Ray Reardon, MBE (8 October 1932) is a retired Welshsnooker player who dominated the sport in the 1970s, winning six World Championships. Despite being a genial figure, his dark widow's peak and sharp-toothed grin earned him the nickname Dracula.

Reardon was born on 8 October 1932, in the coal mining community of Tredegar in Monmouthshire. Wanting to play snooker, he turned down a place at Grammar School to become a miner at Ty Trist Colliery aged 14, following in the footsteps of his father. After a rockfall in which he was buried for three hours, he quit mining and became a police officer when his family moved to Stoke-on-Trent.

Aged 15 Reardon beat fellow Welshman Jack Cowey in the British youth championship. Having won the Welsh amateur title from 1950–1955, Reardon failed to win the English title when he entered the event in 1956 and 1957. Finally upon re-entering the 1964 event, he won the English Amateur title, defeating John Spencer 11–8 in the final. This victory led to an invitation to tour South Africa. This proved to be so successful that Reardon was offered the chance to tour it again as a professional. On the back of this, Reardon resigned as a policeman and duly turned professional in 1967.

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.

Steve Davis, OBE (born 22 August 1957 in Plumstead, London) is an English professional snooker player. He has won more professional titles in the sport than any other player, including six World Championships during the 1980s, when he was the world number one for seven years and became the sport's first millionaire. He has won 28 ranking events in total, second only to Stephen Hendry.

Davis' achievements also include three Masters and a record six UK Championship titles. In 1988 he became the first player to complete snooker's Triple Crown in a single season. He is also a former four-time World Doubles champion with Tony Meo and won the World Team Classic/World Cup four times with England. In 1982, he became the first player to compile a televised maximum break and is one of four players to have compiled over 300 competitive century breaks. Though he has not won a major tournament since 1997, he continues to play snooker at a high level and reached the quarter-finals at the 2010 World Championship. He was still ranked in the world's top 16 at the age of 50, and is ranked number 51 after the 2012 World Championship.

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.

Rex Williams (born 20 July 1933), son of Minnie Roberts and William Williams, is a retired English professional snooker and billiards player.

Williams was an excellent junior player in both snooker and billiards. His professional career began in 1951, during a period of decline in snooker. In the 1960s, when the World Snooker Championship was run as challenge matches, he faced John Pulman in the 1964 and 1965 finals but was unsuccessful both times. In December 1966, during an exhibition match in Cape Town, he followed Joe Davis as the second man to make an accredited maximum 147 snooker break.

He won the World Professional Billiards Championship seven times from 1968 to 1983, including a reign as champion from 1968 to 1980. He was less successful at snooker, although he did become the oldest player to reach a world-ranking final when, aged 53, he lost to Jimmy White in the final of the 1986 Rothmans Grand Prix. He twice reached the semi-final of the World Championship, losing in 1972 to Alex Higgins (having been four frames ahead with five left to play) and, in 1974, to Graham Miles. He gained the unfortunate distinction of never winning a World Championship match at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield after it became the Championship's permanent venue in 1977, despite playing at the venue on eight occasions (a record he shares with Cliff Wilson). He's also remembered for recovering from 8-1 down to win 9-8 against Terry Griffiths in the first round of the 1979 UK Championship, in Griffiths's first televised match (Griffiths was World Champion later that season).