Challenge Tour 2026 Final Order of Merit: Four Reach Ally Pally

Joe Hunt wins Event 23 and takes the Order of Merit

Hunt beat Jack Tweddell 5-1 in the first of Sunday’s two finals, averaging 99.48 to Tweddell’s 93.32. It is his fifth Challenge Tour title of 2026, after Events 2 and 3 in Milton Keynes in January, Event 14 in Hildesheim in May and Event 22 on Saturday evening. Five titles from twenty-four events is more than a fifth of the season, on a tour where thirteen other men won exactly one.

The weekend reads oddly against how it started. Hunt arrived in Wigan second on £13,050 and £2,100 behind Derek Coulson. He left first on £20,400 and £4,900 clear. Four events produced a semi-final, two titles and a last-16 defeat, which is £7,350 — more than a third of his entire season earned in two days. Coulson, across the same four events, earned £350.

There is a neater way to put the size of that total. A Challenge Tour event pays £3,000 to the winner and then £2,000, £1,000, £750, £350, £250 and £100 down to the last 64, which comes to exactly £20,000 shared between 64 paid places. Hunt, on his own, finished the year £400 above what one whole event pays out.

Patrik Williams wins the last event of the season

The final tournament of the 2026 Challenge Tour went to Patrik Williams, who beat Jack Aldridge 5-3 in the Event 24 final, averaging 94.78 to Aldridge’s 78.89. It is his first title on the tour, and the £3,000 lifted him to fourteenth on £6,600 — from outside the top sixteen to inside it, on the last afternoon, which is worth a funded place in the Q-School Final Stage.

Both men beaten in Sunday’s finals did well out of losing them. Tweddell’s £2,000 moved him from thirteenth to eighth and Aldridge’s runner-up cheque, added to a quarter-final in Event 23, moved him from sixteenth to seventh. The top eight without a Tour Card take first-round places at the 2027 UK Open, so two players who did not win anything on Sunday walked out of Wigan with one.

The final 2026 Challenge Tour Order of Merit

The table below is the season as it finished, with what each player added on Sunday. It doubles as a check on the figures: every one of those movements has to be a legal combination of the prize ladder across two events, and set against the post-Event 22 table we published on Saturday night, all of them are. Coulson’s £0 is legal too — the ladder pays 64 places, and a first-round defeat in a larger field pays nothing.

Why three World Championship places sent four players

The Challenge Tour holds three places at the 2026/27 World Championship, and they go to the leading three finishers who have not already qualified by another route. That qualifier matters this year. Hunt has a place through the ProTour race, so the Challenge Tour does not need to give him one, and his place passes down the table.

So the three go to Coulson in second, Tommy Morris in third and Daniel Klose in fourth. Add Hunt and four Challenge Tour men will be at Alexandra Palace in December. Every other way into the 128-player field is set out in our guide to World Championship qualification.

The pass-down also moves where the season was actually decided. Morris and Klose finished £200 apart, which is less than a last-32 cheque, and it settled nothing at all — both are in. The gap that mattered was the one below them, and it was almost fourteen times as wide.

Derek Coulson won a Tour Card without winning anything at Wigan

Coulson took nothing out of Event 21, £350 out of Event 22 and nothing at all on Sunday. He still finished second, £3,050 clear of Morris, and second is a two-year PDC Tour Cardfor 2027 and 2028. At 58, he has spent the year accumulating last-16 and quarter-final money rather than trophies, and a weekend that rewarded hot afternoons gave him almost nothing — which turned out not to matter, because he had banked enough of it between January and August.

Hunt’s card was mathematically safe before Sunday started, which we set out on Saturday night, and his Grand Slam of Darts place comes with finishing top. Both men will have a card in January for the first time; both will also be at Ally Pally in December. Hunt’s 2026 has now produced a Tour Card, a Grand Slam debut and a World Championship debut from the same twelve months.

Archie Self, fifth, with the best darts of the weekend

Self won Event 21 on Saturday at 16 years old with a 104.49 average, the best of the four events. He finished the season fifth on £9,500, £2,750 short of Klose and the last World Championship place, and £6,000 short of a card. The £100 that separated him from Coulson’s card total on Saturday night was never the real margin; by Sunday evening it was six thousand.

He does not leave empty-handed. Fifth is inside the top sixteen, which funds a Final Stage place at Q-School, and inside the top eight, which is a first-round place at the 2027 UK Open. He turns up at Q-School in January as the only 16-year-old in the field with a Challenge Tour title and a 104 average on his record from the same weekend.

A tour that produced seventeen different champions

Twenty-four events produced seventeen different champions. Only Hunt with five, and Coulson, Klose and Self with two each, won more than a single title. Morris managed the strangest season of all: third on the final table, a World Championship place secured, and not one title in twenty-four attempts. He lost the Event 21 final to Self 5-1 on Saturday.

The Challenge Tour Order of Merit is now closed for the year and the tour’s business moves to Q-School in January, with the top sixteen funded into the Final Stage. Before that, the four men above have a World Championship to prepare for, and the two Tour Cards that were still open on Saturday morning have names on them.