World Series of Darts Fields: Legendary Lim Joins Lukes for Bahrain and Saudi Arabia

The 2026 PDC World Series of Darts does not merely tiptoe into the calendar – it arrives with a flourish, a fanfare, and a double-header forged in tungsten history. As winter loosens its grip on Europe, the sport’s travelling theatre of tungsten majesty packs its bags and turns east, where floodlights blaze brighter, arenas hum heavier, and history prepares to stretch its limbs beneath unfamiliar skies.

First stop: Bahrain. Second stop: Saudi Arabia. Both unmistakably drenched in humidity and ambition. At the forefront of this gilded procession stands Luke Littler, the reigning and newly re-crowned World Champion, still only a teenager yet already casting a shadow that stretches across the sport. He is joined by the ice-veined aristocrat of composure, Luke Humphries, world number two and perennial collector of silverware, as the Middle East prepares to host darts’ elite in a two-act opening spectacle.

The Bahrain Darts Masters, now entering its fourth chapter, opens proceedings on January 15–16 at Exhibition World – a venue already familiar with Littler’s brilliance after his triumphant World Series debut there in 2024. This time, he returns not as the future, but as the present tense.

The supporting cast is anything but merely window dressing. World Championship runner-up and European Champion Gian van Veen continues his inexorable rise, while his compatriot Michael van Gerwen – the most prolific conqueror in World Series history – once again sharpens his knives under the desert sun.

Add reigning Bahrain champion Stephen Bunting, the returning firestorm Gerwyn Price, Dutch consistency king Danny Noppert, and the relentless battler Nathan Aspinall, and you have a line-up built not merely to entertain – but to dominate. Yet this is not a closed court. The World Series thrives on collision.

Awaiting the PDC’s aristocracy is a formidable Asian contingent, led by Filipino trailblazers Alexis Toylo and Lourence Ilagan, both seasoned on the world stage. Japan’s precision artisans Motomu Sakai and Ryusei Azemoto bring surgical exactness, while Singapore’s evergreen icon Paul Lim continues to defy chronology. Hong Kong’s Man Lok Leung completes the continental challenge, joined in Bahrain by home hopes Abdulla Saeed and Basem Mahmood – qualifiers who now step onto the grandest of stages.

Barely has the dust settled before the PDC World Series jugganaut moves on.

January 19th–20th sees darts break new ground as Saudi Arabia hosts its inaugural Darts Masters in Riyadh, under the banner of Riyadh Season. The same eight PDC heavyweights remain locked and loaded, but the Asian opposition evolves – drawn from the very summit of the 2025 PDC Asian Tour rankings.

Alongside familiar names Toylo, Ilagan, Sakai, Azemoto, Lim and Leung, the Saudi stage welcomes Filipino pioneer Paolo Nebrida and Japan’s two-time World Championship qualifier Tomoya Goto, each carrying both national expectation and personal ambition into the Global Theater.

This is not merely an exhibition. This is expansion. This is darts announcing, with thunderous clarity, that its borders no longer end at the Channel or the Rhine. The World Series returns not as a novelty, but as a statement. Steel meets sand. Legacy meets emergence. And under Middle Eastern skies, the arrows will fly just the same – unforgiving, unyielding, and utterly glorious.

2026 BAHRAIN DARTS MASTERS

January 15-16, Exhibition World, Bahrain Competing Players PDC Representatives

PDC Representatives