WDF World Championship 2026: Lakeside Field and Seeds

Why is the defending champion not at Lakeside?

Jimmy van Schie won the 2025 Open title at Frimley Green, beating a 15-year-old Mitchell Lawrie 6-3 in the final. Six weeks later he went to European Qualifying School in Germany and won a PDC Tour Card, and the title defence went with it. The World Darts Federation’s own qualification list spells out the mechanism: players who qualify for both world championships and choose the PDC are removed from the WDF field and replaced under its criteria.

Van Schie had been open about the ambition from the moment he won. The reigning champion normally gets an automatic place at the following year’s tournament; his seat went back into the pool instead. The other three defending champions are all entered. Deta Hedman returns in the women’s event, which she won last year as the oldest champion in its history. Lawrie defends the Open Youth title he won at the same Lakeside staging, and Zehra Gemi of Turkey defends the girls’.

At least one other name on the list now sits on both sides of that divide. Raymond Smith qualified for Lakeside through the Australia regional ranking race, and then on 31 October he won the ANZ Premier League and with it a place at Ally Pally. The dates do not force a choice — Lakeside finishes on 6 December and the PDC World Championship opens five days later, on 11 December— but the WDF has written the replacement rule precisely because the question keeps coming up.

How many players are in the field?

Four world titles are decided over the ten days, and together they account for 90 places. The Open is the big one at 48, with the top 16 seeded straight into the second round and the other 32 starting a round earlier. The women’s event works the same way on a smaller scale, and the two junior competitions are smaller again.

A few players are counted twice. Lawrie and Kaya Baysal are in both the Open and the Open Youth, and so is Ben Townley, who came through a last-chance qualifier in each. So 90 places is not 90 people — a point worth holding on to, because the WDF’s own announcement of the event last December put the field at 84.

Who has qualified for the Open?

The first 16 names come off the Open race ranking table, the season-long list that rewards results at WDF-graded events through the year. Lawrie heads it, and Paul Krohne of Germany is third — the two positions that both the WDF’s list and the German seeding lists published this weekend agree on.

Chris Lim is on that list as the 2026 World Masters winner, and it is worth being precise about which World Masters that is. The WDF still runs its own event of that name across Open, youth and girls’ categories; the PDC separately took the title for its January major, the Winmau World Masters at Arena MK. Two tournaments, one name, and no connection between them beyond the history both organisations claim. The split that produced the duplication is covered in our guide to the sport’s two governing bodies.

Behind the ranked 16 the Open field fills from four further routes. Seven places go to winners of the WDF’s Gold and Platinum events, which is how David Davies, Jack Drayton, Jeff Smith, Ryusei Azemoto, Mark Cleaver, Blake Hatchett and Terry Jun Hao Tan got in — the Irish Open, the Isle of Man Open, the Toronto Area Open, the Steel Masters, the New Zealand Open, the Pacific Masters and the Philippines Open respectively. Twelve more come off nine regional ranking races, covering Asia, Australia, Canada, East Europe, New Zealand, North Europe, the UK and Ireland, the USA and West Europe. Nine come off the general race table. The last four are last-chance qualifiers: Berry Pater and Liam Maendl-Lawrance won theirs in Las Vegas in July, and the final two were played for at Lakeside on Sunday, alongside one women’s place, two Open Youth places and one girls’ place.

How much is the prize money?

£223,500 in total, which the WDF says remains the largest fund for any set of tournaments outside the PDC. It is a small increase on the £221,000 paid in 2025, and the increase is specific rather than across the board: it sits in the youth events, funded by sponsorship from Hedman and Paul James. The senior figures are unchanged, with £50,000 for the Open champion and £25,000 for the women’s.

What is the format at Lakeside?

Sets, throughout, and short ones. The structure is the same as 2025 apart from new best-of-three first rounds in the Open Youth and girls’ events. The Open builds from best of five sets in the opening three rounds to best of 11 in the final, which is two sets shorter than the PDC’s final at Alexandra Palace.

The 16-year-old at the top of the list

Lawrie turns 16 on 4 November, three weeks before he walks on at Lakeside as the man to beat. He has already been the youngest player to compete in the senior event, the youngest to reach its final, and in October he became the youngest winner of the WDF Europe Cup singles, averaging 101.26 in the final in Tórshavn. His birthday also opens the PDC door: he has said he intends to enter Qualifying School in January, but wants the world title first.

That is the pattern Lakeside has settled into. It is where the amateur game’s best players spend one more winter before the PDC absorbs them, and the 2025 champion taking a Tour Card instead of a defence is the clearest illustration of it this year.

How to watch, and when the draw is made

Every session is streamed free on the WDF’s YouTube channel, which is also where the draw will be broadcast in the week beginning 2 November. In the UK there is further coverage on BBC iPlayer and S4C. Sport1 holds the German-language television rights and will show the last three match days live.

The full professional season, Lakeside included, is laid out on the 2026 darts calendar.