Since the combustion system of coal-fired boiler in thermal power plant is characterized as time varying, strongly coupled, and nonlinear, it is hard to achieve a satisfactory performance by the conventional proportional integral derivative (PID) control scheme. For the characteristics of the main steam pressure in coal-fired power plant boiler, the sliding mode control system with Smith predictive structure is proposed to look for performance and robustness improvement. First, internal model control (IMC) and Smith predictor (SP) is used to deal with the time delay, and sliding mode controller (SMCr) is designed to overcome the model mismatch. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed controller compared with conventional ones.