Stephen Hendry
Joe Davis
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Dead even across the measured categories. Our all-time ranking places Stephen Hendry at #2 and Joe Davis at #3.
The case for Stephen Hendry
The most dominant player of snooker's modern peak and the man who redefined how fast a frame should be won. Hendry took the world title in 1990 at 21 years and 106 days, still the youngest champion, and added six more (1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1999), including five in a row from 1992 to 1996 — a run no one else has approached in the Crucible era. He finished with 36 ranking titles, five UK Championships, six Masters and 18 Triple Crown titles, and held the world number one ranking for eight consecutive seasons from 1990 to 1998. He retired in 2012 with 775 career centuries and 11 official maximums, the last of them made at the Crucible in his final World Championship appearance. His contribution was tactical as much as statistical: by attacking long reds that his contemporaries played safe on, he forced the entire tour to raise its scoring rate.
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.