Product Review and Giveaway – Winmau SightRight

Winmau SightRight

I have been intrigued by this product ever since the adverts for it started cropping up a while back. In fact Red Dragon had completely sold out at the time of the initial review request, so clearly I wasn’t the only one.

First things first, it’s not an oche, as a few darters I spoke to wrongly believed, or a laser! The unit is actually placed underneath the board and acts as a sight correcting device. Do you have an offline parallax error? …time to find out!

The Winmau SightRight is designed to line you up with the centre of the board according to your vision, sounds an obvious place to start doesn’t it? Well Winmau claim that 99% of us don’t, and you only have to look at several well known professionals who throw from the extreme edges of the oche to get some confirmation of that. In those cases the players have learnt and compensated to throw from their chosen position, that is why they still throw world class arrows.

Rather than go into too much detail I thought I would share the videos starring Red Dragon’s Simon Hall and the inventor (Steve Feeney) and let the experts guide you through it.

Hopefully that gives you a much better idea of the SightRight and its purpose -- I will now detail my own experience.

I plumbed up the unit easily (line included just secure it to board with a dart and a use a barrel as a weight ) and located the it centrally beneath my Blade 4. Now, my natural stance is left of centre, bringing myself into position with the SightRight (easy to do just move until you look down and the two lines on the unit are straight) I almost felt that I was now standing right of centre. This was a significant change for me, and the temptation was to give up because it didn’t feel natural.

The theory behind achieving this optimum oche position is that no matter what side of the board you are aiming for, the weight and length of the throw will be the same, and darts will enter the board straighter.

After adopting the ‘SightRighted’ location on the oche for a couple of weeks, I cant say with 100% certainty whether it has improved my game or not, although my darts do seem to be hitting the intended bed more centrally. I’m not convinced I ever had a problem with my darts blocking the bed, but I am actually very happy throwing from this new position. Therefore the Dartsmad verdict is… for less than half the price of a decent set of tungsten it is worth a punt. It certainly provokes thoughts about where one should throw from, and also introduces consistency i.e. make sure you throw from the same position each turn.

One thing to bear in mind is that once SightRighted the onus is then on the player to memorise the corrected position at the oche, after all you’d get thrown at the league if you took it down to your local!

I will leave the final word to Paul Gillings who is a sports performance analyst and founder of The Darts Performance Centre who commented:

“The theory behind our website is to give the dart player numerous suggestions of ‘good habits’ to adopt, each one adding together to make a big impact on how a dart player performs, SightRight is part of that process!

The logic behind SightRight, which is that of getting a dart player correctly sighted and standing dead centre to the board, just as a marksman would do with a gun cannot be disputed. I believe that a player adopting the correct centred and sighted position on the oche will, over time, be more successful at moving around the board when necessary than a player who sets himself on one side or the other.

We have adopted SightRight as part of our coaching sessions and urge all players to consider the benefits this training aid can give them”.

If you want to win the review model simply email the answer the following question;

What is the current rrp of the Winmau SightRight on the Red Dragon Darts website?

http://www.dartsmad.com/darts-news/2011/04/26/product-review-and-giveaway-winmau-sightright/