An Irish study has named John Higgins as the greatest snooker player of all time, with Ronnie O’Sullivan coming a close second.
The findings of a special computer algorithm that examined 50,000 snooker matches are revealed in RTE’s new series Brainstorm.
Fronted by social scientist Donal Fallon, it examines everything from hurling to hangovers, pollen to postcodes.
With the World Snooker Championships under way, applied mathematician and sports fan Joey O’Brien put the sport’s elite players under the microscope.
He said: “People love ranking things from the top 20 movies of the past week to the Billboard Top 40. We like an argument.”
The mathematician said he wanted to take a scientific look at the snooker’s best-known players as rankings are often driven by emotion.
Intriguingly, one of the sport’s most famous players, Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins, didn’t figure in his rankings.
Joey said: “He wasn’t even in the top 20 of our study so that goes to show you emotion is not everything.
“(Ronnie) O’Sullivan is second, he’s a nice combination of drama and skill.”
The programme reveals the existing ranking system of snooker players is based on prize money.
Read More: Ronnie O'Sullivan shrugs off 'genius' tag with modest Paul Gascoigne comparison
Joey said: “That’s not a perfect system because one tournament, the world championship, the premier tournament, is worth an awful lot more than the rest”, said the Irish mathematician.
“So, if you can do well there it can really over-inflate the ranking.
“The simplest way is probably just counting the number of wins that a player had in the year.
“That’s problematic as well because a win against the very best should be worth more than many wins against your average Joe Bloggs in the snooker hall.”
But the Irish mathematician believes he found a more scientific formula to name the greatest of all time by giving wins over strong players more value in an algorithm.
“The way we went about doing it was in constructing what’s known as a network”, he said on Brainstorm.
“Specifically, we’re going to think about players defeating one other, so the number of times Ronnie O’Sullivan has played John Higgins but how often has Ronnie lost to him.
“Then the idea is that we will transfer some of Ronnie’s prestige because he lost to John Higgins.
“We got this big system of equations for every single player.
“And we want to try and solve that system to provide us with a final prestige over all the matches which we can then use to rank all the players.”
He said they used the snooker database of matches since the 1900s to gauge wins and losses.
“We wanted to take pretty much all the results we could get. The study counted 50,000 games.
“When we plugged the data and formula together what actually fell out was John Higgins was the greatest of all time which might seem kind of surprising,
“There is not much glamour or back pages associated with him. Snooker players do love him.
“Ronnie O’Sullivan, for example, would always say he is his favourite.”
Although he said John Higgins had his own response when the findings were put to him
“John Higgins himself was asked about this and he said ‘no way’, he felt Ronnie (was) but I think he’s more modest than we’re wrong”, said the mathematician.
Brainstorm will air on RTE One at 8.30pm on Monday May 2 and will also be available on the RTE Player.
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