🎯Competitions

Staged over three weeks either side of Christmas at Alexandra Palace since 2008, this is the sport's defining event and its commercial engine. Played in sets, with the final as first to seven, it fills the venue several times a day with a costumed, singing crowd and draws the largest television audiences darts has ever recorded. The prize fund reached £2.5 million for the 2024-25 edition with £500,000 to the champion, and the PDC has since doubled it and expanded the field from 96 players to 128. Phil Taylor's fourteen titles here are the benchmark.

The oldest major in darts, predating the world championship by four years, and for decades the most prestigious title after it. Run under the BDO and now the WDF, the World Masters has an enormous open entry and has been won by Eric Bristow five times, John Lowe twice and a teenage Michael van Gerwen in 2006. Its importance declined as the PDC consolidated the professional game and its television deal disappeared, but it remains the summit of the amateur international circuit and a route into the professional ranks.

Held every July at the Winter Gardens in Blackpool, the Matchplay is the PDC's summer showpiece and the major that professionals name most often after the world championship. It is played in long-leg formats with a two-clear-legs finish, which rewards stamina and punishes anyone whose scoring dips late. The atmosphere in the Empress Ballroom is famously hostile and famously loud. Phil Taylor won it sixteen times, and the trophy now carries his name.

An invitational league contested by eight of the world's leading players across sixteen weekly nights in arenas around Britain, Ireland and continental Europe, followed by play-offs. Since 2022 each night is itself a knockout tournament, with league points awarded for nightly progress. It is the PDC's biggest touring product, regularly filling arenas of 10,000 or more, and it turned darts into a year-round television fixture. Michael van Gerwen has won it seven times; Luke Littler won it at his first attempt in 2024.

Created as the one event where PDC and BDO champions could meet, the Grand Slam retains a distinctive format: round-robin groups before a knockout, with qualification restricted largely to winners of other major titles. Since the BDO's collapse it has drawn its field from PDC majors, Women's Series qualifiers and international champions, but the group stage still produces the year's most unpredictable results. Gerwyn Price won three in a row from 2018 to 2020.

The one major with a genuinely different game. Every leg must be started with a double as well as finished with one, which collapses averages by ten points or more, rewards nerve over pure scoring, and produces upsets no other event generates. Long a fixture in Dublin before moving to Leicester, it is the tournament professionals most often describe as psychologically punishing, since a player can throw six or nine darts without registering a single point.

Marketed as the FA Cup of darts, the UK Open takes entries from PDC Tour Card holders, Challenge and Development Tour players and amateur qualifiers from Riley's clubs and pub competitions, then redraws the entire field at random after every round. A world champion can be pulled out against a part-timer on the same board in the same room, with dozens of matches running simultaneously across a Minehead arena. No other major offers a comparable route from the grassroots to a televised stage.

The professional game's national team event, contested by two-player countries across a mix of doubles and singles matches. Expanded to 40 nations, it is the one PDC tournament that regularly puts players from Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, South Africa, Brazil, Hungary and Gibraltar on a televised stage against England and the Netherlands. It is also the clearest measure of the sport's international spread, and the event that most directly feeds interest in emerging darts markets.