Vietnamese Billiards: What Never Gets Recorded After Every Shot

On the spectator seats of a billiards club in Thu Dau Mot, I picked up a score sheet someone had left behind. The marker had written neatly: two players' names, points per inning, cushion contacts. But the sheet had no tournament name, no date, no signature. A match had been played in full, someone won, someone lost, and after the last round of applause everything vanished with that piece of paper.

I kept it in my desk drawer for nearly two years. It made me think of a mismatch: Vietnam is among the Asian nations that produce the most world-class carom three-cushion players, while the number of semi-professional club matches at home that are properly recorded, with dates, with anything you can look up again, is close to zero.

The point is not a shortage of talent. It is that what talent does every night is not preserved.

I came to billiards by a roundabout route. Twenty-three years in the snooker commentary booth for VTC taught me that this sport has its own rhythm: a good inning is usually built from three or four positioning shots that almost nobody remembers. Before that, I worked as a data consultant for a football club in Binh Duong, where I learned to read matches through xG and PPDA.

Back then Binh Duong had no expensive software, only people who believed every number would find its way.

When I moved into covering billiards for the Vietnamese market, I carried that habit with me and immediately hit a wall. Football has a centralised data system for nearly every professional match. Billiards does not.

The first problem is conceptual. In Vietnam, "billiards" is an umbrella word covering at least three sports that differ in almost everything: carom three-cushion, snooker, and pool in its 9-ball, 8-ball and Chinese 8-ball variants. These three have three tournament systems, three scoring methods, three international governing bodies, and three talent pathways that barely intersect.

A carom three-cushion table is 2.84 metres long and has no pockets. A snooker table has six pockets and fifteen reds. A pool table also has six pockets but smaller balls and different rules. These are three separate sports, in the way football and basketball are separate, not three variants of the same game.

The consequence is that numbers get placed side by side in the wrong place. A carom player averages 1.8 points per inning. A snooker player has a scoring rate per visit above 50 points. Those two figures cannot be compared, yet in sponsorship briefs and on forums they are routinely placed together as if they shared a yardstick.

The biggest blind spot in Vietnamese billiards is that the data of three different sports gets mixed into one place and then read as if it belonged to a single sport.

The data that does exist is fairly tidy. In carom, the Union Mondiale de Billard has standardised recording for decades. The world three-cushion championship is played to 40 points, with a maximum of 50 innings per match. Every match leaves three figures: average per inning, total innings, and cushion efficiency. That is a clean dataset, enough to compare players across eras.

In snooker the data is denser: long-pot success rate, safety success rate, average visit length, number of extended safety exchanges. Maximum breaks of 147 are recorded as a category of their own, and Ronnie O'Sullivan holds the record for the most official 147s in professional events.

In pool, systems such as the WPA track run-out rate after the break, break success rate, and win rate in safety exchanges. These are the numbers used to price players in international invitational events.

But all of that is data from the international stage. At the domestic level, the level that produces those very players, the story is different. Names like Tran Quyet Chien, Bao Phuong Vinh and Nguyen Duc Anh Chien have put Vietnamese three-cushion carom on the world map, yet their journeys through domestic events leave almost no data trace. A provincial open can draw sixty or seventy players over three days and finish without leaving any data file beyond a ranking sheet taped to the door.

I once stayed behind after such a tournament and asked the organisers to let me photograph every score sheet. The person in charge looked at me as if I were a stranger. Nobody had ever asked them that. After some persuading, I had more than two hundred innings from twelve young players. When I entered them into a spreadsheet and sorted, a pattern emerged with uncomfortable clarity.

The group that won most was not the group with the highest average. It was the group with the lowest variance. In other words, they rarely exploded, but they almost never collapsed within an inning either.

I once ran a small test on that dataset: I ranked the twelve players by average, then placed that next to their actual finishing positions. The two rankings diverged by as many as seven places. The player with the highest average finished sixth. The champion ranked fourth by average. That gap carries information.

In short-format, knockout competition, consistency beats a momentary peak, and that is something a ranking built on titles will never show you.

Before I trust a number, I ask where it came from. The same way I look at a player before I comment on him.

People see the winning shot; I see the twenty quiet minutes that led to it.

Now to the counterintuitive part. The natural reflex when you discover a data gap is to go and collect a great deal. I think that is a trap, and I have fallen into it more than once. Not every number deserves recording, and some metrics look highly professional while in fact measuring effort rather than effectiveness.

Cushion contacts are one example. A player who uses many cushions in an inning sounds like someone with fine cue-ball control. But if those cushion contacts sit inside a low-percentage plan, a higher number is a sign of playing loosely. Effort metrics and efficiency metrics are two different things, and only one of them takes you to victory.

In football I have seen the same thing with distance covered. A midfielder who runs thirteen kilometres in a match is always praised, even when most of that running was chasing the ball without cutting out a single pass. Billiards now faces a similar risk as clubs begin attaching counting devices.

Another counterintuitive point: ranking by titles. In Vietnam the most common way to assess a player is to count championships. That is useful for media, and useless for prediction. A player with three titles inside six months of peak form and nothing across the following two years is a very different player from one who holds form across five seasons.

Titles are not meaningless. But a title is the final outcome of a long chain, and if you keep only the final outcome you have thrown away nearly all the information.

Every season is a string of data, but my memory does not sit inside any model.

There was a period that made me review my whole approach to recording. The empty stadiums of 2026, I could hear clearly the roll of the ball and the sound of a notes sheet dropping onto a spectator seat.

When the crowd disappeared, many things I had assumed were the essence of sport turned out to be consequences of a crowd. Pressure from the stands changes how a player chooses an option. That is true in football, and I believe it is true in billiards, where an inning stretched across three minutes in total silence is a very different experience.

That is why I began recording more than the score: the moment within the match, the state of the score, and whether that inning came before or after a heavy losing inning. Context is not decoration around a number. Sometimes context is the number.

With snooker I have the advantage of being a commentator by trade. Domestic amateur snooker tournaments are usually played in short formats, three or four frames, and that completely changes the value of any metric. A player with a high break rate but a slow start suffers in a three-frame format, while a strong safety player benefits. If the format is not recorded, every later comparison is meaningless.

A billiards career lasts far longer than a footballer's. A carom player can hold a peak past forty, even close to fifty. That means the age curve in this sport is entirely different, and assessing a twenty-five-year-old by football's standards is a mistake. I once heard someone say a twenty-eight-year-old player was finished. There is no dataset that supports that sentence.

In women's carom the gap is even wider. Domestic women's events usually have fewer players, fewer sponsors, and therefore fewer people keeping records. A woman averaging 1.3 in a regional tournament might be the signal of a talent worth investing in, but there is no comparison table to confirm it. She is left alone with her number.

The marker is the quietest figure in this sport. They sit through three days of a tournament, write thousands of numbers, and almost nobody remembers their name. For years I have kept the habit of thanking the marker after the final match of every event. That is not social politeness. It is how I remind myself that data does not generate itself; it is produced by the hand of a specific person.

If I had to name the signals to watch in the period ahead, I would look at how many clubs begin storing score sheets digitally, even in a simple spreadsheet. I would look at the emergence of people doing serious recording work at provincial level. And I would look at sponsors starting to ask about metrics rather than only about titles.

Those three signals are small, slow, and will never make a headline. But they are the signs of a billiards scene beginning to understand itself.

The 2026 World Cup taught me the most important thing: numbers are only beautiful when they know which side of the story to stand on.

For Vietnamese billiards, the story is still being written every night in hundreds of clubs, on sheets of paper that will be left on spectator seats when the lights go out. My job, and perhaps that of a few others, is to pick them up before the cleaners arrive.