The 1984 World Snooker Championship (also referred to as the 1984 Embassy World Snooker Championship for the purpose of sponsorship) was a professional ranking snooker tournament that took place between 21 April and 7 May 1984 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England.
Steve Davis won his third world title by defeating Jimmy White 18–16 in the final. Davis became the first player to retain the title at the Crucible. The tournament was sponsored by cigarette manufacturer Embassy.
Joe Johnson, John Parrott, Neal Foulds, Warren King, Roy Andrewartha, Marcel Gauvreau, Paul Mifsud, Mario Morra and Eddie Sinclair made their World Championship debut. All the debutants except Johnson, Foulds, Parrott and King played at the Crucible for the first and only time and only Foulds and Parrott won their first round matches.
Jimmy White played in his first final where he lost to Steve Davis 16–18. It would be the first of six World Championship final defeats. In the match, he was 4–12 behind at the end of the first day. On the second day, White fought back and trailed only 11–13 behind, before Davis again extended his lead to 16–12. White than won the next three frames in row to reduce the gap to 15–16, before Davis cleared the colours to be just one frame away to win the title. And although White would win the next frame with a 65 clearance, Davis won the 34th frame and sealed victory 18–16. With this Davis became the first player to retain the title at the Crucible.
Eight-time winner Fred Davis made his final World Championship appearance, losing 4–10 to Bill Werbeniuk. Davis had first played in the World Championship in 1937. Aged 70 years and 253 days, he became the tournament's oldest ever player.
The breakdown of prize money for this year is shown below:
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).
There were eight centuries in the championship, which were the fewest since 1978. The highest break of the televised stages was 138 made by Rex Williams, and the pre-televised stages was 112 made by Jim Donnelly.
138 Rex Williams
119, 100 Jimmy White
115, 101 Kirk Stevens
109 Ray Reardon
102 Dennis Taylor
100 Steve Davis
