Grand Slam of Darts Format: Groups, Tie-Breaks, Knockouts
The Grand Slam of Darts format in Wolverhampton explained: eight groups of four, two points a win, leg difference, the nine-dart shoot-out and the knockouts.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished PDC & Major Tournaments22 min read
- First staged
- 2007
- Field
- 32 players in 8 groups
- Group matches
- Best of 9 legs
- Quarter-finals to final
- Best of 31 legs
The Grand Slam of Darts format is a group stage followed by a knockout. Thirty-two players are drawn into eight groups of four. Each plays the other three in his group once, over the best of nine legs, and earns two points for a win. The top two in each group go through to the last sixteen, where the matches become the best of nineteen legs; the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final are all the best of thirty-one. Two players level on points are separated by leg difference and then by the result between them; three-way ties go through a longer list that ends in a nine-dart shoot-out. The event has been played in Wolverhampton every November since 2007, apart from 2020, and the winner receives the Eric Bristow Trophy.
Three players, four points each, and two places in the last sixteen. It can happen on the last night of group games in Wolverhampton: the final round of group games finishes, the table goes up on the screen, and three of the four names in a group are level. What decides it then is a published list of tie-breaks, and in the rarest cases nine darts each and a calculator.
The Grand Slam of Darts format at a glance
The tournament runs for a little over a week, with the group stage taking up roughly the first half of it. Among the PDC's tournament majors it is the only one that opens with a group stage, and that changes how the first part of the week feels. A player can lose his opening match and still win the title; a player who wins his opening match can still go out after losing one of the other two if leg difference goes against him. In a straight knockout neither can happen.
| Stage | Players | Match length | Legs needed to win |
|---|---|---|---|
| Group stage, three matches each | 32 | Best of 9 legs | 5 |
| Last sixteen | 16 | Best of 19 legs | 10 |
| Quarter-finals | 8 | Best of 31 legs | 16 |
| Semi-finals | 4 | Best of 31 legs | 16 |
| Final | 2 | Best of 31 legs | 16 |
The leap from the group stage to the knockout is one of the steepest on the PDC calendar. A best of nine, which can be over in five legs, sits on the same stage a day or two before a best of thirty-one, which cannot be over in fewer than sixteen. The format asks a player to be sharp over a sprint in the first half of the week and to endure over long matches in the second.
Points, not just wins
Two points for a win and none for a defeat. There is no point for a draw because there are no draws: a best of nine always produces a winner. The two-point system is a presentational convention rather than anything that changes the arithmetic; a group table could as easily count wins. The legs won and lost in each match are what give the table its depth, because leg difference is the first tie-break.
All matches are standard 501, straight in and double out, under the Darts Regulation Authority's rules.
How the Grand Slam of Darts group fixtures are paired
Each group plays three rounds of matches. Every group is made up of one player from each of four ranking pools, with the top eight qualifiers by Order of Merit placed one to a group, and the first-round pairings are fixed by the draw. After the first round, the two winners meet each other and the two losers meet each other. The third round completes the fixtures: each player meets the one opponent he has not yet played.
| Round of group games | Who plays whom | What it can settle |
|---|---|---|
| First | Pairings fixed by the draw | Nothing yet; every player can still finish first or fourth |
| Second | Winners against winners, losers against losers | A player with two wins is in a strong position but not yet certain |
| Third | Each player against the one opponent not yet faced | Usually decides both qualifying places and the group winner |
| After the third | Tie-breaks if needed | Leg difference, then head-to-head for two players or a longer list ending in a shoot-out for three |
Why winners meet winners
The second-round pairing works like the Swiss system used in chess. It concentrates the decisive matches. After two rounds, the player who has won both is in a strong position, and the player who has lost both is in serious trouble. The third round then pits players with something at stake against each other, rather than leaving dead rubbers between a qualified player and an eliminated one.
Why the third round decides so many groups
Work through the combinations and the reason becomes plain. After two rounds the four players in a group always stand on two wins, one win, one win and no wins, because the winners' match and the losers' match each produce one of the one-win players. The third round pairs everyone with the opponent not yet faced, which depends on how the losers' match went: the two-win player meets either the no-win player, with the two one-win players meeting each other, or one of the one-win players. If the leader wins, the group usually resolves cleanly. If he loses, he can finish level on two wins with one or two other players, and a single upset in the final round has rearranged the table.
The order can produce three-way ties as well. Suppose the two-win player is drawn against a one-win player in the third round and loses, while the other one-win player beats the player with no wins: three players then finish on two wins and four points, with one on none. Or the leader wins all three while each of the other three beats one rival and loses to another, leaving them on one win apiece and three players chasing the second place. Both outcomes are possible under the pairing system, and both send the tournament to its tie-break rules. The third night of group games is therefore the night when most of the group-stage drama happens.
Splitting players level on points in a Grand Slam group
When two players finish on the same number of points, leg difference separates them first. Leg difference is the total legs won minus the total legs lost across all three group matches. A player who won two matches 5-1 and lost one 4-5 has a leg difference of +7; one who won two 5-4 and lost one 0-5 has a difference of -3. The format rewards a player who wins comfortably and loses narrowly.
If two players are level on points and on leg difference, the result of the match between them decides. That is a simple, intuitive tie-break, and in a two-way tie it usually settles things. Every pair of players in a group has met exactly once.
When three players cannot be separated
A three-way tie is harder, because a head-to-head comparison usually fails: in a three-way tie on points each player has typically beaten one of the others and lost to the other. The PDC therefore uses a longer list. At the 2025 edition a three-way tie was settled by leg difference, then total legs won, then legs won against the throw, then the tournament average, and only then by a nine-dart shoot-out among the players concerned.
| Order | Two players level | Three players level (2025 format) |
|---|---|---|
| First | Points, two for each group win | Points, two for each group win |
| Second | Leg difference | Leg difference |
| Third | The result of the match between them | Total legs won |
| Fourth | Not needed | Legs won against the throw |
| Fifth | Not needed | Tournament average |
| Last | Not needed | Nine-dart shoot-out |
A worked example of a level group
Take an invented group of four, with players called A, B, C and D. In the first round A beats B 5-3 and C beats D 5-2. In the second, winners against winners, C beats A 5-4; in the losers' match B beats D 5-1. In the third, A beats D 5-0 and B beats C 5-4.
Every player except D has two wins and four points. D has none. Now the legs. A won 5-3, lost 4-5, won 5-0: fourteen legs won, eight lost, a difference of +6. B lost 3-5, won 5-1, won 5-4: thirteen won, ten lost, +3. C won 5-2, won 5-4, lost 4-5: fourteen won, eleven lost, +3. A tops the group on leg difference. B and C are level on points and on leg difference, and this is where the exact wording of the rules matters. Under the three-way list used in 2025, the next test is total legs won, which puts C, with fourteen, above B, with thirteen. If the rules instead sent the remaining pair back to their head-to-head, B would go through, having beaten C 5-4 in the third round.
Two things stand out from an example as ordinary as that. A lost a match and still won the group. And a single leg anywhere in the group, one more won by B or one fewer by C, would have changed who went through. Every leg in a best of nine counts twice: once in the match and again in the table. That is why players who are already beaten in a group match keep fighting for the legs; a 5-3 defeat can be worth a place in the knockout that a 5-0 defeat is not.
The precise wording of how a three-way tie is unpicked has been set out in the tournament's published format and has not always been worded identically across editions. Anyone needing the rule for a specific year should read the format for that edition rather than assume the sequence was identical. The broad shape, points first, leg difference next and the shoot-out last, has been stable.
- Points comparedEach group win is worth two points, and players on more points finish higher.
- Leg differenceLegs won minus legs lost across the three matches separates most level players.
- Head-to-headIf two players are still level, the winner of the match between them goes above.
- Three-way deadlockIf three players are level, legs won, legs won against the throw and the tournament average are compared in turn.
- Nine-dart shoot-outEach tied player throws nine darts at the board, and the highest total takes the place.
The order of tie-breaks under the PDC format. Most ties are settled by leg difference; the shoot-out is a last resort.
The nine-dart shoot-out
The shoot-out is exactly what it sounds like. Each player concerned throws nine darts, three visits, at the board, and the player with the highest total wins. There is no finishing, no doubles, no 501. The maximum is 540, nine treble 20s. In practice the players aim at the treble 20 throughout, and the winner is usually whoever avoids the darts that drift into the 1 or the 5.
The shoot-out is held on stage under the same conditions as a match, with the referee calling the scores and the players throwing in turn. It is quick. It is also slightly absurd as a way of deciding a place in the knockout of a major, which is precisely why it is the last resort and not the first.
How often it is needed
Rarely. Leg difference across three best-of-nine matches has a wide range, from +15 for a player who won every match 5-0 to -15 for one who lost every match 0-5, and two or three players finishing on identical totals with a circular head-to-head is uncommon. The shoot-out is far more often discussed on the third group night than actually thrown. When it does happen it becomes a talking point for the whole week, partly because it is so different from everything else on the card.
The shoot-out also has a more familiar cousin: the bull-up that settles who throws first in a match. Both are a quick test of accuracy rather than finishing. The shoot-out is the only one with a place in the last sixteen on the line.
The Grand Slam knockout rounds
Sixteen players go through: the eight group winners and the eight runners-up. In the last sixteen, each group winner meets the runner-up of a paired group: the winner of group A plays the runner-up of group B, the winner of B the runner-up of A, and so on through C and D, E and F, G and H. A player who tops his group is therefore guaranteed not to face another group winner in his first knockout match, and every player knows before the final group night which group his last-sixteen opponent will come from.
The last sixteen is the best of nineteen legs. From the quarter-finals onwards, every match is the best of thirty-one, first to sixteen. That makes the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final as long as each other, which is unusual. At most events the final is the longest match; at the Grand Slam the last three rounds are played over the same distance.
Why the long matches matter
A best of thirty-one gives the stronger scorer time. A player who has scraped through his group with a lucky leg difference meets a far harder test, and the better player usually comes through. The final rounds of the Grand Slam rarely produce the flukes of the group stage. That combination, a volatile group stage and a long, demanding knockout, is a large part of why players rate the event highly. The leg-play principles behind these long matches are the same as at the World Matchplay in Blackpool, though the Grand Slam has no two-clear-legs rule.
- 32Players in the field
- 8Groups of four
- 9Legs in a group match, best of
- 31Legs in a quarter-final to final, best of
Fixed features of the format: the field, the number of groups, the group-match length and the knockout distance from the quarter-finals on.
From a sprint to a long race in two days
The change of distance is the hardest adjustment in the tournament. In a best of nine, a player who loses the first two legs is in trouble and has to break throw almost at once. In a best of thirty-one, losing the first two legs barely matters. Players coming out of the group stage have spent three matches treating every leg as urgent, and the best of them reset quickly. Those who carry the urgency into a long quarter-final, forcing their scoring and going for low-percentage finishes, tend to burn out before the halfway point.
The last sixteen sits between the two, a best of nineteen that is long enough to recover from a slow start and short enough to punish a long one. It is the round in which group winners are most often caught out by a runner-up who has had a harder group and is already playing at knockout pace.
The throw and the breaks
The throw alternates leg by leg from a bull-up, with no reset. Long matches are punctuated by short intervals, during which the players leave the stage. These breaks can change momentum as they do in any long leg match: a player on a winning run loses his rhythm, a player who has been outplayed resets.
How players qualify for the Grand Slam of Darts
The Grand Slam is built from results rather than rankings, at least for its first wave of entries. Up to sixteen places, at the 2025 edition, go to the winners and runners-up of the PDC's televised tournaments over the previous twelve months: the majors, the Premier League, the World Cup of Darts and the other events shown on television, in a published order of priority that begins with the biggest titles. A player who has won several of these takes only one place, and the next entry on the list moves up.
The order matters because the list is filled until the places available to it run out. A World Championship finalist is in before a runner-up at a smaller televised event. If the qualifying list has fewer distinct players than places available, the remaining spots go further down the list or to other qualifiers.
| Route into the Grand Slam | Typical source | How the place is filled |
|---|---|---|
| Televised event winners | Previous twelve months of PDC televised events | In a published order of priority, majors first |
| Televised event runners-up | The same events | Further down the priority order |
| Tour card holder qualifier | A qualifying event for PDC tour card holders | Eight places at the 2025 edition |
| Additional qualifiers | Winners on the European Tour and Players Championship circuit, and pathway circuits in some editions | Up to eight places at the 2025 edition, set in the format for each year |
Why one player can take only one place
The priority order exists because the same names win most of the televised titles. In a year when one player wins three or four of the televised events, he still takes one place, and the runners-up he beat move into the field. A dominant season by a single player therefore opens doors for several others. The reverse is also true: in a year with many different winners, the televised list fills more quickly and fewer places pass to the qualifier.
This means the size of the qualifying event's share is not fixed in practice, even if the format sets a figure each year. A player planning his season around the Grand Slam has to watch who wins what on television as closely as his own results, because a title somewhere else can push him in or out. Whether a given player is "in" is a question that can change week by week through the late summer and early autumn, which is why the PDC publishes the qualification list as it fills.
The qualifier for tour card holders
The places not filled by televised-event winners and finalists go to players who come through a qualifying event open to PDC tour card holders, which completes the field. For a player outside the elite, this is the route in. It is a busy, high-pressure day, and qualifying from it can reward a player in good form who has not yet won anything on television. How the tour cards themselves are earned is covered in our guide to the PDC's Q-School and the two-year tour card.
Pathway places
In some editions places have been reserved for players from the PDC's other circuits, such as the Women's Series and the development tours. These places have varied from year to year, and the format published for each edition is the authority. The broad aim is to give players from those circuits a chance to play the leading professionals on a major stage. Our guide to the PDC Women's Series covers the women's pathway into the televised events.
The qualification model is the event's most distinctive feature after the groups. It produces a field that reflects the last year of television rather than the last two years of prize money, and it can include players who have had one excellent week and nothing else.
Why the Grand Slam was created in 2007
The darts split of 1993 left two codes, the PDC and the British Darts Organisation, with separate tours, separate world championships and almost no contact. The Grand Slam of Darts, launched by the PDC in 2007, was built to put players from both organisations in the same draw. BDO players, most of them winners or finalists of the BDO's televised events, were invited to Wolverhampton to play the PDC's best.
It was a commercial idea as much as a sporting one. The BDO had its own world champions whom many fans had never seen play the PDC's elite, and the Grand Slam offered a once-a-year chance to settle arguments about which code was stronger. The answer was usually the PDC, and the margin was often wide. The history of the original divide, and how it was eventually resolved, is set out on our page about the split that created the PDC and the BDO.
Scott Waites, 2010
The cross-code idea had its best moment in 2010, when Scott Waites, a BDO player, won the Grand Slam, beating James Wade 16-12 in the final, a year after losing the 2009 final to Phil Taylor. It remains the clearest evidence that a BDO player at his best could win a major against the PDC's elite, and it gave the event its most often cited story. Waites went on to win the BDO World Championship as well, at the Lakeside Country Club in Frimley Green, in 2013 and 2016.
The end of the cross-code invitations
The BDO collapsed in 2020, and the arrangement ended with it. The World Darts Federation took over much of the international amateur game, but the BDO invitations did not continue in the same form, and any places for players from outside the PDC are now set in the format published for each edition. What the WDF runs now, and how it differs from the old BDO, is explained in our guide to the World Darts Federation.
From invitation to ranking event in 2015
For its first eight editions the Grand Slam was an invitational event. Its prize money did not count on the PDC Order of Merit, the two-year ranking that seeds players at most events. From 2015 it became a ranking event, so the money won in Wolverhampton counts towards that list.
The change mattered because the Order of Merit decides who qualifies for, and who is seeded at, the other majors. A ranking Grand Slam gives every player in the field a reason to care about every match, not only the trophy. A deep run can move a player into the top sixteen and secure a seed at the next World Championship.
What it did to the field
BDO players kept their places after the change: the invitations continued through the late 2010s and ended only with the BDO's liquidation in September 2020. What the ranking status changed was the stakes for the PDC players, for whom a group win in Wolverhampton now carried Order of Merit money as well as a place in the knockout. The ranking system is explained in our guide to the PDC Order of Merit and how it works.
The Grand Slam is now firmly a PDC event, with most of its field drawn from the PDC's own competitions. It lost something as a cross-code curiosity. It gained a place in the ranking structure that makes it matter to the whole tour.
Wolverhampton: the Civic Hall and Aldersley Leisure Village
The first Grand Slam, in 2007, was played at the Wolverhampton Civic Hall in the city centre, a 1930s hall built for concerts and civic occasions rather than sport. The Civic Hall was the event's home from 2007 to 2017, and the atmosphere in a hall of that size, close to the stage, became part of the event's identity.
When the Civic Hall closed for a lengthy refurbishment, the Grand Slam moved in 2018 to Aldersley Leisure Village, a sports complex on the north-western side of the city best known for its athletics track. It has been played there every year since apart from 2020. The move took the event out of the city centre into a more functional venue; it kept the event in Wolverhampton, which was the point.
November in the West Midlands
The Grand Slam is played in November, between the World Grand Prix in October and the Players Championship Finals late in the month. It is one of the last televised events before the World Championship in December, and form shown here is often taken as a guide to who will contend at Alexandra Palace a few weeks later.
The crowd is a mixture of local fans from the West Midlands and the Black Country and travelling supporters from across the country. The atmosphere is that of a darts night rather than a theatre; the Grand Slam crowd is loud, many are in fancy dress, and players who are popular with it get an advantage in the noise. In 2020, with crowds banned, the event was staged behind closed doors at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry, the only year it has been played outside Wolverhampton.
The Eric Bristow Trophy and the Grand Slam winners
Eric Bristow, five times the world champion in the BDO era and one of the players who broke away in 1993 to form what became the PDC, died in April 2018. In May that year the PDC announced that the Grand Slam trophy would be renamed in his honour, and the winner now lifts the Eric Bristow Trophy. The choice of event made sense: Bristow had been the face of darts in the decade before the split, and the Grand Slam was the event that had tried, for a while, to put the two codes back on the same stage.
Phil Taylor won six Grand Slams, the most by any player: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2013 and 2014. By the end of the 2025 edition Michael van Gerwen had three, in 2015, 2016 and 2017, Gerwyn Price three, in 2018, 2019 and 2021, and Luke Littler two, in 2024 and 2025.
| Player | Titles by end of 2025 | Years |
|---|---|---|
| Phil Taylor | 6 | 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2014 |
| Michael van Gerwen | 3 | 2015, 2016, 2017 |
| Gerwyn Price | 3 | 2018, 2019, 2021 |
| Luke Littler | 2 | 2024, 2025 |
| Scott Waites | 1 | 2010 |
| Raymond van Barneveld | 1 | 2012 |
| José de Sousa | 1 | 2020 |
| Michael Smith | 1 | 2022 |
| Luke Humphries | 1 | 2023 |
The table is dated to the end of the 2025 tournament, the last played before this guide was written; each November can add a name or extend a count. Michael Smith's 2022 title came with a 16-5 final win over Nathan Aspinall, and Littler's two came against Martin Lukeman, 16-3, and Luke Humphries, 16-11.
Nine-dart finishes in Wolverhampton
Seven nine-darters had been thrown at the Grand Slam by the end of the 2025 edition, in both the group stage and the knockout rounds: James Wade in the last sixteen in 2008, in a match he lost, Kim Huybrechts in a 2014 quarter-final, Peter Wright in the 2015 group stage, Dimitri Van den Bergh in the last sixteen in 2018, Stephen Bunting in the last sixteen in 2022, Michael van Gerwen in a 2023 group match he lost, and Nathan Rafferty in the 2025 group stage. A perfect leg in a best of nine is particularly valuable, worth a large share of the match. The wider list of perfect legs on television is on our page about nine-dart finishes thrown on television, where it can be kept current.
The Grand Slam's roll of honour shows the same pattern as the other majors: Taylor dominant until the mid-2010s, then a handful of strong players sharing the titles, then a younger generation arriving. For the other events on the English darts calendar, the England sports guides hub brings them together, including the October major with its double start covered in our explainer on the World Grand Prix format.