Warm-up how to get prepared for a match
Warming up before league play and tournaments is very important and worth a special paragraph. You should at least do half an hour of concentrated warm-up before important league matches or tournaments. E.g. the pros playing the World Championship are warming up for several hours (!) before the match. Eric Bristow used to feel ready for battle only when he got 4 or 5 hours of practice before one single match (which then lasted even shorter than his practice session before). He won the title five times so he seemed to know what he did. Of course such extreme warm-up is rarely possible with tournament starts at AM and league nights right after work.
Once you know your most common problems you will develop your own warm-up routines, like hitting each double at least once or twice or playing round the boards and so on. Of course warm-up is also a situation where you may and should go for increased scoring practice, but still doubles (or trebles for cricket) are more important. If diddle for middle is the rule or if cricket will be played of course bull is important, too.
Remember before the tournament or league it still is solitaire that rules! It is especially dangerous here to stick too much to match-play for warm-up because warm-up is a situation where you need to get rid of possible technical problems as soon as possible. This requires your full concentration, and warm-up matches are very likely to put your concentration on winning them instead of fighting your problems! You can of course switch to playing them once your feeling and technique are set for the day, but not earlier.
There is one routine I have developed for occasions where I don't have much time to warm up for some reason. I start with throwing my darts on D20 or even above D20. This because the high darts require a good follow-through, and usually this is my main technical problem. When I then have a good feeling on D20 I go for some score only to get back on the D20 shortly after. When D20 sucks then I repeat this until it works (which usually means the follow-through is there and working), and then I finally go for some rounds on D3 with the first, Bull with the second and D20 with the third dart. This develops my height feeling for going around the board. Followed by some darts on doubles I'm, say "emergency-ready".
citation: Dartdog
