What happens in Leicester on Friday
The Tour Card Holder Qualifier is the least glamorous event on the PDC calendar and one of the most consequential. It is staged at the Mattioli Arena the morning after the season’s final Players Championship, in the same hall, for many of the same players — except that the entry list is defined by exclusion. Only Tour Card holders who have failed to qualify for the Grand Slam of Dartsby any other route are allowed to enter, so the better a player’s year has been, the less likely they are to be in the room.
Winners go to Wolverhampton on 14 November for a £1,000,000 televised major. Losers finish their floor season there, with only the World Championship cut-off still ahead of them. There is no second chance after Friday, because this is the route that exists specifically to fill whatever the other routes have left behind.
How many places are available at the qualifier?
The honest answer on the morning of 5 November is that it is not fixed. The PDC’s published criteria build the field from the top down: up to 24 places to finalists of televised events over a rolling 12-month period, up to 12 more to youth, Development Tour, Challenge Tour, Women’s Series and regional champions, and then whatever is required to reach 40 to European Tour and Players Championship winners, taken in PDC Order of Merit order. The Tour Card Holder Qualifier takes everything still outstanding after that.
| Route | Places | How they are awarded |
|---|---|---|
| Televised event finalists | Up to 24 | Finalists of PDC televised events over a rolling 12-month period |
| Additional qualifiers | Up to 12 | Youth, Development Tour, Challenge Tour, Women’s Series and regional champions |
| European Tour and Players Championship winners | Fills the field to 40 | Event winners not already in, taken in PDC Order of Merit order |
| Tour Card Holder Qualifier | Everything left | One day in Leicester, 6 November — open to Tour Card holders not already qualified |
Work that arithmetic through on a tidy year and you get the number the criteria were written around: 24 plus 12 leaves 12, four of which go to event winners to reach 40, and eight to the qualifier. Eight is the figure quoted when the criteria were published. It has not stayed there.
Source: PDC 2026 Grand Slam of Darts qualification criteria. The qualifier total rises whenever a direct place goes unused.
The overflow rule, and why it matters this week
Buried in the criteria is the clause that makes Friday unpredictable. European Tour and Players Championship titles only create a Grand Slam place if the winner is not already in the field. When an event is won by a player who has qualified elsewhere, the place is not retired — it is moved across to the Tour Card Holder Qualifier, so the field still reaches 48.
That has already settled one seat this season, and it is the clearest illustration of the rule working. Both the winner and the runner-up of the European Championship qualify for the Grand Slam, and Ross Smith beat Martin Schindler 11-8 in the Dortmund final — except Smith was already in the Wolverhampton field through the World Series of Darts Finals. His title therefore used up no new place, and the one it would otherwise have taken stayed in the pool for event winners. The beneficiary, as DartsNews set out at the time, was Henry Coates, the lowest-ranked ProTour winner of 2026, whose Players Championship 25 title had left him waiting on other people’s results. Coates is in Wolverhampton because somebody else’s place was not needed.
What Wednesday’s result did to the number
Apply the same rule to this week in Leicester. Luke Humphries beat Niels Zonneveld 8-4 to win Players Championship 33 on Wednesday, a fourth floor title of his season. Humphries has been in the Grand Slam field since he won the World Grand Prix. Under the published criteria his win created no new qualifier, which means the place it would have carried moves to Friday instead.
Players Championship 34, the last ProTour event of 2026, is being played today at the same venue, and it works the same way. An unqualified winner takes a place directly to Wolverhampton. A winner who is already in sends another seat down to the Tour Card Holder Qualifier. The players entering Friday’s draw will learn how many places they are chasing at roughly the moment they find out who won the night before.
Who is still waiting
The PDC put the field at 36 of 48 on 2 November, after Charlie Manby’s first PDC ranking title at Players Championship 31 and Raymond Smith’s ANZ Premier League win in Brisbane were added. Jonny Clayton, who was missing from the field when we looked at the qualification picture in early October and had come up one leg short, is now among the confirmed names. Gary Anderson was the other high-profile absentee in that October update, and Friday is the kind of day that exists for players in exactly that position: a Tour Card, a thin year by their own standards, and one morning to fix it.
Order of Merit position buys nothing here. The 24 televised places reward finals, the 12 additional places reward youth and regional circuits, the next tier rewards titles, and Friday rewards whoever wins six or seven legs at a time in a sports hall. A former world champion and a player ranked outside the top 100 would enter on identical terms.
What a place is actually worth
All 48 players are paid, which is unusual for a PDC major and makes the qualifier more valuable than its status suggests. Third place in a group pays £5,000, second in a group £12,500, and the ladder runs up through £20,000 for the last 16 to £200,000 and the Eric Bristow Trophy for the champion. The Grand Slam is a full ranking event, so a player who comes through Friday and loses all three group games still adds £5,000 to a two-year Order of Merit that decides World Championship seeding.
Wolverhampton then runs from 14 to 22 November at WV Active Aldersley, with the 48 players split into 16 groups of three for the round-robin stage — the first year of the expanded format, and the 20th staging of the event. The rest of the season’s run-in, including the Players Championship Finals and the World Championship at Alexandra Palace, is on the calendar.