How did Van den Herik win the final?
There was nothing between them early on, Duff matching the Dutchman leg for leg through the opening exchanges. Then the gap opened, and it opened quickly: van den Herik took control of the second half of the match and Duff never got back on terms, the final ending 9-5 in a race to nine legs.
It was the seventh win van den Herik needed. The 2026 edition scrapped the group stage entirely — the ADC expanded the field from 56 players to 128 and made it a straight bracket played across eight days, which meant seven rounds for the champion and no second chances for anyone. The defending champion Jack Tweddell found that out on day one, losing 5-1 to Alex Williams in the first session of the week. Duff won his own opener 5-3 against Shaun Vernall in that same session.
Who did each finalist beat?
The two routes were close to mirror images. Both men came through the last 16 by 6-4, and across the three rounds from the last 16 to the semi-finals they conceded exactly the same number of legs as each other.
| Round | Van den Herik beat | Score | Duff beat | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Last 16 | Maxim Lemahieu | 6-4 | Raymond Mulvey | 6-4 |
| Quarter-final | Kevin Lankhuizen | 7-5 | Dan Nicholls | 7-1 |
| Semi-final | Lewis Cook | 8-2 | Callum Francis | 8-6 |
| Final | Neil Duff | 9-5 | — | |
Add up the legs they gave away from the last 16 to the semi-finals and the two totals are identical: eleven each. They got there completely differently. Van den Herik was taken to 7-5 by Kevin Lankhuizen in the quarter-finals and then barely broke sweat in the semi, beating Lewis Cook 8-2. Duff did the opposite — he dismissed Dan Nicholls 7-1 in the quarter-final, then had to survive Callum Francis 8-6.
Eleven legs conceded each across the three rounds. Derived from the published scorelines — Source: Darts World, DartsNews, Dartfreakz and Red Dragon
Why does the ADC champion already have a PDC Tour Card?
Here is the oddity at the centre of this result. The ADC Global Championship is the biggest tournament in amateur darts, and the man who just won it is not going to be an amateur much longer. Van den Herik finished fourth on the 2026 PDC Development Tour Order of Merit on £12,250, and that final table was decided by £50— the margin that kept him ahead of Owen Bates and took the last World Championship place on offer.
It brought him more than one prize. The Development Tour’s two-year Tour Cards went to the leading players on the table who had not already qualified by another route, so van den Herik takes a card covering the 2027 and 2028 seasons as well as a place at Alexandra Palace next month. He has been there before and lost in the first round on his debut at the 2026 event. This time he arrives with a professional card in his pocket, and you can track the table that sent him there on our Development Tour Order of Merit page.
None of that came from Portsmouth. The ADC Global Championship awards prize money and nothing else — no card, no Ally Pally place, no ranking points. Van den Herik described this as his last amateur event for the time being, and the £20,000 is the whole of the reward.
Who is Neil Duff, and what comes next for him?
The runner-up has a stronger claim on the word champion than anyone else in the building. Duff won the inaugural WDF World Championship in 2022, beating Thibault Tricole 6-5 in a deciding set to become the first world champion from Northern Ireland. He collects £8,000 here, and then he has rather more important darts to play.
Duff is seeded 15th for the 2026 WDF World Championship, which runs from 27 November to 6 December at the Lakeside Country Club in Frimley Green. When that draw was made last week he came out as the only former champion anywhere in the 48-player Open field, on the opposite side of the bracket to top seed Mitchell Lawrie, with Lewis Gurney or Ron Meulenkamp first up. The full Lakeside field and seeding list explains how he got the 15th spot.
Who has won the ADC Global Championship?
Van den Herik is only the third name on the trophy, after Devon Petersen and Jack Tweddell. It is a short list and a telling one. Petersen is a former PDC Tour Card holder who won a European Tour title, the 2020 German Darts Championship, beating Jonny Clayton 8-3 in the final; Tweddell held this title for most of a year; and the 2026 champion takes a ProTour card in January. “Amateur” is doing a lot of work in the name of this circuit.
Going from 56 players to 128 put another 72 places into the draw and removed the group stage that had previously given the better names a cushion, which is how a defending champion comes to lose on the opening day. The flat prize structure pushes in the same direction — £500 for losing in round one, £20,000 for winning seven matches — and we broke the whole ladder down in our report from the opening day.
What else is on this week
Portsmouth empties and Wolverhampton fills. The Grand Slam of Darts starts on Saturday 14 November, and its 48-player field was only completed when the Nordic & Baltic Championship finished on the same Sunday that van den Herik and Duff were working through the Portsmouth bracket. Lakeside follows at the end of the month, and the World Championship begins at Alexandra Palace on 11 December — with van den Herik in it. Every date is on our darts calendar.