The women’s world champion, Reanne Evans, has been given a place in the qualifying rounds of this year’s World Championship, World Snooker has announced.
The 29-year-old – the dominant player of the women’s game with 10 successive world titles to her name – will head to Shef-field’s Ponds Forge in April in a bid to qualify for the main event at the Crucible.
Evans will be one of 128 players to bid to join the game’s top 16 in the tournament and she will need to win three matches to do so.
She would become the first woman to compete in the World Championship if successful, having become the first woman to qualify for any ranking event last season when she got through to the main stage of the Wuxi Classic in China.
A new infrastructure introduced by the sport’s governing body means that all players seeded outside the top 16 will join the 128 qualifiers.
Were Evans to win even one of her qualifying matches in Shef-field it would carry prize-money of £6,000 – a fee comfortably in excess of the tariff on offer for winning the women’s World Championship.