Players Championship Finals 2026 Draw: Price Seeded 52nd

How is the Players Championship Finals draw made?

By arithmetic, which makes the word “draw” generous. There is no randomness in it at all. Every one of the 64 qualifiers is seeded by their final position on the Players Championship Order of Merit, and the bracket then pairs seed n with seed 65 minus n, straight down the sheet: 1 against 64, 2 against 63, and on to 32 against 33. Check all 32 ties in the table below and not one of them breaks the pattern.

That is why the interesting question at Minehead is never who got lucky. It is what the seeding list looks like — and this year it looks like nothing else in the sport, because the table behind it counts prize money from the 34 Players Championship floor events of one season and refuses to count anything else.

Players Championship Finals 2026 draw in full

Six former world champions, and three of them in the fifties

Gerwyn Price is the 52nd seed and plays Sebastian Bialecki, the 13th. Gary Anderson is 54th and plays Karel Sedlacek, the 11th. Michael Smith is 56th and plays Ross Smith, the ninth. Five world titles sit on the wrong side of those three ties.

Price withdrew from his planned non-PDC exhibition dates in late October, as we reported when he cleared his diary into 2027, and spent much of the autumn away from the floor. Anderson only secured his place in the last week of the series. Michael Smith has not won a ranking event in some time, and his most notable floor appearance of 2026 was on the losing end of history.

That night in Milton Keynes in April is the best single answer to anyone who thinks these seedings are an accident. Beau Greaves became the first woman to win a PDC ranking title at Players Championship 11, and she did it by beating Rob Cross 6-5 in the quarter-finals, Anderson 7-1 in the semi-finals and Michael Smith 8-7 in the final, finishing the last leg on 142. Those three men are seeded 22nd, 54th and 56th here. Greaves is the eighth seed and makes her Minehead debut against Christian Kist.

The two absent world champions matter as much as the six present ones. Peter Wright did not make the cut, and neither did the defending champion Luke Littler, who played two of the 34 events and finished 130th on £10,500. Nathan Aspinall and Josh Rock are also missing.

The ties worth clearing the Friday evening for

Ross Smith v Michael Smith is the headline. The PDC notes it is their first televised meeting since January 2023, and it arrives with the pair heading in opposite directions: Ross Smith won the European Championship in Dortmund last month and is seeded ninth, while the 2023 world champion comes in 56th.

Charlie Manby v Martin Schindler is the same inversion in miniature. Schindler lost that Dortmund final 11-8 and is seeded 49th at Minehead; Manby, who won Players Championship 31, is 16th.

Wessel Nijman v Henry Coatesputs the season’s most prolific floor player against the man who squeezed into 64th place by £250. Nijman won six Players Championship titles in 2026 and topped the table on £160,500.

Chris Dobey v Mike De Decker pairs the second seed, who threw a nine-darter on the final day of the series, with the 2024 World Grand Prix champion. And Maik Kuivenhoven v Daryl Gurney hands the 19th seed a former Minehead champion: Gurney won this title in 2018, beating Michael van Gerwen in the final.

Who could meet in the second round at Minehead?

Because the pairings are published in bracket order, the second-round meetings are already readable. The winner of Bialecki against Price goes on to meet the winner of Gian van Veen against Jeffrey de Graaf, so Price could face van Veen in round two. At the other end of the sheet, Anderson or Sedlacek runs into Rob Cross or Mickey Mansell.

One eighth of the draw is heavier than the rest. Read the bracket order through and the section running from Dobey’s tie down to Jonny Clayton’s contains Michael van Gerwen, a seven-time champion of this event, Luke Humphries, who won it in 2023 and 2024, and Dobey as the second seed. Van Gerwen and Dobey could meet in the last 16, and Humphries is on the far side of the same quarter-final. Two of the three men who have lifted this trophy since 2022 are in one eighth of the bracket, and they cannot both reach the semi-finals.

Humphries is the seventh seed off four floor titles from only 11 entries, a return that says something about how lightly the seasoned television players now treat the series. Tommy Morris, who has no Tour Card and beat Humphries to win the last event of the season, is seeded 21st and plays Callan Rydz.

Format, prize money and schedule

Round one is played on Friday 27 November, rounds two and three across Saturday’s double session, and the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final on Sunday 29 November, alongside the Winmau World Youth Championship final between Cam Crabtree and Jan Schmidt. Coverage is on ITV4 in the UK, with DAZN, Viaplay and PDCTV carrying it elsewhere and the Stage Two matches on PDCTV on the Friday and Saturday. The full schedule of play has not been released.

The prize fund is £750,000, up from £600,000, with £130,000 to the champion. Opening rounds are best of 11 legs and the distance more than doubles at the last 16 — our guide to the Players Championship Finals format sets out the round-by-round structure and why that step decides the tournament. Everything else left in the 2026 season is on the darts calendar.

Minehead is the last PDC event before Alexandra Palace, which gives the low seeds an unusually sharp incentive. A world champion seeded 52nd with three weeks until the World Championship has rather more riding on a best-of-11 on a Friday afternoon than the number next to his name suggests.