World Youth Championship: Crabtree Beats Littler 6-5

Who won the Littler semi-final, and how

Crabtree averaged 97.91. Littler averaged 97.89. Across a best-of-eleven that went the distance, two hundredths of a 3-dart average works out at a point or two in total, and it went the way of the man ranked outside the world’s top sixty rather than the man at the top of it.

A leg from going out at 5-4 down, Littler took out 117 to level it and force the decider. Crabtree then held throw in sixteen darts, finishing on double six. There was no collapse in it from either side — the loser of this match played to a standard that wins most youth semi-finals.

Crabtree is in the second year of a Tour Card he won at Q-School in 2025. He had already beaten Joseph Simpson 6-1 and come through 6-4 against Kaya Baysal, the sixteen-year-old who had won Development Tour Event 24 in this same building the previous afternoon.

Littler has now lost the same semi-final twice

This is the second year running that Littler has gone out of this tournament at the last four, in Wigan, by a single leg. Beau Greaves beat him 6-5 here in 2025 to become the first woman to reach the final; Crabtree beat him 6-5 here in 2026. Our preview of Monday’s heats noted that Greaves had needed a last-leg decider to stop him on these boards a year ago. It needed one again.

What changed is how he lost it. Against Greaves he averaged 107.40 and was beaten by an eleven-dart break of throw in the decider — the losing average was higher than almost anything else thrown in the tournament. On Monday he averaged 97.89 and lost the decider to a hold. Two different matches, the same scoreline, the same stage, the same building.

He remains the 2023 champion and he remains age-eligible until 2031, so this is a missed opportunity rather than a closing door. It is still two years in a row that a tournament he entered as top seed has been taken off him by one leg.

Both finalists are in the Grand Slam before they play the final

The scheduling of this tournament produces an oddity that is worth spelling out, because the qualification criteria the PDC published in February reserve two Grand Slam of Darts places for the World Youth finalists rather than for its champion. Crabtree and Schmidt earned those places on Monday night.

The Grand Slam of Darts runs from 14 to 22 November at WV Active Aldersley in Wolverhampton, with a 48-player field for the first time and a £1,000,000 prize fund. The World Youth final is on 29 November. Both men will therefore have played a televised major against senior opposition a full week before they meet each other to settle which of them is the youth world champion. Whoever loses at Minehead will already have had the bigger stage.

What the final decides for the World Championship

The champion also receives an invitation to the PDC World Championship, and this is where it gets layered. Crabtree does not need it. He finished third on the Development Tour Order of Merit on Sunday with £12,350, which was one of the three Alexandra Palace places the final table handed out. He is already in.

That makes his Development Tour place transferable. If Crabtree wins at Minehead, he takes Ally Pally entry as youth champion and the place he earned on the Development Tour slides down the standings to the next man not already qualified — Owen Bates, fifth on £12,200, who lost 6-5 to Manby in the last 16 on Monday. Bates has no stake in the final beyond wanting Crabtree to win it.

Schmidt finished outside the Development Tour top twelve, so for him the arithmetic is simpler: win and he is at Alexandra Palace, lose and he is not.

Schmidt is the first German finalist since Schindler

The quieter half of the draw produced the bigger surprise in some ways. Schmidt, 22, beat second seed Sebastian Bialecki 6-2 in the last 16, survived Henry Coates 6-5 in the quarter-finals and then beat Charlie Manby 6-3 with an average just under 95 to reach his first major final of any kind.

He is the first German to reach a World Youth Championship final since Martin Schindler lost the 2018 decider to Dimitri Van den Bergh, and he is one win from joining Max Hopp, who beat Nathan Aspinall 6-5 in 2015, as the second German youth world champion. Hopp’s title remains Germany’s only one in the tournament’s fifteen completed editions.

Monday emptied the World Championship race of one of its subplots and added another. The rest of the season’s fixtures, including the Swiss Darts Trophy this weekend and the European Championship in Dortmund later in the month, are on the 2026 darts calendar.