2025 World Darts Championship prediction: Littler the man for the big occasion

You know it’s nearly Christmas when the World Darts Championships get underway, so here is your reminder to get those presents in early so you can sit back and enjoy the action.

Whether we will see anything as exciting as we did 12 months ago when a 16-year-old took the darts world by storm and even saw the sport covered on the front and back pages of the newspapers for the first time.

Luke Littler was eventually beaten in the final by Luke Humphries, but he has continued to get better and better and will be hoping to go one further this time around at Ally Pally.

Darts betting sites have Littler as the favourite to win at 2/1, just ahead of his namesake Humphries at 10/3 and Gary Anderson at 9/1.

It’s hard to see beyond Littler for the title and not because we’re looking for another Christmas fairytale but because he’s arguably the best player in the world right now.

He’s won more titles than anyone else in the last 12 months, including the Premier League and the Grand Slam of Darts, and he also knows exactly what to expect this time around.

World Darts Championship prediction 1: Luke Littler to win the World Darts Championship - 2/1 William Hill

The fact that Littler and Humphries are in the same half of the draw certainly makes things interesting and opens things up when it comes to an each-way bet.

Despite the year being dominated by the two Lukes, we have still seen some shocks with two outsiders winning two of the majors: Mike de Decker taking the World Grand Prix and Ritchie Edhouse winning the European Championship.

Both De Decker and Edhouse are also in the top half of the draw with Littler and Humphries so we’ll have to look a bit further for our each-way bet.

Betting sites are offering 28/1 on the world number two Michael Smith, which might sound really generous, and it would be if the 34-year-old wasn’t going into the tournament in awful form.

He won the title in 2023, but it took another 11 months before he picked up his second title, winning the World Cup of Darts in May, alongside Luke Humphries.

He hasn’t averaged over 100 in any of his last 11 matches and if he doesn’t have a good run at the World Championships he could slip out of the top 10, and maybe that will be enough of an incentive to spur him on.

Anderson is the other player in with a good chance despite not having won a major title since 2018. The Scot is in great form, reaching the semi-final of the Grand Slam of Darts last month and he also has the highest average of all this season with 99.06.

He is in line to face Michael van Gerwen in the fourth round but if he can get through that, then his route to the final is fairly clear.

So if you bet £10 each way at 10/1, your total bet will be £20 and the bet is split as follows: £10 goes on Anderson to win at full odds of 10/1 and £10 to come first or second at half of the odds, 5/1.

World Darts Championship prediction 2: Gary Anderson to win the World Darts Championship - 10/1 each-way Betfred

There have only been 14 World Championship nine darters in 24,352 legs since 2009, but we have seen four in televised PDC tournaments this year, so it’s understandable why it is such a big market.

In total, there have been a record 55 in all competitions since the start of the year and with the levels we expect this time we think the record of three that we saw at the 2022 World Championships could be broken.

World Darts Championship prediction: Over 1.5 nine dart finishes - 13/8 Bet365

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