{"id":310960,"date":"2025-12-11T23:45:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-11T23:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/310960\/"},"modified":"2025-12-11T23:45:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T23:45:08","slug":"pdc-world-darts-championship-luke-littler-beats-darius-labanauskas-in-first-round","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/310960\/","title":{"rendered":"PDC World Darts Championship: Luke Littler beats Darius Labanauskas in first round"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Elsewhere on the opening night, 2023 world champion Michael Smith beat Women&#8217;s World Matchplay winner Lisa Ashton 3-0.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Ashton, who had the majority of the crowd on her side, won two of the first three legs but Englishman Smith, 35, then put together a run of seven successive legs on his way to securing a spot in the last 64.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;That first set was nerve-wracking,&#8221; Smith told BBC Radio 5 Live. &#8220;As soon as I walked out, the crowd was on me straight away.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I expected it but I thought if I go 1-0 down, it was going to get worse and worse.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I tried to force things that weren&#8217;t there, but when I took that first set, it was happy days. I started to settle in then and nearly threw it away in the last set, but we&#8217;ll take the win.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">German debutant Arno Merk and Latvia&#8217;s Madars Razma also made it through to round two with 3-1 wins against Belgium&#8217;s Kim Huybrechts and Dutchman Jamai van den Herik respectively.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">A total of 128 players are competing in the World Championship, up from 96 last year, for an increased first prize of \u00a31m.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The first round is scheduled to conclude on Friday, 19 December, with the final taking place on Saturday, 3 January 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elsewhere on the opening night, 2023 world champion Michael Smith beat Women&#8217;s World Matchplay winner Lisa Ashton 3-0.&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":310961,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-310960","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/310961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}