1981 World Snooker Championship
The 1981 World Snooker Championship was a ranking professional snooker tournament which took place from 7 April to 20 April 1981 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. The tournament was the 1981 edition of the World Snooker Championship, and was the fifth consecutive world championship to take place at the Crucible Theatre since 1977. It was sanctioned by the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association. The total prize fund for the tournament was £75,000, of which £20,000 went to the winner.
The World Snooker Championship Trophy
Defending champion Cliff Thorburn (pictured in 2007) lost his semi-final match.
Steve Davis (pictured in 2014) won his first world championship, defeating Doug Mountjoy 18–12.
Snooker is a cue sport played on a rectangular billiards table covered with a green cloth called baize, with six pockets, one at each corner and one in the middle of each long side. First played by British Army officers stationed in India in the second half of the 19th century, the game is played with twenty-two balls, comprising a white cue ball, fifteen red balls, and six other balls—a yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, and black—collectively called the colours. Using a cue stick, the individual players or teams take turns to strike the cue ball to pot other balls in a predefined sequence, accumulating points for each successful pot and for each time the opposing player or team commits a foul. An individual frame of snooker is won by the player who has scored the most points. A snooker match ends when a player reaches a predetermined number of frames.
Four-time world champion Mark Selby playing at a practice table during the 2012 Masters tournament
A full-size snooker table set up for the start of a game
A sliding scoreboard, some blocks of cue-tip chalk, white chalk-board chalk, and two cue sticks
A shot using a rest, allowing the player to reach farther down the table