When Do Snooker Players Peak and Who’s Really the Greatest?

Snooker has always inspired arguments about greatness. Is it about world titles? Longevity? Dominance in a particular era? And beyond individual legacies, a bigger question lurks beneath the surface: how does performance in snooker actually evolve with age?

A recent academic paper by Baker and McHale (2024) tackles both questions using something snooker has in abundance but rarely exploits: data. Drawing on more than 100,000 matches the authors apply modern statistical modelling to uncover how player strength changes over time, who truly stands above the rest, and when snooker players reach their peak.

Moving Beyond Win Counts

Fans usually judge players by trophies or win percentages. However, they ignore the strength of opposition, differences between eras, and that some players dominate weaker fields while others battle through golden generations.

Baker and McHale instead treat snooker as a paired comparison sport: every frame tells us something about the relative strength of two players. By analysing results frame‑by‑frame (rather than just match wins), the authors estimate a the strength for every player at every point in their career.

Crucially, this strength is allowed to change over time. Players improve, peak, plateau, and decline and the model respects that reality.

Who Is the Greatest of All Time?

When strength is measured this way, two names clearly rise to the top: Ronnie O’Sullivan and Stephen Hendry.

At their absolute peaks, the results finds them to be almost indistinguishable. If peak‑Ronnie played peak‑Hendry, the probability of Ronnie winning is just 50.8%, essentially a coin toss.

So why does O’Sullivan often feel like the obvious answer to the “GOAT” debate?

Longevity.

Hendry’s peak was ferocious but relativity brief. O’Sullivan, by contrast, has sustained elite‑level performance across multiple decades. The paper shows that Ronnie’s real achievement is not a uniquely high peak, but an extraordinary ability to delay decline.

This distinction between peak brilliance and career endurance is one of the paper’s most important contributions.

When Do Snooker Players Peak?

Here’s the finding that challenges conventional wisdom:

Snooker players peak, on average, between ages 25 and 30.

That’s younger than expected for a sport that relies heavily on precision, experience, and tactical intelligence rather than speed or raw physicality. For comparison:

• Chess players peak in their early 40s.

• Golfers peak in their mid‑30s.

  
  

The authors also find that stronger players peak slightly later around 30 rather than 25 but the difference is modest. More importantly, once decline sets in, elite players do not decline more slowly than others. What separates careers is not the slope of decline, but how long it is postponed.

Decline Is Normal, And Revealing

Another insight cuts against popular narratives. We often explain declining performance in terms of motivation, hunger, or effort. The data suggest otherwise.

After accounting for age and strength, the authors find no systematic evidence that players “try harder” in big tournaments than small ones. Performance fluctuations are largely structural, not psychological.

This reframes how we should interpret late‑career slumps. The real signal lies in when it starts and how sharply it unfolds.

Did Players Fulfil Their Potential?

Using further statistical analysis the authors explore whether players lived up to what their early careers promised. Some, like Ronnie O’Sullivan, consistently performed above age‑expected levels. Others, including Stephen Hendry, declined faster than age alone would predict.

This reframing is subtle but powerful. A player doesn’t need to be the greatest ever to have had an exceptional career. Conversely, even champions may under‑fulfil their potential if their performance collapses early.

This bitesize research piece is written by Snooker Science but is based on the great work of Baker and McHale. Their full paper can be found here: Baker, R. & McHale, I. (2024). Estimating age-dependent performance in paired comparisons competitions: application to snooker. Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, 20(2), 113-125. https://doi.org/10.1515/jqas-2023-0082