The 2001 World Snooker Championship (also referred to as the 2001 Embassy World Snooker Championship for the purposes of sponsorship) was a professional ranking snooker tournament that took place between 21 April and 7 May 2001 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. The tournament was sponsored by cigarette manufacturer Embassy. Defending champion Mark Williams lost in the second round 12–13 against Joe Swail, and became the latest first-time champion to fall to the Crucible curse, being unable to defend his first World title. Ronnie O'Sullivan won his first World title by defeating John Higgins 18–14 in the final.

Tournament summary

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 matches were held between 20 February and 4 March 2001 at the Newport Centre in Newport, Wales.

Round 1

Round 2–4

Round 5–6

Century breaks

There were 53 century breaks in the Championship. The highest break of the tournament was 140 made by Joe Swail.