Joe Davis
Steve Davis
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Joe Davis leads 2 of 3 categories. Our all-time ranking places Joe Davis at #3 and Steve Davis at #4.
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 Steve Davis
The player who made snooker a mainstream British obsession and the most complete tactician the sport has produced. Davis won six world titles (1981, 1983, 1984, 1987, 1988, 1989) from eight finals, took 28 ranking titles, and spent seven consecutive seasons as world number one through the 1980s. With six UK Championships and three Masters he finished on 15 Triple Crown titles. In 1982 he made the first maximum break shown on television, a 147 against John Spencer at the Lada Classic in Oldham. His game was built on percentages: safety of a quality no one could match, positional play that rationed opponents to a handful of chances, and an absence of unforced error that opponents found demoralising. He was also central to the sport's two most famous defeats, losing the 1985 final 18-17 on the last black to Dennis Taylor before an estimated 18.5 million British viewers, and losing to 150-1 outsider Joe Johnson in 1986.