Joe Davis
Mark Selby
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Joe Davis leads 2 of 2 categories. Our all-time ranking places Joe Davis at #3 and Mark Selby at #7.
The case for Joe Davis
Snooker's founder, first champion and first theorist. Davis co-created the World Championship in 1927 with promoter Bill Camkin, beat Tom Dennis 20-11 in the inaugural final for a purse of roughly six pounds ten shillings, and then won all fifteen stagings held up to 1946 before withdrawing permanently. He never lost a World Championship match. He was also a leading billiards professional, taking four world billiards titles between 1928 and 1932, and it was his understanding of positional play in that game that he transplanted into snooker. On 22 January 1955 at Leicester Square Hall he made the first officially ratified maximum break of 147. His instructional books taught a generation that snooker was a scoring game rather than a defensive one, establishing break-building from the black as orthodoxy. Comparisons across eras are impossible in his case: he faced a tiny professional field on slower equipment, but he invented the standards everyone since has been measured against.
The case for Mark Selby
The hardest man in modern snooker to beat over a long match. Selby has four world titles (2014, 2016, 2017, 2021) from six finals, more than 20 ranking titles, and eight Triple Crown titles including the 2012 UK Championship and three Masters (2008, 2010, 2013). He has passed 800 career centuries. His reputation rests on attrition: a safety game good enough to strangle opponents for whole sessions, an unusual willingness to play a frame out over an hour, and a recovery rate from behind that has produced repeated Crucible comebacks, most notably from 10-4 down to beat Ronnie O'Sullivan in the 2014 final. The caricature of him as purely defensive is unfair — in the 2023 world final against Luca Brecel he made the first maximum break ever compiled in a World Championship final. Known as the Jester from Leicester, he has spent long spells as world number one across three separate periods.