Gerwyn Price needed 34 darts to win the first set of the World Grand Prix final and three sets to go 3-0 up. He won one of the seven that followed. Luke Humphries won 6-4 at the Mattioli Arena in Leicester, and the question this tournament had been posing all week— whether it would ever produce a fourth multiple champion — now has an answer.
The scoreline is the second-best thing about this match. The sequence is the first. Price won three sets, then one set, and Humphries won the other six — four of them in a row while he was still behind, and the last two when the thing had been pulled back level and could have gone anywhere.
| Set | Won by | Humphries–Price |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Price | 0-1 |
| 2 | Price | 0-2 |
| 3 | Price | 0-3 |
| 4 | Humphries | 1-3 |
| 5 | Humphries | 2-3 |
| 6 | Humphries | 3-3 |
| 7 | Humphries | 4-3 |
| 8 | Price | 4-4 |
| 9 | Humphries | 5-4 |
| 10 | Humphries | 6-4 |
The opening set was extraordinary, and it needs the format spelled out to land properly. In the double-start format a leg does not begin until a player hits a double, so every missed attempt at the start is a wasted dart that still counts against the average. Averages here run well below the straight-start majors for exactly that reason; 95 is a strong Grand Prix number, and the highest average ever thrown at this tournament beyond the first round — set two days earlier by Nathan Aspinall— is 105.15.
Price averaged 132.62 across the first set and took it in 34 darts. He then won the second and third as well, with Humphries unable to get a foothold, and at 3-0 in a first-to-six final the match looked finished.
It is the sort of start that has decided plenty of finals and it decided nothing here. Price took one of the remaining seven sets. What changed was not Humphries’ scoring so much as the order in which the two men were able to start legs and finish them — the fourth set went Humphries’ way on a run of three substantial checkouts in succession, and from there he had the initiative for the first time in the match.
Set eight was Price’s answer, taken in straight legs to level at 4-4, and it is the moment the final genuinely hung in the balance. Humphries edged the ninth to lead for the first time since the opening throw and closed out the tenth.
Before Sunday the World Grand Prix had been staged 28 times and produced 12 different champions, and only three of them had ever won it more than once. That is the oddity of the double-start major: more than a quarter of its stagings belong to players who won it once and never again, because the skill it rewards is not the one that keeps a player at the top of the Order of Merit.
| Player | Titles | Share of 29 stagings |
|---|---|---|
| Phil Taylor | 11 | 37.9% |
| Michael van Gerwen | 6 | 20.7% |
| James Wade | 2 | 6.9% |
| Luke Humphries | 2 | 6.9% |
| Eight one-time champions | 8 | 27.6% |
Humphries joins that list alongside Phil Taylor, Michael van Gerwen and James Wade — and he beat Wade 5-3 on Saturday to get here, having beaten Niels Zonneveld 3-0 in a quarter-final he came through without dropping a set. Price stays on one, and stays the player Humphries has beaten in both of his Grand Prix finals.
Humphries arrived in this final having reached the previous three, the first player ever to manage four in succession at this event. He had lost the middle two, and the shape of the run is neat enough to be worth laying out: a 2023 win, two defeats, a 2026 win. The 2024 final went 6-4 to Mike De Decker. This one went 6-4 the other way.
The 2023 final was played over the best of nine sets, the other three over the best of 11, so the target was five in 2023 and six thereafter. Source: PDC results via DartsNews, Darts World and Darts Planet TV.
This is Humphries’ ninth PDC major and his first since the Premier League in May 2025, where he beat Luke Littler 11-8 in the play-off final. Sixteen months is not a drought by most standards, but it had started to be discussed as one, and he had been blunt on Saturday night about what the record fourth final would be worth without a trophy attached: “Unless I pick that trophy up, unfortunately that history doesn’t mean anything.”
Price’s wait is the longer and more awkward story. His last major title was the 2022 World Series of Darts Finals, the seventh of his seven majors, and he has now lost five major finals in a row since: the 2023 Premier League to van Gerwen, the 2023 World Grand Prix to Humphries, the 2026 World Matchplay to Littler, the World Series of Darts Finals in Amsterdam a fortnight ago to Ross Smith, and this one. Two of the five have been to the same opponent in the same building.
The difference on Sunday was that he lost a final he had controlled rather than one he was beaten in from the start, which is a new and less comfortable way to come up short.
Humphries takes ÂŁ150,000 from a ÂŁ750,000 fund and Price ÂŁ80,000. Both had already secured the ÂŁ50,000 that comes with reaching the semi-finals, so the swing on the night was ÂŁ70,000; the full ladderpays ÂŁ35,000 for a quarter-final, ÂŁ20,000 for a second-round place and ÂŁ7,500 for a first-round exit.
The season now runs to Dortmund and the European Championship at the end of October, then Wolverhampton for the Grand Slam of Darts in November and Minehead after that. Every date is on the 2026 darts calendar.