announced that the greatest players in the world will be competing over 32 consecutive nights in what is known as the PDC Home Tour. What is the relevance to us South Africans? Well, it is great news for us sports punters who are just itching for something to bet on and it gets better as SuperSport are bringing us live coverage so my DSTV decoder can finally go back into the lower 200’s – channel 210 to be precise.

Popping onto the World Sports Betting website there are loads of Darts Matches priced up and to use an example, on Friday we have Adam Huckvale up against Andy Jenkins with Huckvale 29/20 and Jenkins 5/10. There are also other markets available such as Total 180’s which is generally set around over or under 2.5 and you can also bet on the first player to score a perfect 180.

It may not be Super Rugby and to be fair it lacks the atmosphere of a proper darts tournament, but hey it is live and you can bet on it and that is good enough for me.

Hang in there sports fans we will get through this and will be punting on everything that moves soon!

Twitter: @BrentGraham.

This article was written for the CitiGaming supplement of the Citizen Newspaper and was published on the 23 April 2020.

Brent Graham is a blogger on www.goodforthegame.co.za and sends a free weekly e-mail list just CLICK HERE to register