The 2006 Maplin UK Championship professional ranking snooker tournament was held between 4 and 17 December 2006 in the Barbican Centre, York. It was the 30th instalment of the event and was part of the 2006/2007 season.

Peter Ebdon won in the final 10–6 against Stephen Hendry.

The qualifying took place between 14 and 19 November at Pontin's, Prestatyn.

The UK Championship is a professional ranking snooker tournament. It is the second biggest ranking tournament after the World Championship and is one of the Triple Crown events. Judd Trump is the defending champion.

The UK Championship was first held in 1977 in Tower Circus, Blackpool as the United Kingdom Professional Snooker Championship, an event open only to British residents and passport holders. Patsy Fagan won, beating Doug Mountjoy by 12 frames to 9, to win £2000. The following year the event moved to the Guild Hall, Preston, where it remained until 1998.

The rules were changed in 1984 when the tournament was granted ranking status and all professionals were allowed to enter. Since then, it has carried more ranking points than any tournament other than the World Championship.

The tournament has seen many memorable finals. In 1977 and 1979, it provided Patsy Fagan and John Virgo with their first and only major tournament wins respectively. In 1980, it was Steve Davis's first of his 73 professional tournament wins. In 1981, the final between Davis and Terry Griffiths set the stage for four more final battles between Davis and Griffiths that were to dominate the rest of the season before their unexpected losses in the first round of the 1982 World Championship.

Ronald Antonio "Ronnie" O'Sullivan (born 5 December 1975) is an English professional snooker player known for his rapid playing style, and is nicknamed "The Rocket". He has been World Champion on four occasions (2001, 2004, 2008 and 2012) and, with career earnings of over £6 million is second after Stephen Hendry on snooker's all-time prize-money list. O'Sullivan has been the world's no. 1 player on five occasions, and has won a total of 24 ranking titles. He is second, again behind Hendry, on the list of players making the most competitive century breaks, with a total of 678. O'Sullivan has compiled 11 maximum breaks in professional competition, a record which he shares with Hendry. He also holds the record for the fastest maximum break, at 5 minutes 20 seconds.

O'Sullivan is considered by many fans, critics and professionals, including fellow multiple-World Championship winners Hendry and Steve Davis, as the most naturally talented player in the history of the game. He has, however, been involved in a number of controversial incidents during his career.

Stephen Maguire (born 13 March 1981 in Glasgow, Scotland) is a Scottish professional snooker player.

Maguire almost qualified for the 2000 World Championships, leading eventual semi-finalist Joe Swail 9–6 in the final qualifying round before losing 9–10, but first served notice of his true potential by knocking out Stephen Lee in the first round of the UK Championship in 2002.

Maguire was the surprise winner of the 2004 European Open. Ranked 41 in the world at the time, he beat well established top-16 player Jimmy White 9–3 in the final. It was in that same season that he qualified for the World Championship for the first time, losing 6–10 in the first round to Ronnie O'Sullivan, but O'Sullivan admitted to being impressed by Maguire's performance and tipped him to be a future World Champion.

The start of the 2004/2005 season saw Maguire establish himself as one of the game's brightest talents. He performed well at the season opening Grand Prix, reaching the quarter-finals, and things improved further at the British Open in Brighton. Maguire defeated Ronnie O'Sullivan 6–1 in the semi-finals, leading O'Sullivan to claim that 'he had never seen anything like that on a snooker table before' and also rated Maguire as 'probably the best player in the world at the moment'. Although Maguire lost the final 6–9 to his compatriot John Higgins, he more than made up for it at the next event, the UK Championship, snooker's second biggest tournament.

Graeme Dott (born 12 May 1977) is a Scottish professional snooker player from Larkhall in Scotland. He won the 2006 World Championship, which was his first ranking title after four previous runner-up spots. He followed this up with the 2007 China Open and reached #2 in the World Rankings, but subsequently suffered from depression and experienced a loss of form, dropping out of the top 16 for the 2009/2010 season, before rediscovering his form and reaching his third World Championship final in 2010.

After winning the UK Under-19 Championship in 1992 and Scottish Amateur Championship in 1993, Dott turned professional in 1994. He slowly climbed the rankings, reaching the top sixteen in 2001, where he remained until 2009. Early successes included reaching the quarter-final of the 1996 Welsh Open and qualifying for the World Championship for the first time in 1997. Dott was a runner-up in the 1999 Scottish Open, the 2001 British Open, the 2004 World Championship and the 2005 Malta Cup. He scored his only competitive 147 break in the 1999 British Open.