Ahead of a defining period in the darting calendar, PDC Stats Analyst Christopher Kempf provides an in-depth analysis on the players with substantial ranking money to defend over the next three months.
October, November and December are the most promising and perilous months for any darts player - the period on the calendar into which the highest-stakes events are all contested, culminating with the World Darts Championship, where 128 players compete for a £1m top prize.
The possibility of earning hundreds of thousands of pounds in just five events is real for many elite players, but so too is the possibility of a player losing that much from his ranking position if he did so two years ago, and can no longer replicate that feat.
Within the next three months, nearly half of the ranking money earned by Luke Humphries in his triumphant autumn and winter of 2023-24 will disappear.
If not replaced with new (non-guaranteed) income, Humphries' £250,000 lead over Luke Littler will transform into a deficit nearly twice as large, with Littler emerging sometime in November as the new world number one.
Short of winning the World Championship, or nearly all the other events on offer between now and 3 January 2026 (as he did two years ago), there is nothing Humphries can do to prevent this eroding of his ranking position.
Since Littler has won the majority of his matches with the current world number one in 2025, his prospects for remaining so in 2026 look bleak, as Littler has only one-third of the ranking money at risk that Humphries does.
Possibly the player with the best opportunity to rise up in the rankings this autumn is Josh Rock, who is simultaneously defending less than 10% of his two-year total, having positioned himself near or top of the Form Guide for the past few months.
His best result of 2023 was a quarter-final finish at that year's Grand Slam, at which he earned £25,000 - a runner-up finish at any one of the next five TV ranking events would allow him to increase his ranking prize money, even if he lost every other match between now and January.
The highest-ranked player defending less than 10% of his money before 2026 is Jonny Clayton, who survived the challenge of defending his 2023 World Matchplay earnings in July to hold on to a world number six ranking.
No other player in the PDC has appeared in the semi-finals of every ranking TV event of the season, and if he were to continue in that vein, he would likely earn enough to surpass Michael van Gerwen and Stephen Bunting for the world number three spot, which the Welshman has never attained, even after winning the 2021 World Grand Prix.
World Champions as recently as three and four years ago, Michael Smith and Peter Wright have large amounts of ranking money to defend in the coming months at the worst possible moments for them - when their form is at a low ebb and they are struggling to qualify for the big TV events at which they were once mainstays.
For Peter Wright, the situation is marginally better. Even though the Scotsman is defending 34% of his ranking money, he has just managed to qualify for the World Grand Prix and is on track to appear in the European Championship.
Therefore if he recovers his once world-leading form in the month of October, recovering the £150,000 he stands to lose is possible, if unlikely.
Michael Smith stands to lose less than £100,000 by comparison, but as he is not qualified for either of those two events, he will have to make up all of it (in all likelihood) in just the Players Championship Finals and the World Championship.
Thanks to guaranteed prize money earned at future events at which the players are provisionally qualified, three players in the top 32 will rise up in the rankings over the next three months regardless of how many matches they win or lose.
These three are Mike De Decker (who is defending a minimum of ranking money earned from losing three of his four TV matches at the end of 2023) and 2024 European Championship finalists Jermaine Wattimena and Ritchie Edhouse, who had enjoyed little televised success before their breakthrough wins in Dortmund in 2024.
However, the biggest opportunity for advancement belongs to Wessel Nijman, who is not only the most recent Players Championship event winner, but is qualifying for the World Grand Prix and European Championship for the first time.
As a result, a 14% increase in his ranking total is therefore the worst-case scenario for the young Dutchman, and he has great potential for an even more meteoric rise.
Follow Christopher on Twitter @ochepedia