Stephen Hendry
Neil Robertson
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Stephen Hendry leads 3 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Stephen Hendry at #2 and Neil Robertson at #10.
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 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.