2017 World Snooker Championship

2017 World Snooker Championship

The 2017 World Snooker Championship took place from 15 April to 1 May 2017 in Sheffield, England. It was the 19th and final ranking event of the 2016–17 snooker season which followed the China Open. The winner of the event was the defending champion and world number one Mark Selby, who defeated John Higgins 18–15 in the final. The total prize fund for the championship was £1,750,000, the winner receiving the top prize of £375,000.

About 2017 World Snooker Championship in brief

Summary 2017 World Snooker ChampionshipThe 2017 World Snooker Championship took place from 15 April to 1 May 2017 in Sheffield, England. It was the 19th and final ranking event of the 2016–17 snooker season which followed the China Open. The winner of the event was the defending champion and world number one Mark Selby, who defeated John Higgins 18–15 in the final. This was Selby’s third World Championship win; he had also won the tournament in the 2014 and 2016 tournaments. The total prize fund for the championship was £1,750,000, the winner receiving the top prize of £375,000. There were 74 century breaks in the main stage of the championship, and a further 84 in qualifying. Englishman Ronnie O’Sullivan compiled a break of 146 in the quarter-finals, the highest of the tournament. The first world championship in 1927 was won by Joe Davis, the final being held in Camkin’s Hall, Birmingham. Since 1977, the event has been held at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. As of 2020, Stephen Hendry is the most successful player in the modern era, having won the championship seven times. The event was organised by World Snookser, a subsidiary of the World Professional Billiards and Snookers Association. The tournament was broadcast in Europe by the BBC and Eurosport, and internationally by WorldSnooker on Facebook. It featured a 32-player main draw, as well as a 128-player qualifying draw that was played at the English Institute of Sport, Sheffield, from 5 to 12 April, concluding three days before the start of the main draw.

The 2017 tournament featured 32 professional players competing in one-on-onesnooker matches played over several frames, using a single elimination format. The number of frames required to win a match increased with each proceeding round of themain draw, the first round consisting of best-of-19 frames matches. The top 16 players in the latest world rankings automatically qualified for the main Draw as seeded players. The remaining 15 seeds were allocated based on the world rankings released after the Chinaopen. The draw for the qualifying competition included 110 of the remaining 112 players on the World Snookeder Tour, aswell as 18 wildcard World Tour, amateur players and all four invited players at the WSF. Half of the participants in the qualifying draw were seeded players: those ranked from 17th to 80th were allocated one of 64 seeds in world ranking order; the other participants were placed randomly into the mainDraw. To reach the draw, players needed to win three best- of- 19 frames matches, with the final match being played over a maximum of 35 frames. The prize money for the event for the 2017 event was raised to £1.750,1,000 from the previous year’s £1,.750,750 prize fund. It is the 49th successive world championship to be contested using the modern knockout format, and the 41st consecutive year that the tournament had been staged at theCrucible.