Joe Davis
Neil Robertson
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 Neil Robertson at #10.
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 Neil Robertson
The most successful player produced outside Britain and Ireland, and for a long stretch the only one. Robertson won the World Championship in 2010, becoming the first Australian champion and the only player from outside the British Isles to take the title between Cliff Thorburn in 1980 and Luca Brecel in 2023. He has more than 24 ranking titles and five Triple Crown titles, including three UK Championships (2013, 2015, 2020) and the 2012 Masters, and has compiled over 800 career centuries. In 2013-14 he became the first player in history to make 100 century breaks in a single season, finishing with 103, a benchmark that has since become the marker of an elite scoring campaign. Left-handed and technically orthodox, he built his career by moving to Britain as a teenager after failing to make an impact from Melbourne, and remains the proof that the tour's talent pipeline is not geographically fixed.