World Snooker Championship
annual professional snooker ranking tournament
The World Snooker Championship is the most prestigious tournament in professional snooker. The latest edition of the event had a total prize pool of £2,395,000, including £500,000 for the winner. It is now one of the three tournaments (together with the UK Championship and the invitational Masters) that make up snooker's Triple Crown Series. The reigning world champion is Wu Yize.
The event was first held in 1927 as a professional competition organised by the Billiards Association and Control Council, and Joe Davis won the title. In 1952, a rival tournament called the World Professional Match-play Championship was introduced by the Professional Billiards Players' Association to compete with the 1952 World Snooker Championship, which had only two entrants. The World Professional Match-play Championship was held as the world championship for snooker until 1957. From 1964 to 1968, the event was played using a challenge format, where the current champion would be challenged by another player. John Pulman won all seven challenge matches.
History
Overview
Joe Davis dominated the tournament over its first two decades, winning the first 15 world championships before he retired undefeated after his final victory in 1946.
“World Snooker Championship” enters the record as annual professional snooker ranking tournament. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what World, Snooker and Championship can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“World Snooker Championship” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, World, Snooker and Championship provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q502948. Authority coordinates are 53.381, -1.467. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1927, 1952, 1957 and 1964.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “World Snooker Championship”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow World Snooker Championship primary sources, World Snooker Championship archive and World research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “World Snooker Championship”?
- Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “World Snooker Championship” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.