Premier League Darts 2025 Tournament Predictions: Cool Hand to win the title

The Premier League Darts is back, with eight players slugging it out over the next 17 weeks. We'll have weekly tipping articles and as always, we've asked our darts expert Sean Rafferty to preview this massive tournament and give us his Premier League 2025 darts tournament predictions...

History, Location and Format

The 2025 Premier League Darts is the twenty-first running of this PDC event, which has grown from small beginnings into a huge arena-based tournament all across the UK and Europe.

The tournament is held at 17 different arenas, with this year's event running from Thursday, 6th February to Thursday, 29th May and will be shown live on Sky Sports in the UK. The finals will be held at the O2 Arena in London.

The field features just eight players with the top four in the world rankings qualifying automatically, as well as four wildcards selected by the PDC. Each night the eight take part in a short-format knockout event with four quarter-finals, two semis and a final. Points are awarded for performance and are tallied up in a league table, with the top four progressing to the play-off finals in London in May.

There has been three multiple winners of this event, with Dutchman Michael van Gerwen winning the title on seven occasions, Phil Taylor (six times) and Gary Anderson twice.

The defending champion is Luke Littler, who defeated his compatriot Luke Humphries 11-7 in last year's final at the age of 17.

Prize Money

There is a prize fund in of £1,000,000 on offer to the eight participants.

Premier League Darts Odds

2 units Luke Humphries to win the Premier League @ 11/4

Cool Hand got himself back in to the winners enclosure at the weekend, winning the revamped Winmau World Masters in Milton Keynes. Luke had won only one of his last six events, which is a bit of a rough spell by his standards, but he was not to be denied at the weekend. His journey to the final was a relative breeze, with 3-0, 4-0, 4-1 and 5-2 victories over Joe Cullen, Josh Rock, Damon Heta and Danny Noppert.

The final however was anything but a breeze - it looked like it could be when Humphries raced into a 5-2 lead, but Clayton came firing back and eventually took it to a deciding set. Humphries held himself together best, despite a lot of missed doubles and won a classic final 6-5. You could tell the last couple months he’s just been searching for that top level of his and it looked like he finally found that consistently decent game, posting averages of 99, 95, 104, 100 and 100. This will give him the confidence boost he needed heading into another Premier League campaign.

It’s a lengthy period of time competing in the Premier League, the best part of four months. So, while form will come and go in that time, you’re looking for consistency in a player. Humphries has definitely shown that over the past 18 months - winning a World Championship, World Matchplay, Grand Slam, World Grand Prix, two Players Championship Finals and World Masters. On top of finishing runner-up in the UK Open, Premier League and World Grand Prix. He’s almost a guarantee to reach the latter stages of these biggest tournaments.

That consistency should see him well in the league phase over the first 16 weeks - Cool Hand finished clear in second place in the league table last year, finishing behind Luke Littler by four points. I can’t see past the two Lukes being top two in the table again, meaning they’ll be separated at the semi finals stage. A lot will depend on current form come the end of May, but I’d say a Littler vs Humphries final is more likely than not, considering both are very tricky to beat over the longer format of first to 10 legs.

Humphries is of course seeking revenge, having lost to Littler 11-7 in last year’s final. He’s already proven he can beat him over this format - having beaten Littler 11-7 in the Players Championship Finals in November. Although the odds may suggest there is, there really isn’t much separating these two so once again I have to go with the value in Luke Humphries to lift his first Premier League title at 11/4, which would go a long way to completing the full collection of majors for Cool Hand.

1.5 units Chris Dobey to finish bottom @ 3/1 

It would be fair to say the Premier League line-up raised a few eyebrows when the eight players to participate were announced. One of those I was more surprised at being included was Chris Dobey. There’s no doubting that reaching his first ever World semi-final went a long, long way towards his inclusion. However, having achieved next to nothing in televised events the rest of 2024, I feel there was probably other players more deserving of a spot than Chris.

Dobey has featured in the line-up on one other occasion in 2023, where he finished seventh out of eight in the league phase, despite getting off to a decent start. I fear this year could be similarly tough for Hollywood, given he’s arguably coming in with weaker form than he did in 2023. Since reaching that World semi final, the Geordie man hasn’t really looked at his best - suffering disappointing defeats to Stephen Bunting, Ryan Searle and Raymond Van Barneveld in his past three events, with averages of 85, 94 and 92.

As I say, barring the World Championship his televised form hasn’t been up to much for a long time. His Pro Tour form was strong in 2024 but that’s not as relatable to the Premier League. This event can be a lonely place for a player if they get off to a bad start and confidence starts to dip. If Dobey doesn’t get off to a good start, then I think it could be a bit of a slog for him. With arguably less experience in these big events than anybody else in the field (apart from Littler who is an exception), 3/1 looks decent value for Dobey to finish bottom of the pile.

Darts Odds

You can find all Sean's latest Darts Betting Tips on our main Insights content hub.