PDC Order of Merit: Humphries Retakes World No.2

How one quarter-final decided second place

Second on the Order of Merit is worth having. If the order holds to December it is the difference between the second seed’s half of the Alexandra Palace draw and the third seed’s, and in a season where nobody is going to catch Luke Littler it is the only position near the top that is genuinely contested.

Van Veen had held it since early August, when he overtook Humphries after the Hildesheim double-header without winning a title. The provisional table published midway through the Grand Prix had the gap at £63,750 in his favour: Van Veen on £1,029,750, Humphries on £966,000. Both men were in the last eight at that point, so both had the £35,000 a quarter-final pays already in the bank.

Van Veen lost his, 3-0 to James Wade, and his total has not moved since. Humphries won his, then the semi-final, then the final. The champion’s cheque was £150,000, and because the £35,000 was already counted, the title added £115,000 to a ranking that had been £63,750 short. That is how a £63,750 deficit became a £51,250 lead over the course of three matches.

It is a narrow margin for a position decided by a major. £51,250 is barely more than the £50,000 a Grand Prix semi-final pays, and Van Veen has the rest of October, Wolverhampton in November and Minehead after that to take it back.

The full PDC Order of Merit top 32

These are the standings published after Leicester, with the gap to the player immediately above each name. The top 32 is the band that matters most: it is the seeded group at the World Championship and the automatic-entry group for most of the majors.

Wade is fifth, £2,250 ahead of Jonny Clayton after a run to his first Grand Prix semi-final since 2014. Niels Zonneveld, who beat Josh Rock and Gary Anderson on his Grand Prix debut, is 29th. And the man who knocked Littler out in the first round, Luke Woodhouse, is 18th.

Why Littler’s lead is the strangest number on the list

Littler lost 2-1 to Woodhouse on the opening night and left Leicester with £7,500, the smallest cheque the tournament pays. He is still £2,043,000 clear of second place.

Put that lead next to the rest of the table and it stops looking like a gap and starts looking like a different competition. £2,043,000 is more than any other player in the world has earned across the entire two-year window — nearly double Humphries’ £1,081,000. The distance from first to second is also more than two and a half times the distance from second all the way down to 32nd, which spans £803,000.

Why Mike De Decker dropped out of the top 32 without playing

Mike De Decker won the 2024 World Grand Prix, beating Humphries 6-4 in the final at the same venue for his first televised title. It was worth £120,000. That money came off his ranking when the 2026 edition was played, and he had not qualified for the 32-player field in Leicester, so there was nothing to replace it with.

He is now 33rd on £274,000, £4,000 behind Ritchie Edhouse in 32nd. His standing in the seeded band had been resting almost entirely on a single week in October 2024, and that week has now expired.

This is the part of the Order of Merit that catches people out. The table is a rolling two-year total, and prize money leaves it when the tournament that paid it is staged again. Qualify and go out early and you lose the difference; fail to qualify and you lose the lot. De Decker lost the lot, in the one week of the year he could least afford to.

The arithmetic was harsher than a straight defence, too, because the Grand Prix has grown. The 2024 fund was £600,000 and the 2026 fund £750,000, so every round now pays more than the round De Decker was defending it against.

What the top 32 is actually for

Thirty-second place is the line that decides who is seeded at the World Championship. Seeds enter at the second round at Alexandra Palace and are placed in the draw rather than drawn into it; everybody else qualifies another way and plays from round one. The band also carries automatic entry into most of the majors, which is why a drop from 32nd to 33rd costs more than one place suggests.

Worth being precise about one thing, because the two rankings get confused: Tour Card retention is not decided here. That runs off the one-year ProTour Order of Merit, where the top 64 at the end of the season keep their cards. The two-year table decides seeding and entry, not status.

What moves it next

The Swiss Darts Trophy in Basel on 9-11 October is the next ranking event, a 48-player event with £230,000 on offer. Maastricht follows with the last European Tour event of the season, and the European Championship takes over Dortmund from 22 October. Every date is on the 2026 darts calendar.

Dortmund, Wolverhampton and Minehead all come before the World Championship, so the gaps in the middle of the table — where twelve players from seventh to eighteenth are covered by £104,000 — will not survive the autumn in their current order. The live PDC Order of Merit updates after every one of them.