World Masters Darts: Format, Short Sets and Its History

Two legs. That is all a player needs to win a set at the World Masters, and it is why the event feels faster than anything else on the darts calendar. A set is the best of three legs, the throw alternates, and a single break of throw can decide it before the crowd has settled.

The World Masters, in its present form, is the Professional Darts Corporation's first televised tournament of the year, played in late January at Arena MK in Milton Keynes, a few weeks after the World Championship ends at Alexandra Palace. Its format is a seeded knockout of 32 players, counted in sets of three legs, the shortest sets in professional darts. It is also two older tournaments joined together: the Winmau World Masters, a British Darts Organisation title that ran from 1974 to 2019, and the PDC's invitational Masters, which ran from 2013 to 2024. The 2025 relaunch gave the PDC the name and the format of the first and the date and venue of the second.

World Masters darts in short: sets of three legs

Set play in darts is not universal. Most professional events, the UK Open and the floor tournaments among them, are counted in legs. A small number of events use sets, and they tend to be the ones that think of themselves as world titles. The World Masters is one of them, but it uses sets in a form no other PDC event shares.

At the PDC World Championship format, a set is the best of five legs. At the World Grand Prix, the same. At the World Masters it is the best of three. A player wins two legs, wins the set, and the scoreboard resets.

That one difference changes how a match is played and how it is watched. A best-of-five set allows a player to lose the first leg on his own throw and still recover. A best-of-three set often does not. The arithmetic is set out in the next section; the practical effect is that every leg in a World Masters match carries more weight than a leg in almost any other event.

• 3Legs in a set
• 2Legs to win a set
• 1974Year the World Masters began
• 5Eric Bristow's World Masters titles

Set length and the founding year apply to the World Masters title in both its BDO and PDC forms. Bristow's five titles were all won in the BDO era.

How a best-of-three-leg set plays

Throw alternates leg by leg, as it does throughout darts, and the first throw in each set alternates between the players across the match. So in any set one player throws first in legs one and three and the other throws first in leg two. The player with the throw has a structural edge in each leg, because at the professional level he will usually check out before his opponent reaches a finish. Winning a leg in which the opponent had the throw is a break.

Now count the cases. A set can be won 2-0 or 2-1, and how each result arises tells a viewer a great deal about the match. Call the player throwing first in the set A and the other B.

Leg one (A throws)	Leg two (B throws)	Leg three (A throws)	Set result
A wins	A wins	Not needed	A wins 2-0, with a break in leg two
A wins	B wins	A wins	A wins 2-1, every leg held
A wins	B wins	B wins	B wins 2-1, with a break in leg three
B wins	A wins	A wins	A wins 2-1, after an exchange of breaks
B wins	A wins	B wins	B wins 2-1, with breaks in legs one and three
B wins	B wins	Not needed	B wins 2-0, with a break in leg one

Look at the second row. If every leg goes with throw, the player throwing first in the set wins it 2-1. That is the default outcome at the highest level, and it means that across a match the sets would simply alternate if neither player ever broke. The player who wins the match is therefore the one who breaks throw more often, and in a three-leg set one break is frequently enough.

In a best-of-five set the equivalent calculation is gentler. A player who drops a leg on his own throw can win two of the remaining legs, one of which he throws first, and still take the set. In the shorter format the margin for recovery is a single leg.

1. 1Leg oneThe player with the throw in the set starts. A hold puts him one leg from the set.
2. 2Leg twoThe opponent throws first. A hold levels the set at 1-1; a break ends it 2-0.
3. 3Leg threeIf needed, the first thrower in the set throws first again and needs only to hold.
4. 4Next setThe first throw passes to the other player, and the pattern starts again.

The logic of a best-of-three-leg set with alternating throw. The player who throws first in the set also throws first in any deciding third leg.

Why throwing first matters less in a match than in a set

Within a set, throwing first is a clear advantage. Across a match, it evens out, because the first throw alternates set by set. The player who wins the bull-up at the start gains the throw in the first set and in any deciding set, which is where it matters most.

Round by round through the World Masters darts format

The World Masters is a single-elimination draw of 32 players with matches getting longer, measured in sets, as the field narrows. The ladder used in the relaunched event runs from the best of five sets to the best of eleven in the final.

Round	Format	Sets needed to win	Legs if every set goes the distance
Preliminary rounds	Best of 5 sets	3	15
First round	Best of 5 sets	3	15
Second round	Best of 7 sets	4	21
Quarter-finals	Best of 7 sets	4	21
Semi-finals	Best of 9 sets	5	27
Final	Best of 11 sets	6	33

The format was new in 2025 and the PDC has been willing to adjust the lengths of its events from one year to the next, so treat the figures as the shape of the event in its first editions rather than a regulation frozen in place. The organiser publishes them afresh in each year's tournament rules.

The shape is the part that will hold. A first-round match to three sets of three legs can be finished in well under half an hour, which allows the opening rounds to fit into the afternoon and evening sessions with several matches in each. The final, at six sets, is long enough that one hot spell rarely settles it. This is the same principle the UK Open applies with legs: short matches while the field is large, longer ones once the strongest players are left.

How many legs a match can contain

Short sets add up quickly. A match played to a modest number of sets of three legs can still run to more legs than a best-of-eleven floor match, because each set can go to a third leg. The difference is in how those legs are grouped. In a long-leg format, losing three legs in a row puts a player three legs behind. In a short-set format, losing three legs in a row might cost one set and a leg of the next, and the scoreboard counts sets, so a player can lose more legs than he wins and still win the match. That happens at the World Masters more often than at a five-leg-set event, and it is one of the format's quirks.

A worked example: winning on sets while losing on legs

Take an illustrative match played to three sets, the best of five, which is the first-round length, between two players we will call Hart and Mason. The figures are invented to show the arithmetic, not taken from any real match.

Set	Winner	Legs in the set	Running score in sets
First	Mason	2-0 to Mason	Mason 1-0
Second	Hart	2-1 to Hart	1-1
Third	Mason	2-0 to Mason	Mason 2-1
Fourth	Hart	2-1 to Hart	2-2
Fifth	Hart	2-1 to Hart	Hart wins 3-2

Add up the legs. Hart won six and Mason won seven, yet Hart wins the match. Mason's two clean sets were emphatic and counted for no more than Hart's three tight ones. Every one of Hart's sets went to a third leg, and he won every third leg he played. Across a match, that is what short sets reward: winning the legs that decide sets, not winning the most legs.

A leg-play event would have scored the same darts the other way. Seven legs against six, and Mason goes through. The same performance, two formats, two different winners. That is the cleanest single argument for why the format of a tournament is not a neutral wrapper around the darts but a part of the contest, and why players speak about the World Masters as an event that needs its own approach.

Who qualifies and how the preliminary rounds work

The relaunched World Masters is a seeded event, which separates it sharply from the UK Open's open draw. The top 24 on the PDC Order of Merit, taken after the World Championship that has just finished, go straight into the first round of the main draw, seeded so that the leading names are kept apart until the later rounds. The other eight places are filled by qualifiers, which makes a televised field of 32.

Those eight come through preliminary rounds played the day before the main draw begins. The entry for them is wide: every tour card holder who has not qualified directly, the leading players from each of the PDC's secondary tours and its Global Affiliate Tours, and a handful of players from the Junior Darts Corporation. The PDC's announcement of the relaunch put the number competing in the preliminaries at up to 180 for those eight places, run as a group stage feeding a knockout. This preserves something the old invitational Masters lacked. Under that system, a player outside the top sixteen, and later the top twenty-four, had no route in at all. Under the relaunched format, any professional on the tour can in principle reach the televised stage by winning enough preliminary matches.

Why the timing complicates seeding

The World Masters falls at the end of January, which is also when the PDC's two-year ranking turns over at the end of the World Championship and when the latest round of tour cards is being issued at Q-School. The ranking used for the draw therefore reflects the prize money from the World Championship just completed. A player who had a strong run at Alexandra Palace can move into a seeded place for the World Masters within a month. Our guide to the PDC Order of Merit explains how the World Championship's prize money is counted and when older money drops off.

Short sets against long legs and the five-leg set

Set play and leg play reward slightly different things. A comparison across the main PDC formats shows where the World Masters sits.

Event	Match counted in	Legs in a set	Note on the format
World Masters	Sets	3	The shortest sets in professional darts
PDC World Championship	Sets	5	Long matches over sets of five legs at Alexandra Palace
World Grand Prix	Sets	5	Every leg must begin and end on a double
World Matchplay	Legs	None	Long leg matches, with a two-clear-legs rule in the deciding leg
UK Open	Legs	None	Best of eleven early, longer from the fourth round
Players Championship events	Legs	None	Best of eleven legs on the floor

The difference between three and five legs per set looks small and is not. In a best-of-five set, a player who holds throw in every leg wins three of the legs his opponent does not break, and a single break of serve is usually only enough when combined with a hold. In a three-leg set, one break followed by a hold is the set. The World Grand Prix, which shares the five-leg set with the World Championship, is explained in our guide to the World Grand Prix's double start, and the comparison shows how much the shorter set accelerates things.

The World Matchplay, at the other end, uses no sets at all, and its final legs must be won by two clear. That is the most forgiving format for a player who starts badly, because a long leg match allows a recovery over twenty or thirty legs. The World Masters is the least forgiving.

World Masters3legs

PDC World Championship5legs

World Grand Prix5legs

Set length only. Events counted in legs, such as the UK Open and the World Matchplay, have no sets and are omitted.

Show the numbers

Legs in a set at the PDC's set-play events

Item	Value
World Masters	3legs
PDC World Championship	5legs
World Grand Prix	5legs

What short sets do to averages and upsets

Averages at the World Masters tend to be read differently from averages at a leg-play event. A three-dart average is calculated over all the darts a player throws, and set play does not alter that calculation. What it alters is the relationship between the average and the result.

In a long leg match, the player with the higher average wins most of the time, because the format gives the better scorer enough legs to prove it. In a short-set match, a player can average several points lower and win, because the result turns on a small number of key legs: the ones in which a break of throw happened. A player who scores heavily but misses doubles in the deciding legs of sets can lose to an opponent who scored less but finished better at the critical moments.

Upsets, and why the seeding still holds

This makes the World Masters more volatile than the other seeded events. Upsets in the opening rounds are a regular feature: the format gives an outsider fewer legs to hold out over and puts a premium on finishing nerve rather than sustained scoring. The seeded draw offsets some of that, because the leading players do not meet each other early, but it cannot protect them from the format.

There is a reasonable case that this is unfair on the better players. There is a stronger case that it is the point of the tournament. A season that opens with a short-set event and a seeded draw gives the outsiders a better chance of a televised win than almost anything else on the calendar, and the leading players accept that risk at the start of the year, when the ranking stakes are lower than they will be in the autumn.

The deciding leg as the real unit of the match

Commentators at the World Masters tend to talk about the third legs. There is a reason. In a best-of-three set where both players hold throw in the first two legs, the set comes down to leg three, thrown first by the player who started the set. If he holds, the match moves on with nothing changed. If he is broken, he has lost a set he should have won, and the momentum of the match turns on that single leg.

Over a match of several sets, those third legs pile up. A player who wins most of the third legs he plays will win most World Masters matches, whatever his average. A player who loses them, even narrowly, will spend the tournament wondering how he lost while throwing well. The figures that best describe a World Masters performance are therefore the less familiar ones: checkout percentage in the deciding legs of sets, and the number of breaks of throw. The headline three-dart average, which tells you most of what matters at a leg-play event, tells you less here.

The PDC Masters from 2013, an invitation event

Before the World Masters was relaunched, the PDC's late-January televised event was the Masters, without the word World. It began in 2013 as an invitation tournament for the top sixteen players on the PDC Order of Merit. The first two editions were staged at the Royal Highland Centre in Edinburgh, and Phil Taylor won the first of them, beating Adrian Lewis 10-1. From 2015 the event was played at Arena MK in Milton Keynes, the building it has used since.

Its format was leg play. That is the main thing that separates it from the relaunched event. In its first years matches ran to the best of nineteen legs with a best of twenty-one for the semi-finals and final; once the field was enlarged, the opening round came down to the best of eleven. The Masters was a short seeded knockout of the elite, and it carried no ranking money: prize money won there did not count on the Order of Merit. It was a showcase event, much like the Premier League in its effect on the ranking, where a strong league run brings money and profile but no ranking.

Expansion to twenty-four

The field was expanded to twenty-four players for the 2021 edition. Under that arrangement, the leading players had byes into the second round while the players ranked below them played an opening round. The expansion widened the field slightly but did nothing to open it to players outside the leading group. The Masters remained an event for the established elite, which was both its appeal and its limitation.

Winner	Year or years	Note
Phil Taylor	2013	Won the first edition, in Edinburgh, 10-1 against Adrian Lewis
James Wade	2014	Beat Mervyn King 11-10 in the second and last Edinburgh final
Michael van Gerwen	2015 to 2019	Five consecutive titles
Peter Wright	2020	Beat Michael Smith 11-10
Jonny Clayton	2021	Won behind closed doors during the pandemic
Joe Cullen	2022	His first major televised title
Chris Dobey	2023	His first major televised title
Stephen Bunting	2024	The last edition before the relaunch

Van Gerwen's five in a row was the defining run of the invitational Masters. In a format that had no qualifiers and no outsiders, the strongest player of the period won it year after year, which is roughly what an invitation event for the top sixteen should produce. That predictability is part of the reason the PDC was willing to replace it with something less certain.

The original Winmau World Masters from 1974

The World Masters began in 1974, in the early years of the British Darts Organisation, with the dartboard manufacturer Winmau as its sponsor. It quickly became one of the BDO's two great titles, alongside the world championship that the BDO staged from 1978 and later held for many years at the Lakeside Country Club in Frimley Green.

The Winmau World Masters was played in short sets for most of its history. That format is the line that connects the original event to the PDC's 2025 relaunch, and it was always the Masters' distinguishing feature. When darts was being shown on BBC and ITV in the late 1970s and the 1980s, the short-set Masters was one of the events a British viewer would most often see.

Eric Bristow's five titles

Eric Bristow won the Winmau World Masters five times, in 1977, 1979, 1981, 1983 and 1984, and no player matched that total in the BDO era. His wins came in a period when he was the dominant figure in the game, also winning five world championships, and the Masters was one of the events that built his public profile as much as his ranking. A full list of world champions, BDO and PDC, is kept in our guide to the darts world champions.

Bristow's record at the Masters suits the format. Short sets reward a player who closes out legs under pressure and who forces breaks of throw, and Bristow's reputation, before and after his playing peak, rested on exactly that: a fast, confident finisher who made opponents feel the pressure of every leg. A five-leg set gives a slower starter more room. The three-leg set gave him none to concede, and he rarely needed any.

A women's title alongside the men's

The BDO also staged a women's World Masters alongside the men's event from 1982, when Ann-Marie Davies won the first, and for women players in the BDO era it was one of the most important titles available. The PDC's relaunch revived the men's event under its own structure. Women players have a route into PDC competition through the PDC Women's Series, which has its own qualifying links to the bigger tournaments, but the old women's Masters did not come across in the same form, and that is one part of the BDO's legacy the 2025 relaunch left behind.

The Masters was also a much wider event than the PDC's invitational Masters would be. It drew entries from across the BDO's international membership, not only from British players, and the winners' list includes players from overseas as well as from England, Scotland and Wales.

1. 11974The Winmau World Masters begins as a British Darts Organisation title, played in short sets.
2. 2BDO eraThe Masters becomes one of the BDO's two great titles, and Eric Bristow wins it five times.
3. 31990s splitThe leading players form what becomes the PDC, but the Masters stays with the BDO.
4. 42013The PDC launches its own invitational Masters, counted in legs, for the top sixteen.
5. 52019The last BDO World Masters is played, and John O'Shea wins it.
6. 62020The BDO collapses in September and the World Darts Federation inherits its international role.
7. 72022The WDF stages its own World Masters, in legs rather than sets, and makes it biennial.
8. 82025The PDC relaunches the World Masters in place of its Masters, with short sets restored.

The sequence of events. The exact years in which the BDO's final edition was played and in which the title lapsed are given in the prose only where certain.

How the World Masters name passed to the PDC

The split of the early 1990s took the leading players out of the BDO and into what became the PDC, a story told in full in our guide to the PDC and BDO split. The Masters stayed with the BDO, and for nearly three decades the two organisations ran parallel circuits. The BDO had the Masters and the Lakeside world championship. The PDC had its own world championship and, from 2013, its own Masters.

The BDO folded in September 2020, after years of financial difficulty and falling participation in its events. Its last World Masters had been played in 2019 and won by John O'Shea, who beat Scott Waites 6-4. The World Darts Federation, the international body for the sport outside the PDC, took over much of the BDO's international role, and it revived the World Masters for itself in 2022 at Assen in the Netherlands. The WDF version is not the same event in any but the nominal sense: it is played in legs rather than sets, it is staged every other year, and it has moved around, with editions in Budapest and in Las Vegas.

The board maker and the relaunch

The name stayed with Winmau, and the relaunch depended on the board maker's commercial partnership moving to the PDC. When it did, the PDC replaced its invitational Masters with a World Masters for 2025. The new event kept the PDC Masters' place in the calendar at the end of January and its venue in Milton Keynes. It restored the old event's short sets, its title and its sponsor. It opened its field through preliminary qualifying rather than restricting it to an invited elite.

This is an unusual piece of sporting history, and an untidy one. A title that had belonged to one organisation for forty-five years was picked up by that organisation's old rival while a third body was already using it. There are now two World Masters: the PDC's, in Milton Keynes in short sets, and the WDF's, biennial and in legs. Neither is wrong to use the name: Winmau's went to the PDC's event and the BDO's international membership went to the WDF's. For a British viewer, the PDC's event is the one that carries the old format and the field of leading professionals, and the one the word Masters will now mean on television.

Milton Keynes and the late-January slot

Arena MK stands beside Stadium MK, home of MK Dons, on the southern edge of Milton Keynes, and spent several years under sponsorship as the Marshall Arena, which is the name on most match reports from the Masters era. It hosted the PDC's Masters from 2015 and kept the tournament when the World Masters replaced it. It is also used for other PDC events during the season. The arena is a purpose-built indoor venue rather than a converted hall, which suits a televised darts event with a single stage and a seated crowd.

The late-January date places the World Masters a few weeks after the World Championship final at Alexandra Palace, which falls in early January, and the event has run into the first days of February. It makes the World Masters the first televised event of the new season. It is often the first time the newly crowned world champion appears on a stage after winning the title.

Getting there and what the building is like

Milton Keynes is an easy trip from much of England, which helps an event that draws a travelling crowd. The town sits on the West Coast Main Line, with direct trains from London Euston, and the arena is reached from Bletchley or the central station by road. Stadium MK and the arena share a site with car parks and the retail park around them, so a visitor driving in from the M1 has a short last leg rather than a city-centre crawl.

Inside, the layout is that of a televised darts event in an indoor arena: one stage, lit for the cameras, a seated floor, and tiered seating around it. There are no outer boards here. Every match of the main draw is played on the same stage, which is a sharp contrast with the Friday at Minehead or a floor event in a hall of boards. For a qualifier who has come through the preliminary rounds, the first walk-on in Milton Keynes is often a first appearance in front of an arena crowd.

Why opening the season matters

For players, the late-January slot is a chance to reset after the World Championship. For the PDC, it is a way to bridge the gap before the Premier League and the floor season begin in earnest. An event at that point in the calendar draws a large television audience, because interest in darts in Britain is at its yearly peak after Alexandra Palace. That is one reason the PDC kept the slot and the venue when it changed the event's name and format: a successful date and a good arena were worth more than a clean break.

Ranking money, the trophy and the winners

Under the invitational Masters, prize money did not count on the Order of Merit. That was the defining limitation of the old event: a player could win it and gain nothing on the ranking list. With the relaunch, the World Masters became a ranking event, so its prize money counts on the Order of Merit, which gives the leading players a reason to treat it as seriously as any other major, and gives the qualifiers who win matches a ranking reward.

The PDC presents the World Masters as a continuation of that history rather than a new tournament. That is a fair reading of the sport's past only up to a point. The PDC never staged the World Masters before 2025, and the players who won it in the BDO era did so against a field that did not include the PDC's players. The continuity is in the name, the format and the trophy, not in the competition.

The relaunched event's roll of honour is still short. Luke Humphries won the first PDC World Masters in 2025, beating Jonny Clayton 6-5 in the final, and Luke Littler won the second in 2026, beating Humphries by the same score. Two finals and two deciding sets is a small sample, but it is the sample the format predicts: in sets of three legs the last set tends to arrive. The winners of the PDC's invitational Masters are set out in the table above, and Bristow's five titles remain the most famous record attached to the World Masters name. More darts formats, from the first leg of a match to the end of a season, are covered across our England guides.