The 1986 World Snooker Championship (also referred to as the 1986 Embassy World Snooker Championship for the purposes of sponsorship) was a professional ranking snooker tournament that took place between 19 April – 5 May 1986 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England.
Joe Johnson won his only world title by defeating Steve Davis 18–12 in the final. The tournament was sponsored by cigarette manufacturer Embassy.
Like John Spencer in 1978, Terry Griffiths in 1980 and Steve Davis in 1982, defending champion Dennis Taylor fell to the Crucible curse, and lost his opening match 6–10 against Mike Hallett.
Johnson was a 150–1 outsider at the start of the championship, as he had never won a tournament in his seven-year career. He defeated Dave Martin in the first round and Hallett in the second. In the quarter-finals he overturned a 9–12 deficit to defeat Griffiths 13–12; before he beat Tony Knowles 16–8 in the semi-finals to set up a final against Steve Davis, the world number one. After the first days play ended at 8–8, Johnson took a 13–11 lead before the last session of the match. Johnson then won five of the last six frames to win the match 18–12 for his only world title.
Future world champion and world No. 1 Stephen Hendry made his debut losing 8–10 to Willie Thorne. It also made him the youngest player in the championship's history at the age of 17 years and 3 months. Another debutant in 1986 was Danny Fowler, who lost 2–10 to Terry Griffiths.
Three-time world champion John Spencer made his final appearance at the tournament, losing 7–10 to Alex Higgins.
The breakdown of prize money for this year is shown below:
Winner: £70,000
Runner-up: £42,000
Semi-finals: £21,000
Quarter-finals: £10,500
Last 16: £5,250
Last 32: £2,953
Last 48: £1,203
Highest break: £7,000
Maximum break: £80,000
Total: £350,000
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 20 century breaks in the championship, a record which stood until 1991. The highest breaks were 134 made by Davis in the main events, and 141 made by Hendry and in the qualifying event.
