Terrence "Terry" Griffiths OBE (born 16 October 1947) is a retired Welsh snooker player and current snooker coach and pundit. He won the World Championship in 1979 at the first attempt, and reached the 1988 final. He also won the Masters in 1980 and the UK Championship in 1982, making him one of seven players to have completed snooker's triple crown. He was renowned for his slow, highly cautious style of play.

Griffiths was born in Llanelli. A former postman, insurance salesman, miner and bus conductor, he had a long amateur career, winning the Welsh Amateur Championship in 1975 and the English Amateur Championship in 1977 and 1978 before turning professional.

In his first professional match, at the 1978 UK Championship, he lost 8–9 to Rex Williams after leading 8–1. However, he could hardly have expected what would come in the 1979 World Championships. After qualifying he beat Perrie Mans and Alex Higgins. Interviewed after beating Eddie Charlton in a long semi-final, it suddenly dawned on him what he had done, and he said "I'm in the final now, you know!" in his broad Welsh accent. He went on to beat Dennis Taylor 24–16 in the final, becoming world champion at the first attempt. In the same year he was part of the Welsh team that won the inaugural World Cup of snooker: he, Ray Reardon and Doug Mountjoy beat England 14–3 in the final. But at the end of 1979, he lost 13–14 in the UK Championship final to John Virgo.

Alexander Gordon "Alex" Higgins (18 March 1949 – 24 July 2010), also known by his nickname of Hurricane Higgins, was a Northern Irish professional snooker player who was twice World Champion and twice runner-up. Higgins earned the nickname The Hurricane because of his speed of play. Higgins was also a former World Doubles champion with Jimmy White and won the World Cup three times with the All Ireland team. He also came to be known as the People's Champion because of his popularity.

Higgins is often credited to have brought the game of snooker to a wider audience and contributing to its peak in popularity in the eighties.

Higgins had a reputation as an unpredictable and difficult character. He was a heavy smoker, struggled with drinking and gambling, and admitted to using cocaine and marijuana. Diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998, Higgins was found dead in his Belfast home on 24 July 2010.

Alex Higgins was born in Belfast and had three sisters. He started playing snooker at the age of 11, often in the Jampot club in his native Sandy Row area of south Belfast and later in the YMCA in the nearby city centre. At age 14 and weighing seven and a half stones (47.6 kg), he left for England and a career as a jockey. However, he never made the title because, in his youth days, he drank a lot of Guinness and ate a lot of chocolate which made him too heavy to ride competitively. He returned to Belfast and by 1965, aged 16, he had compiled his first maximum break. In 1968 he won the All-Ireland and Northern Ireland Amateur Snooker Championships.

Edward Francis ("Eddie") Charlton AM (31 October 1929 – 7 November 2004) was an Australian professional snooker and English billiards player. He remains the only player to have been world championship runner-up in both snooker and billiards without winning either title. Later in his career, he became a sporting goods marketer; his namesake brand of billiard room equipment remains popular posthumously.

Charlton was born in Merewether, New South Wales, Australia and came from a sporting family. His brother Jim was also a professional snooker player but never joined the world ranks. Eddie himself was also a senior grade footballer, a champion surfer, a good cricketer and a boxer. One of his proudest moments was when he carried the Olympic torch on part of its journey to the 1956 Games in Melbourne.

Having been a coal miner, he turned professional at cue sports in 1963 at the age of 34 and the following season he won the Australian Professional Championship, a title which he went on to win, with one exception, every year for the next 20. Known for playing with a very straight cue action and rarely hitting the cue-ball with sidespin, Charlton was the most successful snooker player from Australia before Neil Robertson. He was ranked number three in the world for five consecutive seasons from 1976/77, the first year of the rankings, though surprisingly he never won a ranking tournament (in those first few seasons only the World Championship counted). The dogged antipodean reached the world final in 1968, 1973 and 1975, losing agonisingly 31–30 to Ray Reardon on the latter occasion.

William Joseph "Willie" Thorne (born 4 March 1954 in Leicester, England), is a former English professional snooker player and now a sports commentator.

Thorne became national under-16 champion at snooker in 1970. He never really converted this early promise into professional success, however, only ever winning one ranking snooker tournament (the Classic in 1985). The same year, he reached the UK Championship final against the then dominant Steve Davis, and seemed to have built himself an unassailable 13–8 lead. But a miss on a straightforward blue off its spot during the first frame of the final session allowed Davis to take the frame and eventually win the title. Thorne later said that he had hardly looked at the blue, considering it a certainty. He reached the quarter-finals of the World Snooker Championship in 1982 and 1986.

He peaked at no. 7 in the rankings in the mid-1980s, while also battling a serious gambling problem. In one famous incident, Thorne bet £38,000 on a match involving John Parrott, betting that Parrott would lose as Parrott had lost his personal cue and had to use one supplied by the venue. Much to Thorne's dismay (not least because he was actually commentating on the match), Parrott recovered from a slow start to win, only worsening Thorne's debts. Also, in an interview with The Guardian Newspaper in 2004, Thorne admitted to placing bets worth up to £20,000 on a horse.

John Virgo (born 3 March 1946, in Salford, Lancashire, England) is an English former professional snooker player and more recently a snooker commentator and TV personality.

Virgo turned professional in 1976, at a time when players such as Ray Reardon, John Spencer and Eddie Charlton were at the forefront of the sport. Although he had just turned 30 upon turning pro, he was still among the youngest players on the circuit at the time.

His snooker-playing fortunes peaked in 1979 when he reached the semi-final of the World Championship, and went on to win the 1979 UK Championship (though this was not a ranking event at the time), beating the reigning world champion Terry Griffiths. His UK Championship win came despite him being controversially docked two frames because of a miscommunication regarding the start time of the next session of play. He reached the Top 10 in the world rankings the following season.

Virgo, as part of his exhibition performances, had long performed trick shots and comedic impressions of other snooker players. During the 1982 World Championship, after one semi-final had finished early, he performed some of his impressions, such as of Alex Higgins, Terry Griffiths and Dennis Taylor. He repeated this act in the 1985 World Championship after both semi-finals ended earlier than expected.