Who qualified for the Dutch Darts Championship?
The Tour Card Holder Qualifier is the last door into a European Tour weekend for anyone outside the seeded places, and it is brutally short: win through the day and you are in, lose once at the wrong moment and the tournament happens without you. Thursday’s edition in Den Bosch was the final one of the 2026 season, and these were the ten matches that settled it.
| Qualified | Score | Beaten |
|---|---|---|
| Scott Williams | 6–3 | Mike De Decker |
| Michael Smith | 6–4 | David Sharp |
| Nick Kenny | 6–2 | Brendan Dolan |
| Callan Rydz | 6–2 | Mario Vandenbogaerde |
| Mickey Mansell | 6–2 | Tyler Thorpe |
| Max Hopp | 6–2 | Daryl Gurney |
| Owen Bates | 6–2 | Darius Labanauskas |
| Ricardo Pietreczko | 6–3 | Mensur Suljović |
| Stephen Burton | 6–5 | Thibault Tricole |
| James Hurrell | 6–5 | Keane Barry |
Mickey Mansell had the best number of the round, 105.24 against Tyler Thorpe, with Nick Kennynext on 100.06 to see off Brendan Dolan. Smith’s 95.13 was some way behind both and got him exactly the same thing. Two of the ten went to a last leg: Stephen Burton over Thibault Tricole and James Hurrell over Keane Barry.
Smith is the only one of the two still playing
The 2023 world champion has spent this season in a part of the calendar he is not used to, and Thursday was the second time in two months he has had to earn a European Tour start rather than be handed one. He came through the Basel qualifier in July as well, which means he is now entered for both of the events left on the circuit — the Swiss Darts Trophy from 9-11 October and the Dutch Darts Championship at the MECC in Maastricht from 16-18 October.
Gurney is entered for neither. He was not among the ten who came through that July qualifier for Basel, and Hopp removed him from this one. He is not inside the top 16 of the European Tour Order of Merit, which is where the seeds come from, and there is no host-nation route open to a player from Northern Ireland in Switzerland or the Netherlands. Barring a call-up if somebody withdraws, his one-year total is finished at £22,000 with a fortnight of the season still to play.
That is the part of this qualifier that will matter in four weeks. Two men who were indistinguishable on the table at breakfast are not remotely indistinguishable now.
Red bars are inside the top 32 and bound for Dortmund. Source: PDC Europe, European Championship Race standings published 14 September 2026.
What Michael Smith needs from Basel and Maastricht
The European Championship field is settled by the European Tour Order of Merit, a one-year table that counts prize money from the season’s fifteen European Tour events and nothing else. Smith’s 36th place on £22,000 leaves him £11,000 behind Stephen Bunting, who holds the last qualifying place.
Unseeded, he starts both events in the first round, so a run to the quarter-finals means winning three matches and a run to the final means winning five. Set those results against the £230,000 prize ladder and the shape of the problem becomes uncomfortably specific.
| Basel | Maastricht | Added | Total | Clears? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Last 48 | Last 48 | £4,000 | £26,000 | No |
| Last 32 | Last 32 | £7,000 | £29,000 | No |
| Last 16 | Last 16 | £10,000 | £32,000 | No |
| Quarter-final | Last 48 | £10,000 | £32,000 | No |
| Quarter-final | Last 32 | £11,500 | £33,500 | Yes |
| Semi-final | Last 48 | £12,000 | £34,000 | Yes |
| Runner-up | Last 48 | £17,000 | £39,000 | Yes |
Two lines in that table land on exactly the same number and both hurt. Reaching the last 16 at both events is worth £10,000, and so is a quarter-final at one followed by an opening defeat at the other — £32,000, a thousand pounds under the line. Winning three matches in Basel and then one in Maastricht is £11,500 and gets him there. Either way, the order in which the results arrive is irrelevant; only the total is.
And £33,000 is a floor rather than a target. Prize money is added to this table and never taken off it, so Bunting, Dave Chisnall and Cristo Reyes can all move the line upwards over the same fortnight. Smith has to clear a number that is very likely to be higher than £33,000 by the evening of Sunday 18 October, which is when the Dortmund field is known. The live version of the table is on our European Championship race page.
Scott Williams keeps going
Nobody left Den Bosch with a stranger 48 hours than Scott Williams. On Wednesday night he lost a Players Championship 30 final in a deciding leg, dragged it back from 7-5 down, then watched Karel Sedlacek take his eighth match dart of the evening. On Thursday afternoon, in the same city, he beat top seed Mike De Decker 6-3 to book Maastricht. Whatever Wednesday cost him, it did not carry over.
The two-time world champion Peter Wright had the opposite kind of day, beaten by Kenny before the final qualifying round and left with no European Tour darts to throw this season either. Brendan Dolan, Mario Vandenbogaerde, Keane Barry, Thibault Tricole, Tyler Thorpe and Mensur Suljović all got to within one win of Maastricht and no further.
What the Maastricht field looks like now
The Dutch Darts Championship closes the 2026 European Tour at the MECC from 16-18 October, with £230,000 on offer and £35,000 to the winner. One name that was on the entry list is no longer on it: Luke Littler cancelled his Maastricht entry this week as part of his withdrawal from Dutch events, so the world number one will not be in the building.
For the ten who came through on Thursday, the calculation is more basic than Smith’s. A first-round win in Maastricht is worth £3,500 against the £2,000 for losing it, and both figures count towards the two-year Order of Merit that protects a Tour Card. Williams and Burton in particular are playing for considerably more than a weekend in Limburg. The rest of the season is on our 2026 calendar, and how the floor and European Tour tables fit together is set out in our guide to the PDC ProTour.