2007 World Snooker Championship
The 2007 World Snooker Championship (also referred to as the 2007 888.com World Snooker Championship for the purposes of sponsorship) was a professional ranking snooker tournament that took place at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. It started on 21 April 2007 and was scheduled to finish on 7 May 2007, but continued into the early hours of 8 May, ending at 12:54 a.m. BST. The final broke the record for the latest finish time in a World Snooker Championship final, narrowly beating the 2006 final by two minutes. Graeme Dott was the defending champion, but  lost in the first round 7–10 to Ian McCulloch and became another World Champion who fell to the Crucible curse and could not defend his first World title. John Higgins won his second World title by defeating qualifier Mark Selby 18–13 in the final. The tournament was sponsored by online casino 888.com. 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). The first round draw  was done by presenters Bill Turnbull and Sian Williams of BBC Breakfast on 19 March and it was announced on Breakfast at 7.30 am BST the next day. Preliminary qualifying. The preliminary qualifying rounds for the tournament took place in Pontin's Prestatyn, Wales. Round 1 Round 2 Qualifying. Qualifying for the 2007 World Snooker Championship, was held between 23 February to 2 March 2007 at Pontin's, Prestatyn, Wales. The final qualifying round took place at the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield between the 12–15 March 2007. Round 1 Rounds 2–5 Century breaks. Televised stage centuries. There were  68 centuries scored in the televised stage of the 2007 championship, which was joint equal highest in the history of the tournament (with the tournament held in 2002) until 2009.