Ross Smith Beats Price 11-5 to Win World Series Finals

How the final was won

Price had done the hard part. An 11-darter brought him level at 5-5 in a final he had every reason to believe was his — two titles in this event already, and a semi-final earlier the same evening in which he averaged over 104 to put out Jonny Clayton. From 5-5 he won nothing.

Smith answered the 11-darter with 123 checked out on the bullseye, then 127 on double eight in the very next leg, and at 7-5 the shape of the match had changed completely. Six legs went by in a row. He finished it with a 14-dart break of throw, an average of 103.89, eleven maximums to Price’s five and 46 per cent on his doubles — the kind of finishing that had deserted Price by the end.

Smith’s week in Amsterdam

The route was not a smash-and-grab. Smith arrived at finals day on the back of consecutive ton-plus averages, beat Josh Rock in the afternoon, and then took the noise out of a building that had spent four days roaring for its own, putting out Dutch number one Gian van Veen 11-8 in the semi-final.

Five matches, five wins, and after round one nobody got closer to him than three legs. The tournament that was being written up all weekend as a referendum on someone else’s record chase — Clayton had ended Luke Littler’s clean sweep in the quarter-finals— was being won, quietly, by the man in the other half of the draw.

Four years between televised titles

Smith’s first TV title came at the 2022 European Championship in Dortmund, where he beat Michael Smith 11-8 in a final nobody had him down to win either. What is striking is how closely the two performances match: the 2026 version is the same player, playing slightly better.

The gap in between was not empty, whatever the four-year headline implies. Smith won his maiden European Tour title earlier this year and added a second in August, beating Gary Anderson 8-2 to take the Hungarian Darts Trophy in Budapest in front of a record European Tour crowd. Amsterdam is the third title of his 2026 and much the biggest.

The sixth name on the trophy

Twelve stagings, six different champions. That sounds healthier than it is: Michael van Gerwen has won six of them on his own, half the roll of honour, and no first-time winner had appeared since Littler in 2024.

Price is the one with the record that now reads oddly. He won this event in 2020 and 2022, the second of those 11-10 against Dirk van Duijvenbode, and he had never lost a final here until Sunday. Read the table downwards and only three of the twelve finals have been more one-sided than 11-5 — the widest remains Van Gerwen’s 11-2 against Danny Noppert in an all-Dutch final in 2019.

What it changes, and what it doesn’t

Not the rankings. The World Series of Darts Finals is a non-ranking invitational, so the £100,000 is real money that buys Smith nothing on the PDC Order of Merit— the same arrangement that governs the Premier League, the Masters and the World Cup. His world ranking on Monday morning is the world ranking he took to Amsterdam.

What it does change is the seeding of expectation. The European Championship returns to the Westfalenhalle in Dortmund from 22 October, Smith tops the European Tour Order of Merit that decides the 32-man field, and Dortmund is where he won his first major in the first place. Before that there is the World Grand Prix from 28 September, and the rest of the run-in sits on our 2026 calendar.

Price leaves with £60,000 and the first losing final of his three in this event. Smith leaves with the second televised trophy of a career that had been waiting four years for it.