Who won the 2026 Hungarian Darts Super League?
Borbely did, on Saturday 31 October. Hungary settles its World Championship place in a single day: the season-long league ranks its players, the top eight meet in a knockout playoff, and whoever is left standing flies to London. This year that playoff was staged in the lobby of the MOL Campus, the Budapest tower block that has become the Hungarian federation’s showpiece venue.
He began by losing the opening set of his quarter-final to Gyorgy Jehirszki, took the next two, and from the moment that match turned he did not drop another leg all evening. Patrik Kovacs, the top seed and the man who had won this same playoff a year earlier, was beaten 3-0 in the semi-final. Major, who had come through the other half by seeing off Laszlo Ancsin and then Zsolt Csajbok, was beaten 3-0 in the final.
| Round | Opponent | Sets |
|---|---|---|
| Quarter-final | Gyorgy Jehirszki | 2–1 |
| Semi-final | Patrik Kovacs | 3–0 |
| Final | Nandor Major | 3–0 |
Twenty-one legs without a reply
The streak is what makes this win unusual rather than merely decisive. Beating the defending champion and the other finalist in the same evening would be a good day’s work on its own; doing it without conceding a leg in either match is the sort of run that normally needs a collapse at the other end of the oche. Kovacs is Hungary’s number one and had won the 2025 playoff from a set down against Borbely in the semi-final, so the rematch was the one match of the night with history attached. It lasted three sets.
Borbely is not a complete unknown outside Hungary. He has played European Tour events in Budapest as a host-nation qualifier, and at the 2025 Hungarian Darts Trophy at the MVM Dome he lost 6-4 to Luke Woodhouse while averaging 96.55 against Woodhouse’s 93.92 — outscoring a Tour Card holder and still losing, which is the usual fate of the host-nation qualifier. His 170 finish in that match was the joint-highest checkout of the whole tournament, level with Rob Cross and Niko Springer. The European Tour returned to Budapest again this August, in front of a record crowd for the circuit.
How does Hungary qualify for the World Championship?
Hungary has exactly one guaranteed seat at Alexandra Palace, and the Super League is the only way to it. That matters more than the single number suggests, because Hungarian darts spent a long time with no seat at all. Kovacs was the first Hungarian to throw on the Ally Pally stage in 17 years when he qualified for the 2025/26 tournament, the previous one having appeared in 2008; he lost his first-round match to Callan Rydz. Borbely is the second in that sequence, and the Super League route has now produced a World Championship debutant in each of its two years.
That one place sits inside a much larger structure. Of the 128 players at Alexandra Palace, 80 arrive through the two ranking lists — the top 40 of the PDC Order of Merit and the top 40 not-yet-qualified from the ProTour Order of Merit, a race our guide to the 2027 qualification cut tracks in detail. The other 48 come through international qualifiers, from the Asian Tour to the CDC in North America to the two places Africa now holds for the first time. A national league in Budapest and a tour spanning Asia are, in qualification terms, doing much the same job.
Which World Championship places are still open?
Twelve, and all of them are settled this month. Nine qualifying events remain between 6 and 30 November, and the shape of that list is lopsided: eight regional and national qualifiers hand out a single place each, and then the PDC Tour Card Holder Qualifier on 30 November hands out four on its own. A third of everything still available goes in one afternoon in front of professionals who already hold cards, while entire countries play all season for one seat.
| Date | Qualifier | Places |
|---|---|---|
| 6-8 Nov | Mediterranean Qualifier | 1 |
| 8 Nov | CDC Continental Cup | 1 |
| 8 Nov | PDC Nordic & Baltic Championship | 1 |
| 10-13 Nov | PDC Europe Super League | 1 |
| 13 Nov | Polish Qualifier | 1 |
| 14 Nov | Netherlands & Belgium Qualifier | 1 |
| 28 Nov | South-East Europe Qualifier | 1 |
| 29 Nov | Czechia Qualifier | 1 |
| 30 Nov | PDC Tour Card Holder Qualifier | 4 |
Source: DartsNews remaining-qualifier schedule. The nine events total 12 places.
What Borbely walks into in December
The tournament he has qualified for runs from 11 December 2026 to 3 January 2027 and is the largest in the event’s history in one specific sense: it is the first staged in Alexandra Palace’s Great Hall rather than the main auditorium, lifting capacity above 5,200 a session and the total tickets on offer to a record 180,000. For a player whose biggest previous audience was a European Tour afternoon session in his own city, the jump is considerable.
Financially the place is worth having whatever happens. The 64 first-round losers each take £15,000 from a £5,000,000 fund, which for most international qualifiers is the largest single payday of their year. Raymond Smith arrives by a comparable route after winning the ANZ Premier League, and the full map of who gets in and how is set out in our World Championship qualification guide.
The draw follows the Players Championship Finals later this month, so Borbely will not know his first-round opponent for a few weeks yet. Everything else on the run-in is on our 2026 season calendar.