How Manby won Players Championship 31
The final was over early. Manby averaged 99.72 to Kuivenhoven’s 84.76, and the Dutchman never scored well enough to make the second half of it competitive. Kuivenhoven had already been runner-up once this season, losing the Players Championship 22 final to Rob Cross 8-5 in Wigan in June, and he is still waiting.
Manby’s best darts came three rounds earlier. He put 112.16 past Dominik Grüllich in the last 16 to win 6-3, the highest average anyone managed in Den Bosch all day, having opened the morning with 104.01 in a 6-1 win over the man who won here five weeks ago, Karel Sedlacek.
| Round | Opponent | Format | Score | Manby average |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Round 1 | Karel Sedlacek | First to 6 | 6–1 | 104.01 |
| Round 2 | Dennie Olde Kalter | First to 6 | 6–5 | — |
| Round 3 | Adam Leek | First to 6 | 6–4 | — |
| Round 4 | Dominik Grüllich | First to 6 | 6–3 | 112.16 |
| Quarter-final | Alan Soutar | First to 6 | 6–3 | — |
| Semi-final | Beau Greaves | First to 7 | 7–5 | — |
| Final | Maik Kuivenhoven | First to 8 | 8–2 | 99.72 |
The semi-final he nearly lost
Between the 112 and the trophy came the one match Manby played badly. Beau Greaves trailed 2-6, won three legs in a row to get to 5-6, and had a dart to force a decider before Manby closed it out 7-5. She had already beaten Thomas Lovely, Niels Zonneveld, Keane Barry and Kevin Doets to get there, the last two both in deciding legs.
Greaves taking a Players Championship semi-final place is not the novelty it would have been a year ago. She won Players Championship 11 in Milton Keynes in April, beating Michael Smith 8-7 to become the first woman to win a PDC ranking title, and has since added a maiden European Tour win. The £6,500 she collected on Wednesday was the joint-third biggest cheque of the day.
The other semi-final went the distance: Kuivenhoven beat Dirk van Duijvenbode 7-6, winning the deciding leg in 14 darts.
The 21st different winner in 31 events
Thirty-one Players Championships have been played in 2026 and Manby is the twenty-first different player to win one. That number is doing two things at once. Wessel Nijman has taken six of the thirty-one on his own and Luke Humphries three, which is the concentration you would expect from a floor circuit; the other sixteen titles have gone to sixteen different players, which is not.
Manby is one of sixteen single-title winners this season. Source: DartsNews 2026 Players Championship results index; Wikipedia 2026 PDC Players Championship series.
Yesterday this site noted that eight of the world’s top 16 had skipped the Den Bosch double-header, and that the two events would therefore be decided inside exactly the band of the floor table where Minehead places are still at stake. A 21-year-old in his first full season on the ProTour beat a man in his second Players Championship final of the season. That is the shape an event takes when the top of the game stays at home.
What it does to the Minehead cut
The top 64 of the Players Championship Order of Merit go to the Players Championship Finals, and the bottom of that list went into Wednesday looking like this.
| Player | Position | Prize money |
|---|---|---|
| Henry Coates | 61st | £30,000 |
| Gary Anderson | 62nd | £29,750 |
| Mike De Decker | Last qualifying place | £29,250 |
| Scott Williams | Last qualifying place | £29,250 |
| Mario Vandenbogaerde | First out | £28,750 |
Mike De Decker was one of the two men sharing the last qualifying place, and he is the one who did something about it. He beat Madars Razma, Niko Springer and Ricardo Pietreczko before losing 6-2 to Kuivenhoven in the quarter-finals, and a quarter-final is worth £4,000. That takes him to £33,250 and past Gary Anderson, who sat 62nd on roughly £29,750 and was not entered in Den Bosch — a cut line you cannot defend from home.
Manby’s own £15,000 is the bigger cheque by some distance, and it counts twice: once on the Players Championship Order of Merit that decides Minehead, and once on the main PDC Order of Merit that decides everything else. The gap between 61st and 64th on that first list is £750.
A Grand Slam place that was not there on Tuesday
The Grand Slam of Darts awards no places on the PDC Order of Merit. Televised finalists get in, then the youth, development and regional routes, then European Tour winners, then Players Championship winners — up to a ceiling of 40 pre-qualified players, with the rest decided at the Tour Card Holder Qualifier. Any new Players Championship winner who is not already in takes one of those places, and Manby was not already in. He had appeared on none of the published qualifier lists before Wednesday.
So he goes to WV Active Aldersley from 14 to 22 November, for a £1 million tournament and the Eric Bristow Trophy. The Grand Slam is the one major with no Order of Merit route into it, which is why a single Wednesday on the floor in the Netherlands is worth more to a player in Manby’s position than a steady season would be.
What is next
Players Championship 32 is at the same venue on Thursday, with the same depleted entry list. After that only events 33 and 34 remain, at the Mattioli Arena in Leicester on 4 and 5 November, and whoever is 64th on the Monday morning after those is going to Minehead. The rest of the season has one week of floor darts left in it, and then the Grand Slam reopens the television run on 14 November.
Prize money from Den Bosch feeds the main ranking list too. Track where it lands on the live PDC Order of Merit.