Supriya Ghosh (Editor)

2005 World Snooker Championship

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Dates
  
16 April–2 May 2005

City
  
Sheffield

Organisation(s)
  
WPBSA

Venue
  
Crucible Theatre

Country
  
England

Format
  
Ranking event

The 2005 World Snooker Championship (also referred to as the 2005 Embassy World Snooker Championship for the purposes of sponsorship) was a professional ranking snooker tournament that took place between 16 April and 2 May 2005 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England.

Contents

Ronnie O'Sullivan was the defending champion, but he lost in the quarter-finals 11–13 against Peter Ebdon.

Shaun Murphy won his first ranking title by defeating Matthew Stevens 18–16 in the final. The tournament was sponsored by cigarette manufacturer Embassy.

Tournament summary

  • Eventual winner Shaun Murphy was 150–1 to win at the start of the tournament and became the first qualifier to win the tournament since Terry Griffiths in 1979. He also became the second youngest world champion after Stephen Hendry in 1990.
  • John Parrott failed to qualify for the first time in his career, losing to Fergal O'Brien.
  • Paul Hunter played his first match since being diagnosed with stomach cancer. He lost to Michael Holt 8–10.
  • Mark Williams made the sixth maximum break at the World Championships against Robert Milkins.
  • Steve Davis made his first quarter-final since 1996.
  • Peter Ebdon's slow play caused Ronnie O'Sullivan to lose concentration, as Ebdon recovered from 2–8 down, to win the match 13–11. At one point during the match, Ebdon took five minutes to make a break of 12, only 20 seconds shorter than O'Sullivan's maximum break in 1997.
  • This was the last Embassy-sponsored World Championship due to new legislation preventing the advertising of tobacco products in the UK coming into force. 888.com took the sponsorship the next year and did so until 2008.
  • This year's tournament saw the debuts of future world champions Neil Robertson and Mark Selby.

    • Prize fund

    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).

    Qualifying

    The qualifying rounds 1–4 for the tournament took place between 13 February and 1 March 2005 at the at Pontin's, Prestatyn Sandys. The final round of qualifying took place between 23 and 24 May 2005 at the same venue.

    Round 1

    Stuart Mann 10–8 Liu Song

    Justin Astley 10–9 Steve James

    Hugh Abernethy 10–6 Matthew Selt

    Ben Woollaston 10–6 Mark Joyce

    Lee Spick 10–5 David Gilbert

    Craig Steadman 10–9 Kurt Maflin

    Rounds 2–5

    Century breaks

    There were 63 centuries in the 2005 World Snooker Championship.

    References

    2005 World Snooker Championship Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA