2026 World Snooker Championship

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The 2026 World Snooker Championship (officially the 2026 Halo World Snooker Championship) was a professional snooker tournament that took place from 18 April to 4 May 2026 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England, the 50th consecutive year that the World Snooker Championship was staged at the venue. Organised by the World Snooker Tour, the tournament was the 18th and final ranking event and the third and final Triple Crown event of the 2025–‍26 snooker season. It was broadcast domestically by BBC Sport, in Europe by Eurosport, and elsewhere in the world by WST Play and other broadcasters. The winner received £500,000 from a total prize fund of £2,395,000. The top 16 players from the snooker world rankings, as they stood after the 2026 Tour Championship, were seeded through to the main stage at the Crucible. The qualifying rounds took place from 6 to 15 April at the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield, featuring 128 professional and invited amateur competitors, 16 of whom joined the seeds at the Crucible. A record number of players from mainland China—five seeds and six qualifiers, making eleven in total—reached the last 32. Crucible debutants at the event were He Guoqiang, Antoni Kowalski, Stan Moody, and Liam Pullen, with Kowalski the first Polish player to reach the tournament's main stage. A record-equalling 15 of the 16 seeds advanced to the second round, which had happened only twice before, at the 1983 and 1993 editions. Zhao Xintong was the defending champion, having defeated Mark Williams 18–12 in the 2025 final to win his maiden world title. He lost 10–13 to Shaun Murphy in the quarter-finals, becoming the 21st player to experience the so-called "Crucible curse", referring to the fact that no first-time champion had retained the title since the tournament moved to the Crucible in 1977. The semi-final match between Mark Allen and Wu Yize featured the longest frame ever played at the Crucible, at 100 minutes and 21 seconds. Wu defeated Murphy 18–17 in the final to win his first world title and second ranking title. Wu became the second World Champion from Asia, following Zhao, and also became the second-youngest winner in the tournament's history, after Stephen Hendry. The final of the event was the fourth to go to a deciding frame, following the finals of the 1985, 1994, and 2002 editions. Wu was the tournament's fourth consecutive first-time champion, following Zhao in 2025, Kyren Wilson in 2024, and Luca Brecel in 2023, setting a new record. A record total of 258 century breaks were made at the tournament, of which a record 177 were made in qualifying, surpassing the 143 achieved during the previous year's qualifiers. Chang Bingyu made the second maximum break of his professional career in his third-round qualifying match against Brecel. It was the record-extending 24th maximum of the season, surpassing the 15 maximums set in the previous season. Having already made a qualifying maximum at the 2025 UK Championship, Chang won a