Vietnamese Billiards and the Nine Empty Cells Nobody Has Filled

Nha Trang, eleven at night. Inside a billiards club at the end of a narrow alley, a young player lays his cue on the table, steps back three paces and stands still. No spectators. No scoreboard. Nobody records that he has just missed the hardest cushion escape of the entire practice session. He picks up his glass of water, looks at the red ball resting against the rail, and returns to the table.

I want to begin with that moment rather than with a trophy ceremony. Because in Vietnam we have learned very quickly how to celebrate, but we have not yet learned how to keep records. A sport that keeps no records will forever have to retell itself through emotion alone.

Context: a decade of growth without a ledger

For more than fifteen years, Vietnamese billiards has travelled from roadside recreation to the international arena. Vietnamese players now appear regularly in the three-cushion World Cup circuit organised by the Union Mondiale de Billard (UMB). Ho Chi Minh City has repeatedly hosted a leg of that circuit, bringing leading European and Asian cueists to compete on Vietnamese soil. According to the organisers' announcements for the legs held in the country, each edition gathers hundreds of players from dozens of nations.

In pool, Vietnamese cueists such as Nguyen Quoc Nguyen, Duong Quoc Hoang and Chiem Hong Thai have appeared at international and regional events. In three-cushion, names such as Tran Quyet Chien, Ma Minh Cam, Bui Truong An and Nguyen Duc Anh Chien have formed a generation capable of standing against European players. According to the Union Mondiale de Billard, Tran Quyet Chien is the first Vietnamese cueist to win the world title in three-cushion, a milestone reached in 2026.

Alongside that sits a dense club ecosystem. In Nha Trang, Da Nang, Buon Ma Thuot, Can Tho or almost any provincial capital, there may be more billiard tables than amateur football pitches. These clubs stay open late, sustain a semi-professional class of cueists, and operate like an academy with no board of governors, no curriculum and no gradebook.

And yet, when I try to reconstruct the portrait of that billiards scene through data, I am holding a blank sheet. Not because there is nothing to write about, but because nothing has been measured.

The core: nine empty cells

Try the exercise any analytical department in Europe performs before a tournament. List nine dimensions: the playing style of each cueist; individual data and form; tournament structure and format; the power map of the billiards world; rules and compliance; the professional and psychological ecosystem; risk; the media narrative; and the industry transmission chain.

In Vietnam, all nine cells are blank.

Nobody tracks the cushion-escape success rate of a three-cushion player across a season. Nobody records how often the cue ball is left in the right position on the opening shot. Nobody measures the rhythm of a match: the average seconds per inning, how many innings are pushed into a defensive posture, how often a player chooses the safe route over the scoring route. Nobody classifies positions by difficulty in order to learn which shapes a player masters and which shapes expose him.

We have a scoreboard. We do not have a spreadsheet.

The consequence is a familiar paradox. When a Vietnamese cueist wins an international title, the media reports it quickly, but the explanation of why he won usually stops at one word: "character". Character is a beautiful word. It is also an empty one, because it cannot be verified, cannot be compared, cannot be handed down.

I learned to read a match through numbers, but only when those numbers know how to dance. Vietnam's problem lies elsewhere: we do not yet have a string of numbers to dance with.

Compare it with football, where I began. There, people argue for hours over whether a striker running eleven kilometres is productive or pointless. That argument only exists because of data. Vietnamese billiards has no comparable argument, and therefore no verified progress.

Based on my experience watching matches at the three-cushion World Cup legs held in Vietnam, the stands are always full and the applause is rapid after every difficult cushion shot. But when the session ends, almost no analytical report is published beyond the result and the average per inning. That single figure, standing alone, says nothing about style, about tactics, about how a player handles pressure on his thirtieth inning.

It reminds me of an editor's note from years ago, when he rejected my piece on a World Cup semi-final: "too much emotion, too little data". It took me two weeks to digest that sentence. It still holds for Vietnamese billiards today, with one difference: here the data is not scarce. Here the data has never been created.

In coaching, the gap is even clearer. A club in Nha Trang teaches a student by making him replay a single position twenty times. The teacher knows where the student goes wrong. But that knowledge lives in the teacher's head, not in a system. When the teacher stops, the knowledge leaves with him. In organised billiards nations, the same position would be recorded, numbered, and turned into a searchable lesson. That is the distance between passing on a craft and passing on data.

As for format, a three-cushion World Cup leg is usually split into qualifiers and a main draw, with each match played to a fixed number of points, and that number decides how much surprise the event can produce. Playing to forty points is a completely different sport from playing to fifteen. The same player, in the same form, will produce two different results under those two formats. Vietnamese fans debate this a great deal, but they debate from memory, not from data. Nobody tracks each player's win rate by point threshold, even though a simple spreadsheet would do it.

Another dimension is empty too: competition psychology. Nobody records the scoring success rate on decisive innings — the final inning of a match, the inning immediately after a major error, the inning after an opponent has pulled level. In organised billiards nations, this cluster of metrics is monitored seriously, because it separates a good player from a champion. In Vietnam, that cluster exists only as the audience's impression.

The industry chain is the same. Tables, cloth, cues, balls, lighting systems, prize money, sponsorship, broadcast rights: every link can be measured with its own indicators. Tables sold per year, clubs opened, broadcast hours, the value of sponsorship contracts. Nobody aggregates them. When nobody aggregates them, the industry cannot tell whether it is growing or contracting.

In media narrative, Vietnamese billiards lives on anecdotes told by word of mouth: a player who practises from six in the morning, a cue bought with an entire month's salary, a match that stretched to three in the morning. Those stories travel genuinely, and I do not dismiss them. But they cannot replace a row of data. Anecdote preserves emotion; it does not preserve a denominator.

The power map of world billiards is already clear: Europe holds the centre in three-cushion with players from Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, France and Spain; South Korea and Japan lead Asia; Turkey and Egypt have carved out positions. Where does Vietnam sit on that map? We have an instinctive answer. We do not have an answer in numbers.

That is why I call this nine empty cells. Not one cell, but the entire table.

The contrarian angle: a shortage of memory, not of talent

What few people say out loud: Vietnamese billiards does not lack talent. It lacks memory.

We blame funding, facilities, the absence of international events at home. Look closely and the problem sits elsewhere. A sport can be poor and still remember. It may have no analytics department, yet it can still record each player's win rate by position type with a notebook and a pencil.

What is missing is the habit of record-keeping. That habit costs less than any other investment item.

The second paradox lies in the late-night club culture itself. The matches played after working hours, before small crowds, without cameras, are where cueists are actually forged. But they are invisible to every statistic, because nobody goes there to record. The most valuable data source in Vietnamese billiards sits in rooms where nobody is counting.

For 398 days I heard no whistle, and I realised I had fallen in love with the silence after a goal. Vietnamese cueists during the period when the halls closed found themselves in the opposite position. They kept the table, they kept the cue, but they did not keep the memory of themselves.

Takeaway

I do not write about the trophies. I write about what the trophies conceal.

If tomorrow another Vietnamese cueist becomes world champion, we will celebrate again, and we will most likely explain the victory with that one word, "character". If we still cannot measure why he won, then ten years from now we will still be starting from a blank sheet.

One question to leave with the people who run Vietnamese billiards: if a sport can produce a world champion without data, what happens when it finally starts measuring?