Tournament information for the upcoming 2022 World Women’s Snooker Championship is now available:

The Tour’s flagship event returns for the first time since Reanne Evans claimed her record-extending 12th world title in Thailand back in June 2019 and will be held at the Ding Junhui Snooker Academy at snooker’s spiritual home in Sheffield, England.

The tournament will begin with the staging of the World Women’s Under-21 and Seniors Championships – last held in April 2019 and won by Ploychompoo Laokiatphong and Jenny Poulter respectively – on 10 February, with the main competition to run across the following four days.

There will also be a Challenge Cup competition starting on Sunday for players who do not qualify from the group stages.

Format

The format for the main competition will be as follows:

• The group stages will run with 12 groups (7 groups of 4, 5 groups of 5), each with two seeds per group (placed in accordance with seeding, 1/24, 2/23 and so on) and the remaining players drawn at random
• The top two players from each group will progress to the knockout stage
  • The best eight group winners will progress straight to the last 16
  • The remaining 16 players will play a preliminary round match on Saturday evening for the remaining eight places
• All qualifiers from the group stages will be positioned in the knockout draw according to group stage performance in line with our established qualifying criteria

Group matches will be played over the best of five frames, knockout rounds to be 7/7/7/9/11.

The format for the Under-21, Seniors and Challenge Cup tournaments will be straight knockout. All matches to be played over the best of five frames.