Thursday’s second round results in full
Wednesday’s session had produced three 3-0 wins and no deciding set. Thursday was tighter in every match except the one everybody expected to be tight.
| Winner | Sets | Loser | Legs by set | Averages |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Niels Zonneveld | 3-1 | Gary Anderson | 3-2, 3-0, 1-3, 3-0 | 85.16 – 84.58 |
| James Wade | 3-1 | Stephen Bunting | 3-1, 3-2, 0-3, 3-0 | 93.20 – 96.29 |
| Luke Humphries | 3-0 | Jermaine Wattimena | 3-2, 3-1, 3-2 | 94.11 – 85.33 |
| Gian van Veen | 3-2 | Ryan Searle | 3-1, 2-3, 1-3, 3-2, 3-0 | 85.89 – 84.73 |
Gian van Veen against Ryan Searlewent the full distance, which no match had managed in the tournament’s first four days — the first round is the best of three sets, and Wednesday’s four second-round ties were all over inside four.
Zonneveld’s debut is now the story of the week
Zonneveld arrived in Leicester as a ProTour qualifier drawn against seventh seed Josh Rock, having told reporters beforehand that the double-start format frightened him. He beat Rock on Tuesday, and on Thursday he opened against Gary Anderson with a five-leg set in which the throw counted for nothing, and took it.
He won the second set 3-0. Anderson pulled the third back 3-1; Zonneveld took the fourth without losing another leg. “I think it’s one of the biggest things I’ve achieved in my whole career,” he said afterwards — a fair reading for a 28-year-old whose previous best on a television stage was a World Series of Darts Finals quarter-final in 2021 and whose first PDC ranking final came as recently as Players Championship 22 last year.
There is a neater way to measure what he has done. For most of 2026 Zonneveld was the only man to have beaten Luke Littler at a PDC ranking event, after a 6-5 win over the world champion at the Belgian Darts Open in March. Luke Woodhouse joined that list on Monday by knocking Littler out of this tournament, and was beaten himself forty-eight hours later. Zonneveld is still here.
Bunting averaged 96.29 and went home
Stephen Bunting threw the best darts of the round and collected £20,000 for it. His 96.29 is the highest average any of the sixteen second-round players managed across the two sessions, and it beats Nathan Aspinall’s figure from Wednesday by two hundredths of a point. Aspinall won 3-0. Bunting lost 3-1.
Three of the eight best scorers of the round are out. Bars are scaled from 80. Source: match averages via dartn.de, Łączy Nas Dart, Darts World and Sky Sports.
James Wade beat him anyway, and the way he did it explains the gap between the two numbers. Wade opened leg after leg with 160 — the double-20 start followed by two treble 20s — and won his three sets with set averages above 98 while giving the third away 3-0. Bunting’s 96.29 is spread evenly across four sets. Wade’s 93.20 is concentrated in the three that counted. In a format where a leg does not begin until somebody hits a double, that distinction is the whole game, which is also why the double-start rules make this the one week of the season when the stat sheet lies.
Humphries found his doubles two days late
Humphries had been the awkward case of the week. He beat Dave Chisnall 2-0 on Tuesday on an average of 80.41 and 26 per cent on his closing doubles, a return that normally gets a man sent home. Against Jermaine Wattimena he averaged 94.11, hit 74 per cent of his starting doubles and 64 per cent of his finishing ones, started every leg within three darts, and threw a ten-dart leg in the third set.
“I was a lot better tonight than I was on Tuesday,” he said, which undersells it: the opening-double figure nearly trebled. Humphries has reached the final here in each of the last three years — champion in 2023 over Gerwyn Price, beaten by Mike De Decker in 2024 and by Littler in 2025 — and with the defending champion gone on Monday he is the one man left in the draw whose recent history at this tournament is unbroken. He and Price are also the only two quarter-finalists yet to drop a set all week.
Van Veen survived the first deciding set of the tournament
Van Veen is the reigning European Champion and was runner-up at the 2026 World Championship, and until Tuesday he had never won a match at the World Grand Prix: first-round exits in 2024 and 2025, then a 2-0 win over Dirk van Duijvenbode. Searle took him to a fifth set on Thursday and led 2-1, landing 167 on the bullseye after Van Veen had opened the match with a 152 finish.
Van Veen won the last two sets 3-2 and 3-0. His 85.89 average would have been the lowest of any of Wednesday’s eight players; on Thursday it was good enough to win a quarter-final place worth £35,000. Zonneveld’s winning 85.16 was lower still — below every one of the four men who lost on Wednesday.
The World Grand Prix quarter-finals in full
| Player | Seed | Beat | Best finish here | Quarter-final |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Luke Humphries | 2 | Jermaine Wattimena 3-0 | Champion 2023, runner-up 2024 and 2025 | v Niels Zonneveld |
| Niels Zonneveld | — | Gary Anderson 3-1 | Debut | v Luke Humphries |
| Gian van Veen | 3 | Ryan Searle 3-2 | First round, 2024 and 2025 | v James Wade |
| James Wade | 6 | Stephen Bunting 3-1 | Champion 2007 and 2010, runner-up 2014 | v Gian van Veen |
| Gerwyn Price | 4 | Ross Smith 3-0 | Champion 2020, runner-up 2021 | v Jonny Clayton |
| Jonny Clayton | 5 | Wessel Nijman 3-1 | Champion 2021 | v Gerwyn Price |
| Nathan Aspinall | 16 | Luke Woodhouse 3-0 | Runner-up 2022 | v Ryan Joyce |
| Ryan Joyce | — | Danny Noppert 3-0 | Semi-final 2024 | v Nathan Aspinall |
Four former champions are left, holding six titles between them, and two of them meet each other: Price and Jonny Clayton replay the 2021 all-Welsh final, so one of the six is guaranteed out by Friday night. The other half of that symmetry is the pair who have never been this far — Zonneveld and Van Veen, both Dutch, in the year Michael van Gerwen lost in the first round.
Every seed from 7 to 15 is out
Run down the seeding list and the pattern is hard to miss. Seeds two to six — Humphries, Van Veen, Price, Clayton, Wade — are all still standing. Seeds seven to fifteen are all gone: Rock, Danny Noppert, Van Gerwen, Anderson, Bunting, Wessel Nijman, Ross Smith, Searle and Chris Dobey, nine in an unbroken block. Top seed Littler went out on Monday, and sixteenth seed Aspinall is the only man from the bottom half of the seeding list to survive.
Of the sixteen ProTour qualifiers who started, two remain. Ryan Joyce beat Van Gerwen and Noppert to reach Wednesday’s half of the quarter-final draw; Zonneveld beat Rock and Anderson to reach Thursday’s.
Friday’s quarter-finals and what they are worth
All four ties are on Friday 2 October from 19:00 BST at the Mattioli Arena, over the best of five sets, live on Sky Sports and PDCTV. Aspinall against Joyce and Price against Clayton come from the top half; Humphries against Zonneveld and Van Veen against Wade from the bottom. The semi-finals move to the best of nine sets on Saturday 3 October at 20:00, and the final is the best of eleven on Sunday 4 October.
A semi-final place is worth £50,000 against the £35,000 already banked, the runner-up takes £80,000 and the champion £150,000 from a fund that rose to £750,000 this year; the full ladder sits in our schedule and prize money breakdown, and the rest of the season is on the darts calendar.
Humphries is the highest seed left and the favourite on every measure that applies in a normal tournament. This is not a normal tournament. The man across the oche from him on Friday has beaten the seventh seed and a two-time world champion in the past three days, and spent most of this year as the only player to have taken down the world number one at a ranking event.