• Ronnie O'Sullivan made his World Championship debut at the age of 17 years and 5 months, making him the second-youngest player since Stephen Hendry in 1986.^[2] O'Sullivan lost against Alan McManus 7–10 in the first round.^[3]
• Spencer Dunn made his Crucible debut, after winning eleven qualifying matches—a tournament record—to secure his place in the main draw. He defeated Ian Bullimore 5–1, Colin Mitchell 5–1, Elliott Clark 5–4, Neil Selman 5–1, Julian Goodyear 5–1, Kieran McAlinden 5–4, Mehmet Husnu 5–2, Bill Oliver 10–2, Colin Roscoe 10–7, Dave Harold 10–7, and Mark Bennett 10–9, before his first-round match against Nigel Bond. Fellow debutants O'Sullivan and John Giles both won ten qualifying matches to reach the Crucible stages.
• The other debutants this year were Brian Morgan, Joe Swail, Karl Payne, Shaun Mellish and Stephen O'Connor. The high number of debutants was partially a result of the governing body's decision to begin pre-qualifying at the beginning of the season. Of this year's rookies, only Morgan, O'Sullivan and Swail ever qualified for another World Championship.
• In frame three of his first-round match, Hendry compiled the 250th century break at the Crucible.^[4]
• 1981 runner-up and former Masters and twice UK Champion, Doug Mountjoy, played in his last World Championship main draw. He had appeared at every World Championship since the event moved to the Crucible in 1977, a run of 17 consecutive appearances. Mountjoy reached the second round, falling 6–13 to Jimmy White. Weeks later, Mountjoy had an operation to remove his left lung after being diagnosed with stage 2 lung cancer.
• Dennis Taylor's 13–11 second-round victory over Terry Griffiths set a record for the longest best-of-25-frames match in professional play at almost 800 minutes.
• James Wattana of Thailand became the first player from the Far East to reach the semi-finals of the event.^[5]
• Hendry's 18–5 victory over White was only the third time since the championship moved to the Crucible, and to date the last, that the title was settled in the afternoon with a session to spare. The previous two were in 1983 and 1989.^[6]

The breakdown of prize money for this year is shown below:^[7][8]

• Winner: £175,000
• Runner-up: £105,000
• Semi-final: £52,000
• Quarter-final: £26,000
• Last 16: £14,000
• Last 32: £8,000
• Highest break: £14,400
• Maximum break: £100,000
• Total: £1,000,000

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).^{[7][9][10][11]}

There were 35 century breaks in the championship,^[13] a new record, beating the 31 centuries of 1991. The highest break of the event was a 144 made by Steve Davis.^[14]