Settling on a stance

I am becoming close to settling on key aspects of my stance following sustained bouts of filming my own throw. I have also been watching John Lowe and Phil Taylor videos regularly to try and burn into my brain the image of a good solid stance. There is a stillness in both of these players' setups before throwing that leads me to believe they are the ideal models for angled foot and 90 degrees front foot stances respectively.

I am still undecided on overall height and the degree of twist and lean towards the shoulder but I have settled on a simple mantra for oche postion which is 'stand right, steer left.' When I checked my overall oche position a while back using a homemade 'sight-right' (for the original sight right see http://www.winmau.com/det/909/sightright/) I discovered that for a central viewing position I need to stand a little right of centre bull, but at first this seemed counter intuitive. I have always suffered from darts drifting to the left so I thought that if I stood right and threw to the left it would exacerbate this phenomenon. The mistake I was making was one of perception because if I stand slightly right I think I am looking leftwards at the middle of the board but in fact I am facing it. This subtle shift in perception has allowed me to retrain my angles a little and be more comfortable with where exactly I am standing and in order to throw straight.

I have identified that a likely factor in darts drifting to the left is a slight twist or jerk in my abdominal muscles and have been trying subtle stance variations to eliminate this. On one night this week I had good results steering my throw slightly to the right by shifting my back foot out to the left a little: I threw straight darts including 5mins with a 51+ scoring average with no significant drifting. My next experiment will be to try and keep my weight centered over my front leg a little more to see if this resists body twist and wobble on the oche. I am inclining towards a relaxed oche stance instead of forcing a more upright one, so I continue to use this method without exaggerating the sunken posture too much and scrunching the muscles in my lower back. I am also pleased to report I threw another 180 the other day, which makes 2 in January so far! I threw 3x180s in total last year so I am hopeful that this is an indicator things are heading in the right direction.