The 2011 World Snooker Championship was a professional snooker tournament that took place between 16 April and 2 May 2011 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. It was the 35th consecutive year that the World Snooker Championship had been held at the Crucible and was the last ranking event of the 2010–11 snooker season. The event was organised by the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association and had a total prize fund of £1,111,000, with £250,000 going to the winner of the event. The tournament was sponsored by sports betting company Betfred.

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.