2020 World Snooker Championship
The 2020 World Snooker Championship was a professional snooker tournament that took place from 31 July to 16 August 2020 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. It was the 44th consecutive year that the World Snooker Championship was held at the Crucible. The final ranking event of the 2019–20 snooker season, the tournament was originally scheduled to take place from 18 April to 4 May 2020, but both the qualifying stage and the main rounds were postponed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The event was one of the first to allow live audiences since the onset of the pandemic, but on the first day it was announced that the event would be played behind closed doors for subsequent days. A limited number of spectators were allowed in for the final two days of the championship.
Allan Taylor made the highest break in qualifying, a 145.
Anthony Hamilton qualified for the event but withdrew before the first round.
The 2015 champion Stuart Bingham defeated Ashley Carty 10–7.
Noppon Saengkham defeated the 2005 champion Shaun Murphy 10–4.
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