Mark Selby has become only the 4th player in Snooker history to win 10 Triple Crowns after prevailing over Judd Trump in the 2025 UK Championship. Only Ronnie O’Sullivan (23), Stephen Hendry (18) & Steve Davis (15) have won more Triple Crown tournaments. Mark’s GOAThood is already confirmed as I wrote about last year but is he as dominant as the other GOATs (Greatest Of All Time)?
The Triple Crown of Snooker
The three tournaments which make up Snooker’s Triple Crown are –
- World Championship – which takes place in April and early May
- The Masters – which takes place in January
- UK Championship – which takes place in November & early December.
Using the Wikipedia links above, I’ve created a spreadsheet listing of all winners, runner ups and semi finalists (world championship only) since 1969 which can be downloaded here Snooker – Triple Crowns – Men – 2025 – v1.0. It is up to date as of December 2025. The spreadsheet has a number of worksheets and I will briefly describe three of them now.
TRIPLECROWNS
The listing of winners, runner-ups, etc can be found on the TRIPLECROWNS worksheet and reproduced below. The reason I start the list in 1969 is that is when the modern world championship tournament format began and it was followed by the birth of the Masters in 1975 and the UK Championship in 1977 to complete the Triple Crown set.
Each player is colour coded by nationality and a list of all 57 players shown can be found in column O of TRIPLECROWNS. In the newly added PLAYERS worksheet in cell A2, you can select a specific player using the dropdown list who will then be highlighted in TRIPLECROWNS in a metallic green shade.
RANKINGS
Here you can sort and rank the 57 players shown in TRIPLECROWNS. You can sort for individual tournaments or by summary statistics across all Triple Crowns. Each tournament is denoted with a shorthand with W for World Championship, M for Masters and UK for UK Championship.
There are four summary statistics to choose from –
- Wins – Number of Triple Crowns won.
- Finals – Number of Triple Crown finals played in.
- PointsAll – Number of Triple Crown points won. The points values for each outcome can be entered in the yellow cells in row 1 of RANKINGS.
- PointsEra – Number of points won within a certain time period. The start and end years of this period can be entered in cells P1 & Q1.
The example ranking shown below is for the top 20 players based on the PointsAll column using the points values shown in the yellow cells.
GOATS
This sheet contains all the graphics I now explain in the next two sections.
What makes a GOAT?
Four names should immediately leap to the mind of any snooker fan; Ray Reardon who dominated the 70s, Steve Davis who dominated the 80s, Stephen Hendry who dominated the 90s and Ronnie O’Sullivan who has dominated the 21st century so far. Each has 
won at least 6 world championships but who comes after them?
24 players have won the World Championship in its modern format since 1969. Of these, only 9 have won it at least twice as shown in the table here. I take the view that GOATs should be winning the World Championship multiple times so these 9 are our first contenders for GOAThood.
The World Championship is the summit of snooker but GOATs should be winning the other triple crowns as well. Mark Selby has just won his 10th Triple Crown making him the 4th player of all time to reach this milestone. 8 of his predecessors also appear in the World Championship table above with John Spencer the only one not making the leap. The two players not in the World Championship list but are in the Triple Crown list are Neil Robertson, who has won 6 Triple Crowns, and Judd Trump, who won his 5th Triple Crown last year and prompted me to start writing about Snooker!
Are there other players who reach finals but struggle to win tournaments? The next table lists 11 players who have played in at least 10 Triple Crown 
finals. By now, you should notice the same 8 players who appear in all three tables shown so far plus Judd Trump who appears in two tables. The first of the two other players in the Finals list is the unfortunate Jimmy White who played and lost 4 World Championship finals to Stephen Hendry in the 1990s. The second is Shaun Murphy who entered the Finals list after surprising everyone including me by winning the Masters at the start of this year. Neil Robertson does not appear in the Finals list and neither does John Spencer.
The last table I show below lists the 13 players who have earned at least 25 Triple Crown points in their career. This table captures all 13 players mentioned in the other three tables above. The points values I’ve used here are the ones shown earlier when I explained the RANKINGS worksheet i.e. 3 points for winning a triple crown, 1 point for being runner up, double points for World Championship i.e. 6 and 2, where I also give 1 point for reaching the semi final.
The 8 GOATS of Men’s Snooker
To me, the definition of a GOAT can be built using intuitive round numbers as below –
- 2 or more World Championship Titles
- 5 or more Triple Crown Titles
- 10 or more appearances in Triple Crown Finals
- 30 or more Triple Crown Points using the points values I’ve shown so far.
Since 1969, 8 players have met all four criteria. I doubt there will be any dispute these 8 are genuine GOATS of men’s Snooker.
At the beginning, I listed Reardon, Davis, Hendry and O’Sullivan as obvious GOATs due to their dominance of the World Championship. However, when sorted by points, Reardon ends up in 6th place instead of the top 4. This is because Ray Reardon, Alex Higgins and John Spencer all played in the 70s, a decade which began with only one Triple Crown tournament. Naturally this limits the opportunity for these three to earn Triple Crown Points. It does not stop Reardon and Alex Higgins from exceeding the GOAT threshold but Spencer misses out, a point I will return to in the next section.
Who will be the next GOAT?
Of the players still playing, I see 4 candidates for future GOAThood. Last year, I mentioned Judd Trump, Neil Robertson and Shaun Murphy but I now realise I’d forgotten to include Ding Junhui.
The first three have all won a World Championship but differ in what they need to do next to reach my definition of a GOAT.
- Judd Trump needs to win another World Championship which would automatically give him 30+ points. He already has the 5 Triple Crowns & 10 Finals needed to be a GOAT.
- Shaun Murphy also needs to win another World Championship which would automatically give him his 5th Triple Crown and 30+ points. Last year, I dismissed his chances only for him to prove me wrong by reaching his 10th Triple Crown final!
- Neil Robertson needs to win another World Championship and reach another Triple Crown final. He already has 6 Triple Crowns to his name.
- Ding Junhui has the hardest task of the four since he needs to win 2 more World Championships but if he does this, he will automatically reach all GOAT thresholds at once since he already has 4 Triple Crowns, 8 Finals and 19 Points.
What about John Spencer? His 3 World titles clearly means he has the pedigree of a GOAT but as I noted earlier, being a star in the 70s limited his opportunities for the other Triple Crowns. The question is what would he have achieved had all 3 triple crowns been played for the full decade? Would he have played in 5 more finals and won at least one of them? I think a case can be made he would have done this which is why I believe he is the honorary GOAT of men’s snooker.
The Different Species of GOATs
In this section, I refer to charts which can be found in the PLAYER and DECADE worksheets.
Here are the tables in DECADE. Only those players who won at least 6 triple crown points (equivalent to winning a World Championship) are shown in each timeframe as denoted by the yellow cells at the top of each table. The PtsEra column is the number of points won in that decade, the Pts column is the total number of points won so far in their career. Straightaway, I see two “species” of GOATs.
Let’s start with Ray Reardon, Steve Davis & Stephen Hendry who successively dominated the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. If you compare their PtsEra value with their Pts value, you can see they thoroughly owned their decades. In PLAYER, if you select their names, the resulting chart shows the number of Triple Crown points won in each calendar year along with a 5-year centred moving average as a black line. I have plotted these below along with Alex Higgins.
I regard these 4 players as one species of GOAT. Their career at the top was relatively short but very dominant. In all 4 cases, the black lines show a distinct peak for the centred 5 year moving average.
The other 4 players make up a second species of GOAT. Their peaks are not as dominant as the first species but they have greater longevity. Standing above them all is Ronnie O’Sullivan who has shown relatively few dips for 20+ years compared to the other three. Whereas John Higgins and Mark Williams look like they are coming to the end of their careers, there is no sign O’Sullivan running out of steam. For Mark Selby, let’s hope his recent triumph in the UK Championship is the first of more Triple Crowns to follow.
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