What time does the World Grand Prix start?
Play begins at 18:00 BST on Monday 28 September and again at the same time on Tuesday 29 September, with eight first-round matches in each session. Sky Sports has the tournament in the UK, and it is also on PDCTV. The venue is the Mattioli Arena in Leicester, the same building that staged the 2025 edition.
Monday and Tuesday order of play
Matches run in the order below within each session. Seeds are listed first in every tie, because the 32-player field pairs each of the top 16 on the Order of Merit with a ProTour qualifier — there are no seed-versus-seed ties in the opening round.
| Night | On | Seeded player | Opponent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mon 28 | 1 | Danny Noppert (8) | Niko Springer |
| Mon 28 | 2 | Ross Smith (13) | Cameron Menzies |
| Mon 28 | 3 | Nathan Aspinall (16) | Kevin Doets |
| Mon 28 | 4 | Jonny Clayton (5) | Krzysztof Ratajski |
| Mon 28 | 5 | Gerwyn Price (4) | Sebastian Bialecki |
| Mon 28 | 6 | Michael van Gerwen (9) | Ryan Joyce |
| Mon 28 | 7 | Luke Littler (1) | Luke Woodhouse |
| Mon 28 | 8 | Wessel Nijman (12) | Rob Cross |
| Tue 29 | 1 | Chris Dobey (15) | Jermaine Wattimena |
| Tue 29 | 2 | Ryan Searle (14) | William O’Connor |
| Tue 29 | 3 | Josh Rock (7) | Niels Zonneveld |
| Tue 29 | 4 | James Wade (6) | Joe Cullen |
| Tue 29 | 5 | Gary Anderson (10) | Damon Heta |
| Tue 29 | 6 | Gian van Veen (3) | Dirk van Duijvenbode |
| Tue 29 | 7 | Luke Humphries (2) | Dave Chisnall |
| Tue 29 | 8 | Stephen Bunting (11) | Andrew Gilding |
Why Monday night is Littler’s half of the draw
Read the seed numbers down the Monday column and a pattern falls out: 8, 13, 16, 5, 4, 9, 1 and 12. Tuesday takes 15, 14, 7, 6, 10, 3, 2 and 11. Those are not two arbitrary handfuls. They are the two halves of a standard 16-seed bracket, separated cleanly, and the seed numbers on each night add up to 68 apiece.
The practical consequence is that everybody who wins tonight is on Littler’s side of the draw and can only meet him before the final, while Tuesday’s winners are all in Luke Humphries’s half. The two men who contested last year’s final, which Littler won 6-1, cannot face each other again until Sunday.
It also loads the opening night. Five of the top nine seeds throw on Monday — Littler, Gerwyn Price, Jonny Clayton, Danny Noppert and six-time champion Michael van Gerwen — alongside the tie most likely to produce a name casualty. Wessel Nijman, the 12th seed, closes the session against Rob Cross, a former world champion who is here through the ProTour list rather than as a seed, in a best of three sets.
Best of three sets is the shortest match the tournament plays, and in a double-start event it is the least forgiving. A player who cannot land the opening double is not scoring at all, so two visits of nothing can settle a leg between players separated by ten points of average. The first-round draw has more on which seeds drew badly.
Prize money: every cheque rose except the one 16 players will collect
The fund is up from £600,000 to £750,000, part of the PDC’s season-wide increase, and the champion’s share has gone from £120,000 to £150,000. Every stage of the ladder was lifted — with one exception.
| Stage | Paid | 2025 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Winner | 1 | £120,000 | £150,000 | +£30,000 |
| Runner-up | 1 | £60,000 | £80,000 | +£20,000 |
| Semi-finalists | 2 | £40,000 | £50,000 | +£10,000 |
| Quarter-finalists | 4 | £25,000 | £35,000 | +£10,000 |
| Second-round losers | 8 | £15,000 | £20,000 | +£5,000 |
| First-round losers | 16 | £7,500 | £7,500 | — |
| Total | 32 | £600,000 | £750,000 | +£150,000 |
The first-round cheque has been £7,500 in 2024, 2025 and again this year. Sixteen players will lose over the next two nights and take home exactly what a first-round loser took home two tournaments ago, while the man who lifts the trophy on Sunday earns £30,000 more than Littler did for the same job last October. In share terms the bottom of the field has gone backwards: first-round money was 20 per cent of the pot in 2025 and is 16 per cent now.
The quarter-final cheque is the one that moved furthest in proportion, up two-fifths from £25,000 to £35,000. Winning a single match is worth £12,500 on top of the appearance money — more, in a best of three sets, than the £7,500 for turning up at all.
Bars scaled against the £150,000 winner’s cheque. Source: PDC 2026 prize breakdown.
The full week in Leicester
Seven nights, and the matches lengthen sharply at the back end. The first round is gone inside two sessions, and Saturday’s semi-finalists need five sets to win where Friday’s quarter-finalists needed three.
| Day | Round | Matches | Format |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mon 28 Sep | First round | 8 matches | Best of 3 sets |
| Tue 29 Sep | First round | 8 matches | Best of 3 sets |
| Wed 30 Sep | Second round | 4 matches | Best of 5 sets |
| Thu 1 Oct | Second round | 4 matches | Best of 5 sets |
| Fri 2 Oct | Quarter-finals | 4 matches | Best of 5 sets |
| Sat 3 Oct | Semi-finals | 2 matches | Best of 9 sets |
| Sun 4 Oct | Final | 1 match | Best of 11 sets |
Every set is the best of five legs, so Sunday’s champion has to win six sets in the final having already survived a best of three, two best of fives and a best of nine. Each of those legs has to be started on a double as well as finished on one, which is the whole reason this tournament produces champions the seedings did not predict. The mechanics are set out in our double-start format explainer, and the qualifying picture that produced this field is tracked on the live World Grand Prix Race.
What Littler is defending
Littler arrives as top seed and defending champion, and the money he is defending is the £120,000 he won in 2025 — a figure that no longer exists on the ladder. Retaining the title would put him alongside Phil Taylor, van Gerwen and James Wade as the only multiple winners of the event, and Wade is in the field on Tuesday against Joe Cullen.
Woodhouse is not a gentle opener. He won two PDC titles inside 12 days this year, the second of them the Baltic Sea Darts Open, and that run is what put him in the ProTour top 16 and into this draw. He also beat Ryan Joyce in that final — Joyce plays van Gerwen one match earlier tonight.