The inaugural Tunisia Snooker Open could take place in 2024 – according to Kammah Billiards president Mohamed ElKammah.
ElKammah, a life honourary president of the African Billiards and Snooker Confederation, announced the news on social media platform X.
Not many details about the possible tournament have been shared, but it appears there have already been positive discussions.
“A meeting was held today with the Tunisian minister of sports where he agreed to host ‘Tunisia Snooker Open’ 2024,” Elkammah wrote on Tuesday.
“Mr. Jason Ferguson – chairman of the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association – attended the meeting by video.”
“More details will be published soon.”
It’s unknown whether the new Tunisia Snooker Open would be a ranking event, which could mark a first ever in the continent of Africa.
A couple of WPBSA-sanctioned invitation events were staged in South Africa during the 1979/80 snooker season.
Eddie Charlton won the Limosin International in Cape Town and repeated his success shortly after at the Kronenbrau 1308 Classic in Johannesburg.
The South African Professional Championship was also a regular fixture of the calendar throughout the 1980s.
However, a Tunisia Snooker Open would break new ground, particularly in northern Africa where amateur snooker has been thriving in recent times.
Egypt’s Mohamed Ibrahim and Mostafa Dorgham are currently competing on the World Snooker Tour.
Among others, Amine Amiri of Morocco was also a recent competitor on the main tour – featuring on the circuit between 2019 and 2021.
Snooker, a sport traditionally popular in the UK and Ireland, has for decades made efforts to break into new territories.
There have been several events staged across mainland Europe, with Germany being a common destination of late.
Trips to Asia have also become commonplace, notably in China where a boom in popularity has been experienced since the early 2000s.
If new professional tournaments are indeed to be launched in Africa, it would be another step towards making the sport more global.
Featured photo credit: WST
I would be extremely happy to see the African snooker scene develop, but starting with Tunisia? Really?
It makes no sense to me that failed states are using various sports, trying to improve their image in the eyes of the world while trampling on basic human rights, abolishing freedom of expression, endorsing racial discrimination, and so on…
I simply don’t understand why the WST accepts such requests. I would be much more relaxed about the future of sport if they were looking for other countries.
In the beginning, there was the tobacco industry. Then the betting industry. Next up: dictatorships? Really?
Make snooker global. Great, I fully support the idea. But losing the moral compass on the way – is this the future we want?
None of the North African countries are democracies, so if WST wants to spread the game to the region (or in the Arab world generally) they have to work with non-democratic countries. The military dictatorship in Egypt is far worse than Tunisia, and so is Saudi-Arabia. In general since it’s necessary to work with a country with a human rights record as abysmal as China’s it doesn’t make sense to exclude any country other than “the worst of the worst” (hopefully we’ll never get the Kim Il Sung Memorial Snooker Classic in Pyongyang even if they can no doubt provide all the security, pampering, courtesy cars for the players and disciplined audience Ronnie craves). Freedom House gives Tunisia a rating of 56 of 100 and categorizes it as “partly free” , that’s miles above China’s 9 and obvious “not free” status and better than e.g. neighbouring Morocco’s 37. Freedom House are not infallible, but their ranking does provide a good basic guideline, and the only sovereign countries they give a worse rating than China are: Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Syria, South Sudan, Somalia, Saudi-Arabia, North Korea, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, the Central African Republic, Belarus, and Afghanistan. While Yemen, Azerbaijan & Myanmar are ranked on par with China. So once you’ve agreed to work with the Chinese regime you don’t really have a moral argument for not working with anyone apart from a dozen countries (several of which are failed states or close to being it). Of the “worse or as bad as China” countries Saudi-Arabia and Azerbaijan are the only ones I could see being realistic options for a WST tournament (and there are ofc concrete plans for a tournament in Saudi-Arabia).