UK Open 2027 Amateur Qualifiers: All 16 Venues and Dates

How do you qualify for the UK Open as an amateur?

You win your local club’s qualifier. That is the whole mechanism in 2027. The PDC has handed one UK Open place to each of a set of venues signed up to its in the Community programme, and each venue runs the competition for that place itself — a run of pre-qualifier nights across the winter, then a single finals day that decides who goes.

It is a deliberately small funnel. A venue like The Portland Social Club has five pre-qualifier dates feeding its finals day; Chaukees in Ellesmere Port has seven. Whoever survives their venue’s finals day is in the draw at Butlin’s alongside the Tour Card holders, with no further round to get through.

Where are the 2027 UK Open amateur qualifiers?

Thirteen venues in England each decide a place of their own. Scotland, Wales and Ireland work differently: each runs a series of qualifier nights spread across several venues that feeds into one national finals day, so each nation sends a single qualifier. Thirteen English places plus three national places is the 16 the PDC has confirmed, and the finals-day calendar below adds up to exactly that.

The Scottish qualifier nights run at the Alness & Kinross Bowling Club in Alness, the British Legion Club in Inverness and Lossiemouth Football Club, before the finals day at the Imperial Bar in Inverness. Ireland’s series takes in The Holy Cross in Waterford, Bradley’s Bar in Galway, St Kevin’s GAA Club in Kildare and Christy’s Bar in Listowel, which also stages the finals day. Wales keeps everything at Kings Sports Bar in Newport: four qualifier nights in January, then a finals day on 30 January.

When is each place decided?

Almost nothing is settled before the new year. One place is gone by mid-January, but the series is weighted hard towards the back end — the two February finals days alone account for 11 of the 16 tickets, and they fall on consecutive days.

That clustering matters if you are planning a campaign. A player knocked out at Somercotes on 16 January has the rest of the series still open to them in theory, but the entry lists are venue-by-venue, and the two biggest finals days are three weeks away.

How do you enter?

Directly with the venue. The PDC published a contact email for each English venue and a single address for each of the Scottish, Welsh and Irish series, and pointed players towards the full rules on its own rankings and rules pages rather than running a central entry system for these events. That is the opposite of how you enter the 2027 Qualifying Schools, where entry goes through the PDC’s own system with a fixed fee and a hard deadline.

The announcement does not restate who counts as an amateur, so check the published rules before you pay anything — for 2025 the PDPA’s entry notice set the test as being 16 or over, not holding a PDC Tour Card and not already being qualified through a PDC secondary tour.

What changed from last year’s amateur route?

The destination is the same and the number of places is the same. What has gone is the central event. For the 2026 UK Open the amateur places were split between PDC in the Community qualifiers and Rileys Amateur Qualifiers; for 2025 the PDPA’s entry notice had most of the places going to central PDC Amateur Qualifiers in Milton Keynes and Wigan, with a short list of community venues alongside them. The 2027 series contains neither a Rileys qualifier nor a central PDC Amateur Qualifier.

For a player, the practical difference is geography and repetition. A central qualifier meant one long day in a large field, often a long way from home. Sixteen venue-owned places mean a shorter field, several attempts at the pre-qualifier stage, and a finals day you can probably walk to — but only if one of the 16 venues happens to be near you. There is nothing in the north-east, nothing in Yorkshire, and the Scottish nights sit almost entirely around the Moray Firth.

What do you walk into if you win one?

The UK Open is the one major with no seeds and no protection. Nobody in the field is ranked into a kind half of the draw, and from the last 32 onwards each round is drawn at random once the previous one has finished — the reason it gets called the FA Cup of darts. Our guide to the UK Open format sets out the staggered entry in full.

On the 2026 structure, amateur qualifiers started in round one over the best of 11 legs, against the Tour Card holders ranked 97-128 on the PDC Order of Merit, with the top 32 not entering until round four. The PDC has not yet published the round structure or the field composition for 2027, so treat that as the shape of the thing rather than a confirmed bracket. The other non-card routes — the Challenge Tourand Development Tour Orders of Merit — are separate from this series and are already settled for the coming season.

The dates that matter

Three to put in the diary: 7 November 2026, when the series opened at The Portland Social Club; 7 February 2027, by which point all 16 qualifiers will be known; and 5-7 March 2027 at Butlin’s Minehead Resort. Between the last of those finals days and the first dart at the UK Open there are 26 days.

The full 2027 season is on our darts calendar, and the rankings that decide which round the Tour Card holders enter at are on the live PDC Order of Merit.