1993 World Snooker Championship

The 1993 World Snooker Championship (also referred to as the 1993 Embassy World Snooker Championship for the purposes of sponsorship) was a professional ranking snooker tournament that took place between 17 April and 3 May 1993 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England.

Stephen Hendry won his third World Championship title by defeating Jimmy White 18–5 in the final with a session to spare. The tournament was sponsored by cigarette manufacturer Embassy.

Overview

The World Snooker Championship is an annual professional snooker tournament organised by the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA). Founded in the late 19th century by British Army soldiers stationed in India, the cue sport was popular in the British Isles. However, in the modern era, which started in 1969 when the World Championship reverted to a knockout format, it has become increasingly popular worldwide, especially in East and Southeast Asian nations such as China, Hong Kong and Thailand.

Joe Davis won the first World Championship in 1927, hosted by the Billiards Association and Control Council, the final match being held at Camkin's Hall in Birmingham, England. The 1993 championship featured 32 professional players competing in one-on-one snooker matches in a single-elimination format, each round being played over a pre-determined number of frames, and each match divided into two or more sessions containing a set number of frames. These competitors in the main tournament were selected using a combination of the top players in the snooker world rankings and the winners of a pre-tournament qualification stage. The top 16 players in the world rankings automatically qualified for the event, the remaining 16 players coming through the qualification rounds. It was the seventeenth consecutive World Snooker Championship to be held at the Crucible, the first tournament there having taken place in 1977. The defending champion in 1993 was Stephen Hendry, who had defeated Jimmy White 18–14 in the final of the 1992 World Snooker Championship. The tournament was sponsored by cigarette brand Embassy, and was also referred to as the Embassy World Snooker Championship. The championship was broadcast on BBC Television in the UK.

Prize fund

The breakdown of prize money for this year is shown below:

• Winner: £175,000
• Runner-up: £105,000
• Semi-final: £52,000
• Quarter-final: £26,000
• Last 16: £14,000
• Last 32: £8,000
• Highest break: £14,400
• Maximum break: £100,000

• Total: £1,000,000

Tournament summary

First round

The first round took place between 17 and 22 April, each match played over two sessions as the best of 19 frames. Eight players made their debut at the main stage of the world championship: of these, three first-season professionals, John Giles, Spencer Dunn and Ronnie O'Sullivan, had progressed through 11 rounds to reach the last 32. O'Sullivan was the youngest player ever to qualify for World Championship main stage. He became the second-youngest player to compete at the main stage, at 17 years and 5 months old, two months older than Stephen Hendry had been at his debut in 1986. Snooker historian Clive Everton attributed the high number of debutants to the governing body's decision to hold pre-qualifying at the beginning of the season. According to Everton, "This had created the situation whereby relatively inexperienced players could become match hardened in the summer qualifying school and then catch cold many established players just outside the top 16 in the rankings, which would have exempted them from the qualifying competition."

In frame three of his first-round match against Danny Fowler, Hendry compiled the 250th century break at the Crucible. Three frames later, he made a 128 break, the 200th century break of his career. Fowler won only the tenth frame; Hendry won 10–1.

O'Sullivan lost 7–10 against Alan McManus. Everton felt that O'Sullivan had been affected by the pressure, and that his "Brilliant pots were negated by unforced errors".

Second round

The second round, which took place between 22 and 26 April, was played as best-of-25-frames matches spread over three sessions.

Davis made the highest break of the tournament, and the fourth-highest in championship history, with a 144 in the third frame against McManus. Despite this, he trailed 1–4 before levelling at 4–4. McManus eventually won 13–11.

Quarter-finals

The quarter-finals were played as best-of-25-frames matches over three sessions on 27 and 28 April. Hendry led Bond 6–2 after one session. In the second session, Hendry made breaks of 139 and 110, while Bond had a break of 129. Hendry moved from a 11–5 after two sessions to a 13–7 victory.

James Wattana of Thailand became the first player from the Far East to reach the semi-finals of the event. He was tied 5–5 with Parrott but then took six consecutive frames and went on to win 13–6.

Semi-finals

The semi-finals took place between 29 April and 1 May as best-of-31-frames matches played over four sessions. McManus was 0–3 down to Hendry, but took the next four frames; their first session finished with them at 4–4. The first frame of the second session was won by McManus, but Hendry took the other seven. It was 15–7 to Hendry after the third session, and he won 16–8.

Wattana built a 5–0 lead against White, and later led 6–2. White made breaks of 104 and 108 as he took a 14–8 lead. After losing 9–16, Wattana remarked that his concentration had been "very much on and off" during the match. The match was broadcast live by BBC satellite transmission to around 13 million viewers in Thailand.

Final

The final between Stephen Hendry and Jimmy White was played as the best-of-35 frames across four sessions on 2 and 3 May. Hendry compiled a break of 136 at his first visit to the table to win the first frame. White took the second frame, but lost frame 3 despite a break of 54, after Hendry made a 63. Hendry moved into a 5–1 lead, making breaks of 76 in fifth frame the 126 in the sixth frame, then White won the last frame of the first session. After session two, Hendry was 12–4 ahead. A 123 in the ninth frame was Hendry's eighth century break of the tournament, equalling the record held by Davis and Parrott.

Hendry's 18–5 victory over White was only the third time since the championship moved to the Crucible that the title was settled in the afternoon with a session to spare. The previous two were in 1983 and 1989. Snooker historian Clive Everton wrote that Hendry "dominated the championship so thoroughly that it was easy to forget the inconsistency which had plagued him for most of the season."

White wrote in his autobiography Second Wind that he had low expectations coming into the championship, as he was separated from his wife Maureen and had "spent months on the piss and coke, running around like a madman, and generally just forgetting about snooker." He added that he felt he "fell over the line" in each match on the way to the final, and that in the final was "out-played and outclassed by the best player in the world." In Hendry's autobiography Me and the Table, he wrote that he was confident of victory going into the tournament "I don’t take winning for granted, yet I knew I was going to win this, and maybe I don’t feel it’s that big a deal."

Main draw

Shown below are the results for each round. The numbers in parentheses beside some of the players are their seeding ranks (each championship has 16 seeds and 16 qualifiers).

Qualifying

Results for the qualifying competition are shown below.

Rounds 1 and 2

Rounds 3 to 5

Rounds 6 to 7

Rounds 8 and 9

Rounds 10 to 11

Century breaks

There were 35 century breaks in the championship, a new record, beating the 31 centuries of the 1991 edition. The highest break of the event was a 144 made by Steve Davis.

• 144 – Steve Davis
• 139, 122, 101 – Nigel Bond
• 138, 106 – Steve James
• 136, 129, 128, 126, 124, 123, 113, 110 – Stephen Hendry
• 133 – Terry Griffiths
• 124, 108, 100, 100 – Neal Foulds
• 122, 102 – John Parrott
• 121 – Martin Clark
• 112 – Alan McManus
• 110, 104, 104, 103 – James Wattana
• 108, 105, 104 – Jimmy White
• 108, 104 – Willie Thorne
• 105 – Peter Ebdon
• 104, 101 – Gary Wilkinson

Notes

Bibliography

• Downer, Chris (2026). Crucible Almanac: 2025 edition. Bournemouth: self-published.
• Everton, Clive (1993). The Embassy Book of World Snooker. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-0-7475-1610-1.
• Everton, Clive (2012). Black Farce and Cue Ball Wizards. Edinburgh: Mainstream. ISBN 978-1-78057-568-1.
• Harris, Luke J. (3 January 2020). . In Nauright, John; Zipp, Sarah (eds.). Routledge Handbook of Global Sport. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis. pp. 227–237. ISBN 978-1-138-88723-7. from the original on 5 September 2020.
• Hendry, Stephen (2019) [2018]. Me and the Table (Second ed.). London: John Blake. ISBN 978-1-78946-077-3.
• Smith, Terry, ed. (1991). Benson and Hedges Snooker Year (Eighth ed.). London: Pelham Books. ISBN 978-0-7207-1983-3.
• White, Jimmy (2015) [2014]. Second Wind. Liverpool: Sports Media. ISBN 978-1-910335-12-3. (paperback)
• Williams, Victoria R. (2015). . Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. p. 286. ISBN 978-1-61069-639-5. from the original on 5 September 2020.