Vietnamese Billiards: World Champions and the Data Gap No One Fills

Vietnamese Billiards: World Champions and the Data Gap No One Fills

A yellow ball and a blank page

It was late at a billiards club on Nguyen Thien Thuat Street, Nha Trang. The clock read 11:40 p.m. No spectators — only three people: a young player, someone filming on a phone, and me. The yellow ball stopped less than two centimetres from the cushion. The player stood still. He did not shoot. He was calculating.

I sat there for seventy minutes just to watch him take one shot. The result: three cushions, correct contact, point scored. But what I remember is not the shot. What I remember is the silence before it — and the fact that I had not a single number to record it.

I went home, opened my laptop, and searched for data on that session. Nothing. No statistical table, no success rate, no metric. I had a beautiful moment and a blank page.

That was when I understood: the biggest problem in Vietnamese billiards is not on the table. It lies in the fact that we have no way of telling what happens on the table — in numbers. The match truly begins the moment the ball comes to rest, and we do not have a single line of record about that moment.

Context: A country that plays billiards better than it documents it

Vietnamese billiards is a story of three parallel currents. The first is carom — also called billiards phang: libre, cushion billiards, and three-cushion at its peak. The second is pool: 8-ball, 9-ball, 10-ball. The third is snooker, a discipline that demands a large table, small balls, narrow pockets and near-monastic patience.

If anyone asks me which current is strongest, I do not hesitate: three-cushion carom. This is where Vietnam stands shoulder to shoulder with the world. The Vietnam Billiards & Snooker Federation (VBSF) governs domestic activity, while internationally carom is run by the Union Mondiale de Billard (UMB), with its World Cup system and annual world championship.

For more than a decade, Vietnamese players have climbed to the summit. Tran Quyet Chien has held the world No. 1 ranking and won multiple three-cushion World Cups. Bao Phuong Vinh stunned the billiards world by winning the three-cushion world championship held in Hanoi, entering as a wildcard and going all the way to the crown. Alongside them are Nguyen Duc Anh Chien, Tran Thanh Luc, Ngo Dinh Nai and Ma Minh Cam — the names that built a golden generation of Vietnamese carom.

Vietnam is also a familiar stop on the three-cushion World Cup circuit, with editions in Binh Duong and Ho Chi Minh City drawing hundreds of international players. Three-cushion clubs have sprung up in almost every province. In Nha Trang, where I live, at least five clubs operate past midnight every evening.

And yet, when I want to look up a single figure — a player's average scoring rate at a domestic event, foul counts, efficiency on decisive shots — I often have to fall back on what I have written down by hand. That is the greatest paradox of Vietnamese billiards: world-class results, with data infrastructure at the level of a grassroots tournament.

Pool and snooker are even harder. In pool, Vietnam lacks a national ranking system deep enough to talk seriously with the world, despite a very broad playing culture. In snooker, the international arena is so brutal that it is almost a separate world — run by the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA) and World Snooker Tour, with a system concentrated mainly in the UK, China and Europe.

These three currents share one sad common point: we tell our story through emotion, through word of mouth in billiards halls, rather than through any table of data that can be checked.

Core insight: The discipline-identification problem — the first step nobody takes

In professional sports analysis there is a step outsiders rarely notice: discipline identification. It sounds simple, but it determines everything that follows.

A three-cushion carom shot and a 9-ball pool shot follow entirely different logics. Carom has no pockets, only cushions, and the player must contact a set number of cushions before touching the two object balls. Pool has pockets, and the whole match is a battle for position. Snooker is different again: you score and build a break at once, a frame can last dozens of minutes, and the success rate of a three-metre pot means something completely different from carom.

If you do not correctly identify the discipline, every number that follows is meaningless — and in Vietnam, we routinely skip this first step.

I once witnessed a heated debate at a club in Nha Trang about who was "Vietnam's number one player". One person named a carom champion, another named a pool shooter. The debate lasted two hours, ended over beer and reached no conclusion. The reason is simple: they were comparing two disciplines with different frames of reference, and nobody had data for either to set side by side.

That is a small tragedy of Vietnamese billiards. In carom, we have a world champion. In pool, we have a movement. But because we lack data standardised by discipline, the two currents never meet in a serious conversation.

I learned to read matches through numbers, but only when they know how to dance. And for numbers to dance, there must first be numbers. We are at the stage of not yet having numbers.

Player data: When champions have no file

Try something simple: find a full data profile of a leading Vietnamese three-cushion player. You will find a list of titles. You will find highlight videos. You will find admiring articles.

But you will not find season-by-season average scoring rates, foul counts per innings, efficiency on decisive shots, or win rates in matches that go to the final inning. Those metrics exist in the international carom world — UMB and independent statistical systems record them — but most are not translated into Vietnamese, not systematically archived, and not used to tell the story of Vietnamese players.

This is a measurable gap: we have world champions but not the data depth to prove why they won.

Think about it. A three-cushion player competes in hundreds of matches a year. In every match, every shot carries information: cue-ball angle, stroke power, cue-ball position, cushion count, outcome. If we recorded it, we would have an invaluable archive for the next generation.

In developed billiards nations, people have done this for a long time. I once spoke with a Korean player who recorded every shot of his own training, classified by pattern, and calculated success rates by type. "My data is older than I am," he joked. "It remembers what I forget."

Vietnamese players have training discipline. They spend thousands of hours at the table, repeating difficult shots until they become reflexes. But that discipline has not been converted into recording discipline. And when a player retires, most of the knowledge about him disappears — leaving only a few videos and a few oral memories.

I do not write about the score. I write about what the score conceals. And in billiards, what a scored point conceals is the entire data behind it: the hours that made the shot automatic, the failure rate on the previous attempt, the psychological state at the decisive moment.

Tournament systems: Structure and information gaps

At the international level, three-cushion carom has a relatively clear tournament system. UMB organises the annual world championship, and the World Cup circuit is a regular arena with ranking points awarded at each stop. Players accumulate points to climb the world ranking.

Domestically, Vietnam has events within the VBSF system: the national championship, open events, and club-level competitions. But when I want to look up details of a domestic event — total prize fund, number of participants, format, ranking-point method — I often meet gaps.

Information about tournament tier is the foundation of any analysis. A tournament with a large prize fund but a short format encourages risk-taking. A long-format event with many rounds rewards consistency. These points directly determine who wins.

We lack data on the very tournaments we organise — a gap that turns the evaluation of a title into subjective judgement.

This matters more than people think. When a Vietnamese player wins an international title, the public celebrates. Rightly so. But to assess the true significance of that title, we need to know the quality of the opponents, how many top players entered, and how competitive the field was. Without these facts, we can only say "wonderful" — not "wonderful to what degree".

A tournament with 5 of the world's top 10 players is one thing. A tournament with 1 of 10 is another. The difference lies in data, and we do not have the data.

Power map: Who dominates the Asian table

In three-cushion carom, the power picture over the past decade is clear: Korea, Turkey, Belgium and the Netherlands are the traditional powers, with legends and dense successor generations. Vietnam has emerged as a new force, and together with Korea forms a formidable Asian pair.

Japan has a long carom tradition. China invests heavily but develops mainly in pool and Chinese 8-ball — a hybrid discipline between snooker and pool with American-style pockets and snooker-style rules, which carries great economic appeal in the Chinese market.

I notice something few people do: in Asia, carom and pool do not share a player pipeline. A top 9-ball pool player may never have competed in carom. A carom player may never have held a cue in a 9-ball match. These two currents feed two different audiences, and in Vietnam we use a single word, "billiards", for both — leading to confusion about hierarchy, value and development potential.

Generational transition is a flashpoint. In carom, a golden generation of Vietnam is entering the final phase of its career, and the question is who succeeds it. But to answer, we need data on the younger generation — and that data does not exist.

In pool, the world picture is dominated by the US, the Philippines, Chinese Taipei and the Netherlands. The Philippines has a legendary pool tradition, and I always look there with particular curiosity — the place where I was born but did not grow up. Part of my billiards soul belongs to the Philippines, the rest to Vietnam, and both are steeped in the culture of late-night tables.

Industry chain: From the table to the sponsorship contract

A sports industry operates as a chain. Upstream is clubs, tables, equipment, cues. Midstream is players, tournaments, media, broadcasting. Downstream is sponsorship, derivatives, memorabilia.

In Vietnam, the upstream develops fairly quickly. Billiards clubs appear in cities and countryside. Tables, cues and accessories have a lively market. A leading player can earn income from opening a club, selling equipment and attending exhibitions.

But when the chain reaches the midstream — where data becomes an asset — it breaks. There is no recording system, no match database, no analytics platform. This limits commercialisation: sponsors want numbers on viewership, engagement and sponsorship effectiveness. Without numbers, sponsorship contracts can only rest on relationships and goodwill.

Sponsorship cannot mature on inspiration alone. It needs data to be priced.

Downstream, Vietnamese billiards is almost untapped. There is no significant memorabilia market, no paid in-depth analysis, no player data platform. Meanwhile, in developed billiards nations, a leading player can live on sponsorship and digital content — partly thanks to data infrastructure that lets players be valued as brands.

This opens an opportunity: if Vietnam builds data infrastructure for billiards, the chain can run smoothly from top to bottom. But this is collective work, not individual. While waiting, most journalists and analysts like me must do our own record-keeping.

Contrarian angle: The biggest mistake is pretending to have data

There is a temptation every analyst in a data-poor environment encounters: filling the gap with speculation. Not enough numbers, so we borrow a little from memory. Unclear events, so we add a plausible guess. In the short term the article still flows. But the price appears later: the credibility of an entire analytical field is dragged down.

An editor once noted on my draft: "Too much emotion, too little data." I spent two weeks in despair, watching every match again to find the numbers. From then on I learned a principle: if there are no numbers, it is better to say so than to invent a number that sounds reasonable.

The biggest blind spot of Vietnamese billiards is not the lack of data. The blind spot is the rationalisation that we do not need data, because emotion is enough.

It sounds abstract, but the consequences are concrete. Without data, evaluating players becomes a game of memory and personal preference. The players who are remembered are often those with many shareable moments online, not those with the most consistent performance. One shooter can be celebrated for a beautiful shot while another with a higher win rate is forgotten.

This also explains why developing the next generation stalls. Without data, nobody knows where the young generation stands. Nobody can measure the gap between an 18-year-old and a champion. Nobody knows which skills to improve. Coaching becomes craft passed down by observation — valuable, but shallow.

I do not write about the shots. I write about what the shots conceal. And what is most concealed in Vietnamese billiards is data.

What I want to leave behind

There are moments that do not appear on the scoreboard but live in the breath of the arena. But for that breath not to be forgotten, it must be recorded — in words, in images, and in numbers.

That night in Nha Trang, when the yellow ball stopped two centimetres from the cushion, I faced a choice: write a beautiful paragraph, or start taking notes. I chose both. I wrote the paragraph, and I opened a spreadsheet.

The next day I messaged the young player: "Send me the data from last night's session. Anything you have." He replied: "All I have is video."

That is the starting point. A player begins filming his own shots. A journalist begins taking notes. A club begins archiving results. Small bricks, but bricks.

The question I leave is not who is Vietnam's number one player. The question is: when will we have enough data to answer that question without personal preference?

Then Vietnamese billiards will not only have world champions. It will have a memory of how those champions were made.