Players Championship Darts: How the Floor Events Work
How Players Championship darts works: one-day PDC ranking events for the 128 tour card holders, played on the floor in England and Germany without a paying crowd.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished PDC & Major Tournaments23 min read
- Field
- 128 tour card holders
- Rounds to win
- 7
- Matches in a full draw
- 127
- Finals field
- 64 players
Robin Park in Wigan, nine o'clock on a weekday morning. Sixteen dartboards stand in a line across a leisure-centre hall, each with an oche, a small table and a scoring tablet, and more than a hundred professionals are in the building waiting for a board. Nobody has bought a ticket. By late evening one of them will have won seven matches, a ranking tournament and a winner's cheque, and the next morning most of them will be back to do it again.
That is a Players Championship. In the simplest terms, it is a one-day ranking tournament run by the Professional Darts Corporation and open only to the 128 players who hold a PDC tour card. It is a 128-player knockout played from first round to final in a single day, in legs rather than sets, on a block of about sixteen boards with no paying crowd. The PDC staged 34 of them in each of the 2025 and 2026 seasons, mostly in England with a block in Germany, and they are the backbone of the professional circuit known as the Pro Tour.
What a Players Championship is, and what it is not
Television gives a distorted picture of professional darts. The events that are broadcast, the World Championship, the Premier League and the other majors, account for a minority of the tournaments a tour card holder plays in a year. Most of the professional calendar is made up of floor events, and the Players Championships are the largest group of them.
A Players Championship is not a single tournament. It is a series: Players Championship 1, Players Championship 2 and so on, each a separate ranking event with its own winner and its own prize fund. The numbering runs through the year, and a player who wins Players Championship 17 has won exactly the same kind of event as the winner of Players Championship 3. There is no qualifying for it beyond holding a card. That makes the floor the one place where all 128 professionals meet on equal terms several times a month.
It is also not the same thing as the Players Championship Finals, the televised event in November that collects the leading floor performers of the year into a single tournament. The names cause confusion every season. The floor events are the regular season; the Finals are the play-off, and they have their own section below.
Why "Pro Tour" and "floor" mean the same thing here
Two terms are used for this layer of the sport. "Pro Tour" is the PDC's name for its ranking events outside the televised majors: the Players Championships and the European Tour together. "Floor event" describes the setting, boards on the floor of a hall rather than a stage before a crowd. The European Tour is played on stages with spectators in German, Dutch and other European arenas, as our guide to the PDC European Tour explains, so in practice "floor event" means a Players Championship.
- 128Tour card holders eligible
- 7Rounds to win the event
- 8Legs needed to win the final
- 127Matches played in a full draw
The structure of a single floor event. The final is the one match length the results pages record consistently; the PDC fixes the earlier distances in its tour rules for each season.
One day from registration to the final
Players arrive early. Registration closes in the morning and the draw is already published, so a player knows his first-round opponent and his board number before he has finished his coffee. First-round matches start together across the hall, and the event moves at the speed of its slowest board.
A full 128-player draw requires 127 matches to produce a winner, one for each player knocked out. The first round alone is 64 matches, which is four on each of sixteen boards. The first round can be completed in a couple of hours on that basis, and the event shrinks through the afternoon: 32 matches in the second round, 16 in the third, then eight, four, two and one.
| Round | Players | Matches | Typical setting |
|---|---|---|---|
| First round | 128 | 64 | Every board in the hall in use |
| Second round | 64 | 32 | Most boards still running |
| Third round | 32 | 16 | Boards begin to fall silent |
| Last 16 | 16 | 8 | A handful of boards, often all streamed |
| Quarter-finals | 8 | 4 | The streamed boards |
| Semi-finals | 4 | 2 | The streamed boards |
| Final | 2 | 1 | A single board, usually in the evening |
The winner has played seven matches in one day, the last of them to eight legs. Count the legs and a winning run comes to several dozen, which is a lot of darts for a single day, comparable to a full session at the World Championship. The floor rewards stamina and concentration as much as peak scoring, and a player in his seventh match of the day is throwing with an arm that has already been working for twelve hours.
Match lengths, and why the page does not number every round
Players Championship finals are played to eight legs, the best of fifteen, and have been for several seasons: the results of every event in the series are recorded that way. The earlier rounds are shorter, and the distance for each of them is set by the PDC in the tour rules for the season. Those rules have been revised more than once, so this guide gives the figure it can stand behind and leaves the earlier rounds described rather than numbered. Anyone who needs the exact distances for a particular season should take them from that year's tour rules.
What does not change is the kind of match. The rules of each leg are the ordinary 501 rules, straight start and double to finish, with no sudden-death or two-clear-legs provision of the sort the World Matchplay uses. And every match on the floor is short by the standards of a televised major, where the later rounds run to several times the length of a floor final. A player throwing well for twenty minutes can beat anyone in a short race, which is part of why floor events produce so many different winners across a season.
Practice boards, waiting and the long evening
The hardest part of a floor day is often the waiting. A player who wins his first-round match quickly may have an hour before his second-round opponent is known, because the match that decides it is still going on a board at the other end of the hall. Practice boards are set up for players to stay warm, and most use them, but there is a limit to how long anyone can practise without tiring. The skill of managing the gaps, eating at the right moment, keeping the arm loose without wearing it out, is learned on the floor and rarely discussed on television.
The final usually comes in the evening, ten or twelve hours after the first darts. By then the hall has emptied of most of the players, many of whom have driven home or gone back to the hotel ahead of the next day's event. The last match is played in front of officials, a few players and the camera, and the winner walks off with his trophy and his cheque into a nearly silent building. It is about as far from a stage final at Alexandra Palace as professional darts gets.
How the draw is seeded, and where byes come from
The draw is not a free-for-all. Players are seeded so that the leading names are spread across the bracket and kept apart until the later rounds, and the seeding is taken from a rolling one-year list of Pro Tour prize money rather than from the two-year Order of Merit that seeds the televised majors. That distinction is worth holding on to: a player's floor seeding reflects what he has done on the floor over the past twelve months, not what he did at Alexandra Palace two years ago. The PDC applies the rule to every event in the series in the same way, and the draw is made and published before play begins.
The seeding is a protection, not a guarantee. A top seed's first-round opponent is a player near the bottom of the ranking list, but at the floor level the gap between them is narrow. A tour card holder ranked 120th has, by definition, won a card at Q-School or kept one through the ranking, and he can average in the high 90s on a good day. The leading names lose early rounds on the floor far more often than they do on television.
Byes and reserves
Not every tour card holder enters every event. Players withdraw for illness, injury, family reasons or simply because they have chosen to rest. When that happens, the place in the draw does not stay empty if it can be filled.
The PDC fills it with a reserve. Reserves are taken in order from the Challenge Tour Order of Merit, the list of the players who narrowly missed a card and spent the year on the secondary circuit. A reserve gets the chance to play a ranking event, and with it the chance to earn prize money that counts on the Order of Merit. For a player trying to win a card at the next Q-School, a good run as a reserve is worth a great deal.
When the reserve list cannot fill every gap, the empty places become byes. A player drawn against an empty place goes straight through to the second round without playing. He receives the prize money for reaching the second round, which is a small but real reward for having entered. In a season with many withdrawals, byes are common in the first round, and the number of matches played falls below the 127 of a full draw. The structure of the tour card system and its reserve lists is set out in our guide to the Development Tour and Challenge Tour.
Players marking each other's matches
On the floor, there is no professional caller for most matches. The players do it themselves.
The rule is simple. The loser of a match stays at the board to mark the next match played on it, scoring it on the tablet and calling the scores. The player who has just been knocked out of the event therefore spends the next half-hour watching two of his rivals play. It is an old custom of the sport, inherited from club and county darts, and it survives on the floor because it is practical: with sixteen boards running at once and 127 matches to get through, the PDC could not supply a professional caller for every match without a very large staff.
It also has a certain fairness. Every player marks matches and every player is marked. A player who wins all day never marks a match, which is the reward. A player who loses in the first round marks one.
What a marker actually does
The job has three parts. The marker calls each visit's score aloud, so both players hear it. He enters it on the tablet, which subtracts it and shows the remaining total. And when a player is on a finish, the marker confirms that the dart landed in the double that ends the leg. A good marker is quiet between darts, stands well out of the thrower's line of sight and does not react to the scores. A poor one fidgets, comments or calls slowly, and players notice.
Some players welcome the duty as a chance to study an opponent they may meet later in the season. Others find it a long half-hour after a defeat they would rather leave behind. Either way, the custom keeps the professional floor tied to the club and county game where most of the players learned it, a link that runs back through superleague and county matches to the pub.
Disputes and the officials
Marking is done honestly, almost without exception, because every player knows he will be marked by someone else later in the day. But disputes do happen: whether a dart was in the bed or on the wire, whether a score was entered correctly, whether a player threw from behind the oche. When one arises, the tournament officials and the Darts Regulation Authority's representatives rule on it. The marker's job is to score, not to decide.
The scoring tablets help. Each score entered appears in the live statistics feed, so a mistake that goes unnoticed at the board can be noticed by someone watching remotely. Disputes are rare and almost always resolved within minutes.
Wigan, Leicester, Milton Keynes and Hildesheim
The halls change with the calendar, but a few venues have hosted Players Championship events across many seasons. Robin Park Leisure Centre in Wigan is one of the most familiar. Leicester Arena, an indoor sports venue that spent several years named the Morningside Arena, is another. Arena MK in Milton Keynes, which also hosts televised events, stages floor events when it is not set up for a crowd. Halle 39 in Hildesheim, in Lower Saxony, takes the tour to Germany, where much of the PDC's commercial growth has come from.
These buildings have something in common. They are large, flat, well-lit spaces that can hold a line of sixteen boards with enough room between them for players, markers and officials. They are not built for spectators, because spectators are not part of the event. They are leisure centres and exhibition halls, chosen for the floor area rather than the seats.
The midweek blocks of two events
Floor events are held in blocks of two on consecutive days, and in recent seasons those blocks have fallen early in the week: Monday and Tuesday, or Tuesday and Wednesday. A player travels to Wigan or Leicester, plays Players Championship 9 on the Monday and Players Championship 10 on the Tuesday, and goes home. Weekends are mostly left to the European Tour, which runs Friday to Sunday, and to the televised events, though the floor used weekend pairs itself for years and the PDC has moved the blocks around the calendar more than once. This pattern has a consequence that is easy to miss: a professional who plays every Pro Tour event can spend a great deal of the year in hotels, and the calendar leaves few weeks without darts in it.
| Venue | Location | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Robin Park Leisure Centre | Wigan, Greater Manchester | A leisure centre used across many seasons |
| Leicester Arena | Leicester | An indoor sports venue, for a time named the Morningside Arena |
| Arena MK | Milton Keynes | Also a televised venue, used for floor events without a crowd |
| Halle 39 | Hildesheim, Germany | The tour's regular German floor venue |
Venues have changed over the years, and the PDC sets the calendar each season. The table is a guide to where floor darts has often been played, not a fixed list.
Why some floor events go to Germany
Germany has become the PDC's second home market over the past fifteen years, with large crowds at European Tour events and a growing number of German tour card holders. Holding some floor events there spreads the travel more evenly across the tour, which now includes many players from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and other European countries. For a British player, a block in Hildesheim means a flight and two nights away. For a Dutch or German player, it is the English venues that mean the travel. The calendar tries to balance the two, and the balance has shifted towards the continent as the tour has become more international.
Prize money and the three rankings a floor result counts on
Every Players Championship carries a prize fund, split by round, with the winner taking the largest share and every player who wins a match taking something. The PDC sets the fund for the season and publishes the breakdown by round. This guide gives no figures, because they are revised from year to year, and the mechanism is what matters.
A floor result counts three times over. That is the single most important fact about the Players Championships, and it explains why the leading players turn up for them even though the money from any one event is modest next to a major.
| Ranking | What it counts | Period | What it decides |
|---|---|---|---|
| PDC Order of Merit | Prize money from all ranking events, majors and floor | Rolling two years | Tour card retention, seeding and entry to the biggest events |
| ProTour Order of Merit | Prize money from Players Championships and the European Tour | Rolling one year | Places at the World Matchplay, the World Grand Prix and the World Championship |
| Players Championship Order of Merit | Prize money from Players Championships only | The current season | The 64 places at the Players Championship Finals |
| European Tour Order of Merit | European Tour prize money only | The current season | Places at the European Championship |
The fourth row is not a floor ranking, but it shows the structure: the PDC builds its rankings by slicing the same prize money into different time windows and event groups. Floor money counts on the first three. It does not count on the fourth.
The two-year list is the one most people mean when they talk about the world rankings. Our full guide to the PDC Order of Merit explains how money drops off after two years. The point here is that a single good day on the floor feeds all three lists at once.
What the floor decides: Matchplay, Grand Prix and World Championship places
The leading players qualify for most of the majors through the two-year Order of Merit. Everyone else qualifies through the floor.
The World Matchplay in Blackpool takes the top sixteen on the two-year ranking and then fills its other sixteen places from the ProTour Order of Merit, the one-year list built from floor and European Tour money. The World Grand Prix uses a similar split. The World Championship takes a large group from the main ranking and fills further places from the ProTour list, alongside international qualifiers. For a player outside the elite, a strong year on the floor is the most reliable route to the televised stage.
That makes the floor much more important than its profile suggests. A player ranked 50th in the world, with no Premier League place and no invitation events, will often decide his whole season on the floor: a couple of deep runs at Players Championships can be enough to take him to Blackpool in July and the World Grand Prix in October, and the prize money from those events can then lift him into the top 32.
Careers built off camera
Many of the players now familiar from television built their careers on the floor before they won anything on a stage. The pattern is consistent: a player wins a card at Q-School, spends a season or two learning the floor, wins a Players Championship, qualifies for the Matchplay through the ProTour list, does well there, and moves into the top 32. The floor is where the PDC's middle class is formed, and it is the stage before the stage. Our guide to how players win a tour card at Q-School describes the step before the floor.
There is also the matter of the tour card itself. At the end of each two-year cycle, the players inside the top 64 of the Order of Merit keep their cards and those outside it lose them, unless they qualify again by another route. For a player ranked around 60th, the floor is where that card is kept or lost.
Floor averages, off-camera nine-darters and floor specialists
Averages on the floor are often higher than averages on a stage. That surprises people who assume that the floor, as the lower-profile setting, would produce lower standards. The reason is the conditions.
A floor hall is quiet. There is no crowd singing between darts, no walk-on, no lights in the eyes and no television delay between legs. A player throws, the marker calls the score, and the next leg starts immediately. The rhythm is quick and the environment is calm, which suits a player who scores heavily when relaxed. The three-dart average is calculated the same way on the floor and on a stage, so the numbers can be compared directly, and floor averages above 100 are a routine part of a Players Championship day.
Nine-darters nobody filmed
The same conditions produce nine-dart finishes. Perfect legs are thrown on the floor regularly, often on boards that are not being streamed, with only the marker and a few officials and players to see them. A nine-darter on the floor counts as fully as one on a stage, and the PDC records them, but the image of a nine-darter in most people's minds is the televised one, with the crowd on its feet. The floor produces many more than television does, simply because far more legs are played there.
The floor specialist
Some players are known as floor specialists. The label is not a compliment. It describes a player who wins regularly on the floor and struggles on the stage, where the crowd, the lights and the longer matches demand something different. Darts is a sport where nerve matters as much as technique, and the gap between floor and stage results is one of the clearest ways to see it. The players who succeed in both settings are the ones who end up in the top sixteen.
The Players Championship Finals at Minehead
The Players Championship Finals is the televised end-of-season event for the floor. It takes the 64 leading players on the Players Championship Order of Merit, the ranking built only from floor prize money that season, and seeds them into a knockout. It is held each November at Butlin's resort in Minehead, Somerset, the same venue that hosts the UK Open in March.
The format is a seeded 64-player knockout played in legs, and unlike a floor day it lengthens as it goes. The 2025 edition, played at Minehead from 21 to 23 November, used the ladder below.
| Round | Format | Legs needed to win |
|---|---|---|
| First round | Best of 11 legs | 6 |
| Second round | Best of 11 legs | 6 |
| Third round | Best of 19 legs | 10 |
| Quarter-finals | Best of 19 legs | 10 |
| Semi-finals | Best of 21 legs | 11 |
| Final | Best of 21 legs | 11 |
The first round alone is 32 matches, so the opening day is long and crowded, and the event narrows to its familiar single-stage television form for the last rounds. The field reached 64 in 2016, having started at 32, and the event has been at Minehead in November apart from 2020, when it was played in Coventry during the pandemic.
Why the Finals matter
The Finals are a major ranking event, with prize money that counts on the two-year Order of Merit. They are also one of the last big events before the World Championship in December, so a good run can change a player's seeding at Alexandra Palace. And they reward consistency across the floor season rather than a single good result: a player who reaches the Finals has earned his place over months of floor events, not on one weekend.
How the Finals differ from a floor day
Three things change when the floor goes to Minehead. The first is the crowd. The Finals are played in front of paying spectators at the resort, many of them staying on site for the weekend, and players who have spent the year throwing in quiet halls suddenly throw in front of a noisy audience. The second is the seeding: the draw is set by the season's floor ranking, so the player who topped the Players Championship Order of Merit is the top seed, whatever his position on the two-year list. The third is time. A floor event is over in a day. The Finals run across a weekend, with rest between rounds and longer matches at the end.
That last change is the one that tests the floor specialist. A player who has won several Players Championships in a season will usually arrive at Minehead highly seeded. Whether he can carry floor form onto a televised stage, over longer matches, in front of a crowd, is precisely the question the Finals ask. Some of the best floor players of each season answer it well; others do not, and the Finals have a habit of being won by a player whose season was built on the stage as much as the floor.
- Tour cardA player holds one of the 128 PDC tour cards and is entitled to enter every floor event.
- Floor eventsHe plays the season's Players Championships, earning prize money in each one he wins matches in.
- Players Championship Order of MeritHis floor prize money for the season places him on this list.
- Top 64The leading 64 on the list at the cut-off qualify for the Finals.
- MineheadThe Finals are played as a seeded knockout at Butlin's each November.
The route from the floor events to the televised Finals. The 64-player field is drawn from the Players Championship Order of Merit for the season.
Following a floor event without a ticket
There is no way to buy a ticket for a Players Championship in the ordinary sense. The halls are not set up for a crowd and the events are not sold as entertainment. Fans who want to follow one have two main options.
The first is the PDC's own streaming service, which shows a selection of boards from each event. The streamed boards are chosen to show the leading players and the later rounds, so the coverage widens as the field narrows. By the quarter-finals the cameras can cover every match. The second is the live scoring. Every match is scored on a tablet at the board, and the scores feed live statistics that the PDC and other services publish: match scores, averages, checkout percentages and legs won. A fan can follow a player's whole day from a phone, leg by leg, without seeing a dart thrown.
What the tablets show
The scoring tablets are more than a convenience. They are the record of the event. Each score entered becomes a line in the statistics, from which the averages and checkout rates are calculated. They also give the officials a way to check disputed scores. For the fan, the result is that a floor event that no one in the building is watching can be followed in detail by thousands of people elsewhere.
How the Pro Tour grew to 128 tour cards
The floor was not always like this. In the early 2000s, the PDC's ranking events outside the majors were weekend tournaments, open to members of the PDC's players' association and to players who paid an entry fee. The fields varied in size, the standard varied with them, and a professional career was a matter of entering enough events to earn a living.
In 2011 the PDC introduced the tour card system: a fixed list of professionals with the right to enter every Pro Tour event, decided through the rankings and through Q-School, which first ran in January of that year. The number settled at 128. The weekend events became the Players Championships, now restricted to the card holders, and the European Tour developed alongside them. Card holders still paid an entry fee for each floor event for years afterwards; the PDC has since dropped it, so entering now costs a professional nothing but the travel.
From weekends to midweek
The move to a midweek calendar followed. With the European Tour on the weekends and the televised events growing in number, the floor events moved to Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, often in pairs. The result is a tighter calendar and a heavier workload for the players, and a professional tour that looks much more like a sporting circuit than the open weekends it grew out of.
The judgement here is that the tour card system did more for the standard of the game than any other single reform the PDC has made. It turned the floor from a collection of open tournaments into a closed professional league, with a clear path in through Q-School and a clear path out through the rankings. The Players Championships are the working part of that league. More on the sport's structure, and on the other sports followed in England, is on the England guides hub.