Vietnamese Billiards and the Data Gap: What Lies Behind the Elite Matches

Vietnamese Billiards and the Data Gap: What Lies Behind the Elite Matches

THE COMMENTARY BOOTH, THE THIRTIETH INNING, AND ONE EMPTY CELL

In the commentary booth of a three-cushion carom World Cup stop in Binh Duong, I keep a habit almost nobody else keeps: I write down the position of the cue ball when the match reaches the thirtieth inning. In that particular match, the Vietnamese player was ahead and it was his turn at the table. He chose to send the cue ball into the long rail, pushing the other two balls toward the far corner, accepting no points in exchange for position. The camera cut to the stands. The stage lights changed colour. The tracking screen in the control room advanced the inning counter and nothing else.

When the match ended, the statistics still appeared, complete. The score. The number of innings. The average. The highest run. No cell recorded that the player had just declined an opening and recovered control by sending the cue ball through exactly three cushions. Nobody noted the distance between the two object balls at that moment, and nobody noted that the route he chose was harder than the alternative. The match moved on. And I knew I had just watched a decision that settled the result, while the entire tournament's recording system had no place to hold it.

That is where this article begins. With one empty cell.

THE SETTING: ONE UMBRELLA OVER FIVE DIFFERENT SPORTS

In Vietnam, the word for billiards covers at least five different things. Three-cushion carom, which Vietnamese fans shorten to three cushions, played on a pocketless table, scored by how many times the cue ball touches three cushions before contacting the two object balls. Pool, in its 8-ball, 9-ball and 10-ball variants, played on a pocketed table. Snooker, on a large pocketed table with twenty-two balls. English billiards and French billiards. These five groups have different rules, different equipment, different tournament structures and, most importantly for a professional writer like me, completely different sets of statistics.

The problem starts right there.

Since 2026, Vietnam has been the annual host of a three-cushion carom World Cup stop licensed by the Union Mondiale de Billard (UMB), held in Binh Duong. That event brings the world's leading players to Vietnam every year and has pushed domestic audience interest to a level the sport had never seen before. On the athlete side, Vietnam has a generation that specialists consider rare. Tran Quyet Chien has held the number one position in the UMB ranking. Bao Phuong Vinh won the three-cushion carom world championship in 2026, the biggest milestone in Vietnamese billiards history. Duong Quoc Hoang, Nguyen Quoc Nguyen and Ma Minh Cam have stayed in the continental top group for years. In the women's discipline, Chiem Hong Thai is a familiar name in Vietnamese women's carom.

The grassroots playing population is far larger still. Billiards clubs appear across almost every province and city, from three-table rooms in small towns to centres with dozens of tables in major urban areas. Amateur tournaments run almost weekly. Matches are streamed live on social media with audiences that many sports with formal federations would envy.

But that broadcast layer has one feature I always notice. In most live streams, the viewer sees the table, hears the commentary, and sees no numbers at all beyond the score. No inning statistics, no running average, no count of successful openings. Viewers are given the full emotion and are deprived of the context.

While the visual layer grew, the data layer stood still. That is the paradox I want to dissect in the rest of this article.

THE CORE: A STATISTICAL SYSTEM USED WITH THE WRONG UNITS

A comparison table that mixes three sports

Earlier this year I reread a round-up piece containing a comparison table of Vietnamese players' records. The table had four columns: name, number of titles, average performance, and notes. The third column stopped me. Three of the seven rows used three-cushion carom figures, meaning points per inning. The other four rows used pool figures, meaning match win rate and clearance rate. Those two units cannot sit side by side. A three-cushion player averaging 1.6 points per inning belongs to the world elite. A pool player clearing forty percent of his visits to the table also belongs to the elite. Putting both figures in one column and ranking them by numerical value is a methodological error, one that copy-editing cannot fix.

For a general reader the error is harmless. For a specialist writer it is the signature of an analytical layer that has never existed.

What we have, and what we lack

The data set that top-level three-cushion events publish for Vietnamese audiences usually contains: the score per inning, the total number of innings, the match average, the highest run, and occasionally the number of runs of five points or more. That is enough to know who won. It is not enough to know why.

What is not recorded is far more. Successful defensive shots. Escapes from trapped positions. The ratio of attacking choices to safety choices at each stage of a match. The quality of cushion routes, meaning whether a three-cushion shot struck the intended contact point or merely touched three cushions and then found a ball by luck. The distance between the two object balls at the moment the player decided to open the table. All of this is observable with the naked eye through video, and almost none of it enters any table.

In pool, the situation is slightly better. Major international events do record break-and-run percentages, successful safety rates and pot rates on difficult shots. But most domestic tournaments and amateur matches have no recording layer at all. Snooker is a different case: professional snooker's statistical system is mature enough to assess a player through centuries, fifty-plus visits, safety success rate and average shot time. Three sports, three levels of data maturity, bundled under one word.

The table is a coordinate system, and we are not measuring coordinates

There is something I always tell younger colleagues: a three-cushion table is a plane already divided into a grid. The markers on the rails, what players call the diamonds, are the reference system. An elite player does not hit by feel; he selects the contact point on the first cushion, the contact point on the second cushion, and finally the contact point on the second object ball. Those three points form a path that can be read on the plane.

If a path can be read, it can be measured. We could record the cue ball's coordinates before and after every shot. We could record which diamond was chosen, and how far the actual contact point deviated from the intention. This is the kind of data the human eye cannot process but a person can log by hand in a few seconds per shot.

And yet, across years of following domestic events, I have never seen a single score sheet with a coordinate column. We own a sport with a clearer geometric structure than most, and we record it with exactly two things: points and trophies.

Three evenings spent rebuilding one match by hand

Not long ago, a colleague in Nha Trang and I did something I consider worth doing. We took the recording of a national-level three-cushion match, muted the commentary, and counted every shot. For each shot we logged four things: the player, the type of shot, the points scored, and the cue ball's position afterwards. Three evenings, more than two hundred minutes of video, sixty-two shots in total. Comparing our log with the official score sheet, we differed on four shots. Two were our own counting errors. Two were input errors by the tournament's scorekeeper: one shot recorded as a miss was in fact a deliberate safety, and one entry recorded as a single run was actually two separate innings.

I mention this detail to make one point. At national level in Vietnam, the data layer is currently operated by hand, by multiple people, with different conventions, and with almost no cross-checking step. In a sport where results are decided by very small differences in ball position, input errors flow straight into every analysis downstream.

That experience reminds me of the period when football and many other sports stopped because of the pandemic. Back then I was assigned to rebuild classic carom matches from old recordings, and I found a series of discrepancies between the score sheets circulating online and what actually happened on video: missing shots, innings with wrongly added points. Between empty seasons, data is quiet, but it speaks most clearly. Since then, every quantitative judgement I publish carries one line: according to data cross-checked against video.

Vietnamese billiards lacks clean data because nobody will pay for a properly specified collection layer, while money for a polished visual layer is always available.

The player pyramid and the trophy trap

The way Vietnamese fans currently evaluate a player rests mainly on titles. Champion or not champion. Finalist or early exit. That approach is understandable and has a basis, because the elite stage is where ability under pressure gets verified. But it omits one important axis: consistency.

The UMB ranking is built on accumulated points over a period, so it reflects consistency to some degree. Counting titles does not. A player who reaches eight semi-finals in two years is an extremely dangerous player in any bracket. A player who wins once and then goes quiet for ten months tells a different story. The trophy table gives both men the same line: one.

For Vietnam's leading group, Tran Quyet Chien, Bao Phuong Vinh, Duong Quoc Hoang, Nguyen Quoc Nguyen and Ma Minh Cam, the absence of long-run indicators turns every internal comparison into a matter of feeling. Fans remember a player's most beautiful shot and forget the twenty innings he played reliably. Selective memory operates exactly like a score sheet: it only keeps what made an impression.

The women's side: a bright stage, a dark archive

Here I want to state plainly something I have observed over many years in this trade. Women's billiards events in Vietnam usually appear in the most ceremonial positions of an event: in the opening ceremony, in the sponsor's photo set, in the speech about developing the sport in a comprehensive way. What happens afterwards is much thinner. Match statistics for women players are rarely recorded in full. Video recordings are often not archived for long. Score sheets sometimes exist only on a piece of paper at the scorer's desk.

The result is a paradox: the group used most heavily in communications about the sport's development is the group with the least data to prove that development. A woman player performing well for three straight years may have no data set long enough to prove it to a new sponsor. For a specialist writer, that is a gap that compliments cannot fill.

Who pays for the silence

At the economic layer, the answer is fairly clear. Sponsors pay for image. Broadcasters need beautiful frames, spectacular shots, moments of emotion. A detailed statistical table brings no views, so nobody orders one. Local tournament organisers budget for trophies, for stage design, for sound, and have no line item for hiring a data logger and a video cross-checker.

The loop runs like this. No data means no deep analysis. No deep analysis means media content must lean on emotion and titles. When content leans on emotion, the value of a specialist writer falls. And when the writer's value falls, nobody wants to pay for the data layer. The loop closes exactly where it began.

I do not watch matches for entertainment; I watch to find the moment a system begins to collapse. In billiards, that moment usually arrives after the twenty-fifth inning, when stamina and concentration start to drift and a player must choose between a risky opening and a safety. No data set in Vietnam today records that moment systematically.

THE CONTRARIAN ANGLE: EVEN WITH DATA, THE AVERAGE LIES

At this point a careful reader will push back: with enough data, everything becomes clear. I do not believe that.

In three-cushion carom, the average is the most widely used statistic and the most misleading one. A player finishing a match with an average of 1.5 points per inning over forty innings sounds solid. But if he scored nearly all of those points in the first twelve innings and then played fifteen consecutive innings below 0.5, the average is hiding exactly what the viewer needs to know: he lost form in the middle and only recovered once his opponent had faded. The final number is flat. The story inside it is broken.

A tactical system is only trustworthy once I can find its hole. In today's billiards statistics, the hole is that they measure the final result rather than the process that produced it. In a sport where every shot depends on the cue ball position left by the previous shot, the process is the thing most worth measuring.

There is another blind spot, a matter of professional habit. The spectacular always gets recorded first. A five-point run gets replayed three times in the news bulletin. A perfect safety that costs the opponent ten consecutive innings gets replayed zero times, because it looks like nothing happened. Attacking skill gets elevated into the measure of talent, while defensive skill is filed under contingency, even though at the elite level it is the safety that decides who holds the cue in the final inning.

For anyone wanting to build an analytical layer for Vietnamese billiards, my warning is this: do not build a system that merely repeats what the viewer's eye has already seen. Measure the things the eye skips. Otherwise we will gain more numbers and still have no understanding.

WHAT IS WORTH TRYING NEXT SEASON

I propose something small, immediately doable, requiring no large budget. For every televised three-cushion match, use a six-column log: inning number, player, shot type, points scored, cue ball position after the shot, and a note on the cushion route. Two people log independently, then cross-check against the video within twenty-four hours. One season of that would produce the first national-level data set thick enough to answer questions nobody can answer today: who plays best in the closing innings, who defends most effectively, who loses form on what rhythm.

Empty seasons taught me that the silence of data also deserves interrogation. Vietnamese billiards already has players, audiences, stages and sponsors. The only thing missing is someone who stays behind after each match, rewinds the recording, and writes into an empty cell what the player chose in the thirtieth inning.

If the cost of that is only time, what exactly is holding us back?