Mina Awad defeated Charl Jonck 6-5 in the final of the 2026 All-Africa Snooker Championship to earn a two-year World Snooker Tour (WST) tour card for the first time.
The Egyptian cueist came through a field of 50 cueists in South Africa to lift the continental crown and earn professional status for the 2026/27 and 2027/28 campaigns.
Organised by the African Billiards & Snooker Confederation (ABSC), the event began with a group phase which saw Awad advance with four straight victories.
Whitewash wins over Graeme Britten and Bilal Elyas earned Awad a place in the last eight of the competition and he followed this up with defeats of Amir Al-Tahtawy (5-3) and Hesham Shawky (6-3) to reach the title match.
There, he faced South Africa’s Jonck, who had followed up victory in the Seniors competition on home soil by last defeated Six-Reds champion Abdelrahman Shahin 6-4 to move within one win of the WST.
The best-of-11 frame final was a closely-contested match with little between Awad and Jonck, but it was ultimately the Egyptian who was able to get over the line and secure an emotional victory.
In recent years African Champions have never been able to make an impact on the main Tour, many of them even giving up well before their tour card “expired”. The “gap” between the main tour standard and the current level of the African players appears to be huge. Even for overseas players who are successful it is hard to live as expats in a completely different culture and to adapt to a different life style, isolated from your family. It must be horrible if you get beat, match after match, and even worse if you are “lost” in a completely different culture and isolated, having no compatriot on tour. I’m NOT suggesting that African players should not be offered a chance but the way things are now … well, it’s not working. If there is a real ambition to develop snooker in Africa, maybe, WPBSA could “offer” those players a year of scholarship, with participation in the Q-Tour, before giving them a two years tour card. Yes, it would cost money … “investing ” usually costs money before yielding benefits.
