page_title: Mark Selby
section_title: 2016–17 season
hierarchical_section_title: Mark Selby / Snooker career / 2016–17 season
caption_attribution_description: English: Mark Selby at 2016 European Masters in Bucharest, Romania
context_page_description: Mark Anthony Selby is an English professional snooker player. He has been World Snooker Champion three times and was number one in the world rankings for more than four years continuously. He has won 17 ranking titles, placing him joint seventh on the all-time list of ranking tournament wins.
  Selby joined the main professional snooker tour in 1999 at the age of 16, after competing on the non-ranking UK Tour in 1998. He was runner-up to John Higgins at the 2007 World Snooker Championship. He was the sixth player to win all of snooker's Triple Crown events at least twice, having won three Masters titles, two UK Championships, and three World Championships. His other ranking titles are the Welsh Open in 2008, the Shanghai Masters in 2011, the German Masters in 2015, the China Open in 2015, 2017, and 2018, the Paul Hunter Classic in 2016, the International Championship in 2016 and 2017, the China Championship in 2018, the English Open in 2019, and the Scottish Open also in 2019.
  Known as a patient, tough competitor with strong safety play, Selby is also a prolific break-builder and has compiled over 600 century breaks in his professional career.
context_section_description: Selby won his first ranking title of the season at the Paul Hunter Classic, defeating Tom Ford 4–2 in the final. His semi-final with Stuart Bingham at the Shanghai Masters was a meeting between the top two ranked players in the world, Selby winning 6–5, having been 3–5 behind. After taking an early 3–1 advantage over Ding Junhui in the final, Selby eventually lost 10–6. He was defeated 6–2 by Judd Trump in the semi-finals of the European Masters. He then won 9–3 in another semi-final encounter with Bingham, to reach the final of the International Championship in Daqing, China, winning the event for the first time by overpowering Ding Junhui 10–1. Selby dominated their encounter, winning the last seven frames in a row, in the most one-sided ranking event final since the 2012 Haikou World Open when Mark Allen had defeated Stephen Lee by the same scoreline. Selby made seven breaks over 50 while Ding managed a top run of just 47.
  He beat John Higgins 6–5 at the UK Championship in a high-quality quarter-final match lasting five hours, in which Selby won on the colours in the deciding frame. This was followed by a more routine 6–2 semi-final victory over Shaun Murphy. He developed a 7–2 advantage over Ronnie O'Sullivan in the final, before it was reduced to 7–4, followed by four breaks of 130 or more over the next five frames, two by each player, bringing the score to 9–7 in Selby's favour. He then finished the match with a 107 break to claim his second UK title, completing the second Triple Crown of his career. He failed to progress to the semi-final stage of any of the next seven tournaments, before making it through to the final of the China Open in April, where he took the final three frames against Mark Williams to win 10–8 and claim his fourth ranking event title of the season.
  No one came close to beating Selby as he progressed through to the semi-finals of the World Championship. In his quarter-final match, he heavily defeated Marco Fu 13–3 with a session to spare. He faced Ding Junhui in the semi-finals, going 16–13 ahead before Ding closed the gap to 16–15; Selby then won the 32nd frame to reach his third world final in four years. He fell behind 4–10 against John Higgins in the final, before recovering to win 12 out of the next 14 frames, and finally closed out the match 18–15 to win his third World Championship, becoming the fourth player—after Steve Davis, Stephen Hendry and Ronnie O'Sullivan—to retain the world title at the Crucible. Selby made a record £932,000 during the season. The World Championship was his fifth ranking title of the season after he had never previously won more than two titles in one season. This tied him with Hendry and Ding as the only players to have won five ranking events in a single season.
caption: Selby at 2016 European Masters in Bucharest, Romania
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