Why they rank here
The most successful Asian player in the sport's history and the single figure most responsible for its expansion into China. Ding won the 2005 China Open in Beijing at 18, beating Stephen Hendry 9-5 in front of an enormous home audience, and has since taken more than 14 ranking titles, more than any other player from Asia. His Triple Crown record stands at four: three UK Championships (2005, 2009, 2019) and the 2011 Masters. In 2013-14 he won five ranking events in a single season, equalling Hendry's record for a campaign. He reached the 2016 world final, the first Asian player to do so, losing 18-14 to Mark Selby, and has passed 500 career centuries. The absence of a world title is the gap in his case, but the academies, sponsorships and junior pathways that produced Zhao Xintong's 2025 championship were built on the interest Ding created twenty years earlier.
Career profile
Each bar shows how this athlete compares with the strongest in our all-time list for that metric.