2010 PDC World Darts Championship

The 2010 PDC World Darts Championship was the seventeenth World Championship organised by the Professional Darts Corporation since it separated from the British Darts Organisation. The event took place at Alexandra Palace in London from 18 December 2009 and 3 January 2010.
Phil Taylor successfully defended the title with a 7–3 victory over Simon Whitlock in the final. This was Taylor's thirteenth PDC world title, and his fifteenth in all.
Raymond van Barneveld recorded the second nine-dart finish in the history of the tournament in his second-round match against Brendan Dolan.

Format and qualifiers

The televised stages featured 72 players, an increase of 2 from last year. The top 32 players in the PDC Order of Merit on 1 December 2009 were seeded for the tournament. They were joined by the 16 highest non qualified players in the Players Championship Order of Merit from events played on the PDC Pro Tour.
These 48 players were joined by 24 international players: the 4 highest names in the European Order of Merit not already qualified, the 3 highest names in the North American Order of Merit not already qualified and 15 further international qualifiers to be determined by the PDC and PDPA. Some of the players, such as the 4 from the European Order of Merit, the top 2 Americans, and Australian players are entered straight into the first round, while others, having won qualifying events in their countries, were entered into the preliminary round.
Order of Merit

Pro Tour

European Order of Merit
First round qualifiers

International qualifiers
First round qualifiers

International qualifiers
Preliminary round qualifiers

Prize money

The 2010 World Championship featured a prize fund of £1,000,000 – a rise of £260,000 on the previous year, to become darts' first £1 million tournament. All rounds featured more money compared to 2009, and also sees a £10,000 highest checkout prize being to make the fund go up to a million.
In addition, the losing semi-finalists contested a third place play off match on the same night as the Final, played for an extra £20,000 "winner takes all" pot on top of the £40,000 they both already received for being losing semi finalists. This was the first time since 1998 that such a playoff occurred.
The prize money is allocated as follows:

Draw

Preliminary round

The preliminary round draw was made on 29 November, and the format is best of 7 legs.

Player 1

Score

Player 2

Last 64

The first round draw was made live on Sky Sports News on 7 December, and was conducted by Rod Harrington and Eric Bristow.
All sets were best of five legs, unless there is a final set tie-break. All games that went to a final set had to be won by 2 clear legs; if after six more legs the score in the final set reached 5-5, a sudden death leg would take place to decide the winner.

Rounds 1-4

Scores after player's names are three-dart averages

Representation from different countries

This table shows the number of players by country in the World Championship, the total number including the preliminary round.

Television coverage

As they had done for every WDC/PDC World Darts Championship, Sky Sports provided coverage in the UK, broadcasting all 72 matches live in high-definition. Dave Clark presented the coverage with analysis from Rod Harrington and Eric Bristow. They also commentated on matches along with Sid Waddell, John Gwynne, Dave Lanning, Nigel Pearson, Rod Studd and Stuart Pyke. Interviews were either handled by Clark, Bristow or Studd.

Technical elements

Technical crew were supplied by Yorkshire-based Sports Event Services Limited, with Mark Leak heading up their crew and assuming the role of stage manager.