World Grand Prix Final: Humphries Beats Wade to Face Price

Saturday’s semi-final results

Both semi-finals of the 2026 BOYLE Sports World Grand Prix were played at the Mattioli Arena in Leicester from 20:00 BST on Saturday 3 October, over the best of nine sets. That is first to five, where nothing earlier in the week had gone beyond first to three.

Price won on the only skill this tournament actually tests

Aspinall arrived in the semi-final as the story of the week. On Friday he had beaten Ryan Joyce 3-0 on a 105.15 average, the fourth-highest average in the tournament’s history and comfortably the biggest ever thrown at it beyond the first round. Twenty-four hours later he won two sets and went home.

The explanation sits in one number: Price got in on 51 per cent of his first visits to the board. In the double-start formata leg does not begin until you hit a double, and a player who misses that double has handed over two or three darts of scoring for nothing. Half of Price’s legs started on time. That is the whole match report.

He took the opening set 3-0 and led 3-0 in sets before Aspinall found something, landing 132 to take the fourth and adding the fifth to get within one. Price then came through the sixth and broke Aspinall twice in succession in the seventh, having been broken himself, to finish it 5-2.

The post-match interview was spikier than the darts. Aspinall had been visibly unhappy with the Leicester crowd through the closing sets, and Price used his winner’s slot on stage to say so: “Nathan was complaining about the crowd, but they were on his side,” he told Sky Sports, before adding, “Stop performing on the board and just play darts.” No disciplinary action has been announced by the Darts Regulation Authority, and reports of a fine are speculation rather than anything confirmed.

Humphries made history and then dismissed it

Wade, a two-time champion of this event, made the second semi-final a genuine contest for four sets. Humphries took the opener, Wade answered with a big checkout, and they traded to 2-2 before Humphries won the fifth and sixth to lead 4-2. Wade got one back. Humphries took the eighth set without reply, finishing on double top.

He averaged 96.92 and threw ten maximums, which in a double-start event is a considerable number — every leg here costs a player darts at the start, and the scoring windows are correspondingly shorter than at the Grand Slam or any straight-start major. It also sits a long way from where his week began: he opened the tournament on an 80.41 average and still has not lost a set in Leicester outside Saturday night.

Four consecutive finals is a record in a tournament that had been staged 28 times before this one, and Humphries was unsentimental about it. “To make four Grand Prix finals on the trot is super special,” he said, before the qualifier: “Unless I pick that trophy up, unfortunately that history doesn’t mean anything.” He has lost the last two, 6-4 to Mike De Decker in 2024 and 6-1 to Luke Littler in 2025.

Whoever wins becomes the fourth multiple champion

Here is the thing neither man has been asked about. The World Grand Prix has produced 12 different champions in 28 stagings before this week, and only three of them ever won it twice.

Phil Taylor won it 11 times, Michael van Gerwensix, Wade twice. That is the entire list. The other nine stagings went to nine different one-time winners, Price in 2020 and Humphries in 2023 among them — which tells you something real about double-start darts. A third of this tournament’s history has been won by a man who never won it again, and the skill it rewards is not the one that keeps players near the top of a ranking list.

A 2023 rematch, in the same building

Sunday is a straight replay of the 2023 final, when Humphries beat Price 5-2 for the first major title of his career. That one was played in this venue too, when it was still called the Morningside Arena; it was renamed the Mattioli Arena in February 2024.

It also happens to be the match that opened the longest drought of Price’s career. His last major title was the World Series of Darts Finals in 2022, the seventh of his seven majors. He has reached four major finals since and lost every one.

None of the four was close. The two in 2026 — 9-18 to Littler at the World Matchplay in July and 5-11 to Ross Smith in Amsterdam a fortnight ago — are the reason Price went into this week on a run of three televised finals lost in three months. The nearest thing to a contest was the double-start final in Leicester, against the man he plays on Sunday.

When is the World Grand Prix final and what is it worth?

The final is at the Mattioli Arena on Sunday 4 October from 20:00 BST, live on Sky Sports and PDCTV, over the best of 11 sets. That is first to six, one set longer again than the semi-finals and the longest match of the week.

The champion takes £150,000 from a £750,000 fund and the runner-up £80,000; both men have already banked the £50,000 that comes with reaching the last four, so the swing on the night is £70,000. The full prize ladder has every cheque, and what follows — Dortmund in late October, Wolverhampton in November — sits on the 2026 darts calendar.

On form the longer format suits Humphries, who has dropped three sets in four matches and averaged nearly 97 in the only one that stretched him. On history it suits him too, because he has won the only final the two of them have contested here. But the one number that came out of Saturday belongs to Price, and over 11 sets of double-start darts a man getting in on half his first visits is a harder problem than any average.