The 19-year-old world champion is in Orlando with girlfriend Faith Millar, and has ruled out any competitive darts until the final week of August.
“Last week was up there with one of my best performances throughout a tournament. I was very happy with it, but now I need to relax, go to America, chill out, not think about darts and come back for the World Series,” Littler said before flying out.
“I won’t be throwing darts in America, I’ll be chilling out.”
The choice comes at a cost. Littler will not defend either of the titles he won in the Southern Hemisphere last summer: the New Zealand Darts Masters in Auckland on August 14-15 and the Australian Darts Masters at the WIN Entertainment Centre in Wollongong on August 21-22. Both were staples of his 2025 diary. Both are gone from his 2026 calendar.
Read also: Palestine FA slams FIFA's "double standards" amid Gaza conflict and governance concerns
Numbers no one had touched since Taylor
The break follows the most statistically dominant Matchplay campaign the tournament has ever seen. Littler’s five-match tournament average of 111.04 obliterated Phil Taylor’s 106.31 from 2010, a benchmark that had stood for a decade and a half.
He beat Gerwyn Price 18-9 in the final at the Winter Gardens, averaging 111.53 in the closing match alone, and hit 66 maximum 180s across the week to break his own competition record of 64 set last year.
“Luke is one in a million,” Price told Sky Sports afterwards. “In that game I missed a couple of opportunities but the bull checkouts, the 167, was a big turning point even though it was early in the game.”
Five majors down, four to go
Skipping the trip Down Under does not derail Littler’s stated ambition: he wants every PDC ranking major on the calendar in one year. Five are already on the mantelpiece, World Championship, UK Open, Masters, Premier League and now the World Matchplay.
Read also: Mercedes will not impose team orders despite Kimi Antonelli's championship lead
“The clean sweep is very much on,” Littler said days after the Blackpool final.
Four are still open: the BoyleSports World Grand Prix in Leicester from September 28 to October 4, the European Championship in Dortmund, the Grand Slam of Darts in Wolverhampton, and the Players Championship Finals in Minehead.
August 25: back to work, with a Minehead spot still to lock down
Competitive action resumes on August 25-26, when Players Championship 27 and 28 take place at the Mattioli Arena in Leicester. Littler needs to bank enough ProTour prize money at those events to lock down a place at the Players Championship Finals, one of the four remaining pieces of the clean-sweep puzzle.
Before then, no darts, no thinking about darts, no defending World Series titles. Just Orlando.
Read also: Verstappen jokes about Red Bull's mystery collapse: 'Maybe I've hit a black cat'
