The 2018 William Hill World Darts Championship was a darts event, held between 14 December 2017 and 1 January 2018 at the Alexandra Palace in London, United Kingdom. It was the 25th World Championship organised by the Professional Darts Corporation since it separated from the British Darts Organisation.
Michael van Gerwen was the defending champion, but lost 6–5 in sets to Rob Cross in the semi-finals, with the score at 5–5 in sets and with van Gerwen leading 5–4 in legs he missed 5 match darts to beat Cross. Cross forced an 11th and sudden death leg, van Gerwen missed a 6th match dart before Cross hit double 8 to win an epic semi-final and reach his first world final. Cross went on to win the World Championship on his debut by defeating Phil Taylor 7–2 in the final. Cross only turned professional 11 months prior to the event. This was Taylor's 29th and final World Championship, surpassing the record of 28 appearances he jointly held with John Lowe.
Jamie Lewis became the first player to reach the semi-finals after entering the championship through a preliminary round event, first introduced at the 2004 Championship. Lewis eventually fell to Taylor in the semi-final, by a score of 6–1.
Prize money
The prize money for the tournament was a record high of £1,800,000 in total. The winner's prize money has increased from £350,000 to £400,000.
Qualification
Qualifiers
Order of Merit
Pro Tour
Richard North
Vincent van der Voort
Christian Kist
Ronny Huybrechts
Jermaine Wattimena
Steve West
Zoran Lerchbacher
Jan Dekker
Keegan Brown
James Richardson
Peter Jacques
Martin Schindler
Chris Dobey
Steve Lennon
Kevin Painter
PDPA Qualifier
First round qualifier
Ted Evetts
Preliminary round qualifiers
Brendan Dolan
Jamie Lewis
International qualifiers (Alphabetical order) First round qualifiers Toni Alcinas Marko Kantele William O'Connor Devon Petersen Diogo Portela Krzysztof Ratajski Kim Viljanen
Preliminary round qualifiers
Seigo Asada
Willard Bruguier
Cody Harris
Luke Humphries
Kai Fan Leung
Paul Lim
Alan Ljubić
Gordon Mathers
Kevin Münch
Kenny Neyens
Bernie Smith
Jeff Smith
Xiaochen Zong
Background
72 players competed in the championship; with the 32 highest ranked players on the PDC Order of Merit being seeded, and the next sixteen highest ranked players from the 2017 PDC Pro Tour Order of Merit and the top eight ranked players from a number of international and invitational qualifiers also going straight into the first round. The remaining sixteen international and invitational qualifiers competed in a preliminary round.
Michael van Gerwen, the winner of the 2014 and 2017 championships, was top of the two-year PDC Order of Merit and number one seed going into the tournament. The tournament was to be the last for Phil Taylor, who had won the PDC World Championship fourteen times previously, most recently in 2013. As well as van Gerwen and Taylor, three other previous PDC world champions qualified as seeds, two-time champions Gary Anderson and Adrian Lewis, and 2007 champion Raymond van Barneveld.
The top seeds below van Gerwen were 2017 UK Open winner Peter Wright, Gary Anderson, 2017 World Grand Prix winner Daryl Gurney and 2017 Champions League of Darts winner Mensur Suljović. Rob Cross, the runner-up at the 2017 European Championship, made his World Championship debut as the 20th seed.
Richard North, in his debut year, was the highest ranked non-seed on the 2017 PDC Pro Tour Order of Merit. As well as North, three other qualifiers through the Pro Tour made their debut, Peter Jacques, Steve Lennon and Martin Schindler. The list of qualifiers also included the 2017 Youth Champion Dimitri Van den Bergh and the 2004 runner-up Kevin Painter.
Amongst the international and invitational qualification tournaments there was, for the first time, a South and Central American Qualifier. The majority of tournaments were the same as had been for the previous championship, but there was no longer a Philippines Championship. Gordon Mathers was the first player to qualify for the Championships, having finished top of the Dartplayers Australia rankings. The top two players on the Nordic & Baltic rankings also qualified, as did the winners of the fifteen international qualifiers, including the 2017 PDC World Youth Championship.