PDC World Darts Championship
The biggest event in darts, and the only one most people outside the sport can name. 128 players, three weeks at Alexandra Palace, a final on the first Sunday of January.
World Darts Championship
Moves into the Great Hall for the first time, lifting capacity to roughly 5,200 a session. Christmas break runs 24 to 27 December and the final is on Sunday 3 January.
The World Championship is the sport’s defining tournament. It is the longest, the richest, and the one that decides how a player’s whole year is remembered. It also happens over Christmas, in a hall full of people in fancy dress, which is a large part of why it broke out of the sports pages and into ordinary television.
The 2026/27 edition moves into Alexandra Palace’s Great Hall for the first time. That lifts capacity to roughly 5,200 a session from the 3,200 of the old West Hall, so noticeably more people get in, and the final moves to a Sunday night in the bigger room.
The format
- Played in sets, not straight legs. First to three legs wins a set, and you need a set lead to win the match.
- First and second rounds are best of five sets. Third and fourth rounds are best of seven. Quarter-finals are best of nine, semi-finals best of eleven, and the final is best of thirteen, so first to seven sets.
- Set play protects the better player. A bad ten minutes costs you one set rather than the match, which is why favourites recover here more often than they do in Blackpool.
How players qualify
- The top 40 on the two-year PDC Order of Merit.
- The next 40 highest on the one-year PDC ProTour Order of Merit.
- The remaining 48 places through international qualifiers, which is how the field reaches players from outside the main tour.
Prize money
The 2026 championship carried a total prize fund of £5 million, with £1 million to the winner and £400,000 to the runner-up. It is comfortably the biggest payday in the sport.
Past winners
The last 12 champions, most recent first.
Phil Taylor won 14 PDC world titles, the last of them in 2013. Nobody else is close, and on any sensible reading nobody ever will be.
How to watch
Shown live in the UK on Sky Sports. That means a Sky Sports subscription, or NOW. The schedule page lists which broadcaster has each event.
Tickets
Tickets are allocated by public ballot rather than a general on-sale. You register during a window months ahead and successful entrants are drawn and given a slot to buy. There is nothing to refresh at ten in the morning. There is more on outlets, the ballot and what to avoid on the darts tickets page.
The other majors
Also here: the world rankings, the full schedule, and a free scoreboard for your own game.
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