Vietnamese Billiards and the Identity Problem: When One Sport Carries Four Names

Over 240 billiards matches I have logged across Vietnam in the past three years — from three-cushion carom events in Binh Duong to nine-ball pool games in a small hall in Thu Duc — one detail has repeated so often that it haunts me. More than half of those matches could not be filed neatly into a clear statistical category. Not because I was too lazy to classify them. But because the people inside the sport themselves have never agreed on what game they are playing.

The white board outside a training room on Phu Loi Street reads just four words: "Billiards — 19:30". No line says whether it means pocket billiards, carom, snooker or three-cushion. Players walk in, pick a table, and each carries a different rulebook in their head. For a data analyst, the nightmare begins at the signboard.

Outsiders usually think "billiards" is one sport. In reality, under that name sit at least four sports whose rules, tournament systems and scoring differ so much they cannot be compared. Three-cushion carom is played on a pocketless table, scored by how many times the cue ball contacts three cushions before hitting the object ball. Nine-ball pool is played on a pocketed table, won by sinking the nine ball last. Eight-ball pool splits the balls into solids and stripes, each side holding one group. Snooker is played on the largest table, scored by the value of each coloured ball, and has an entire professional system with its world championship held in Sheffield.

In Vietnam, all four strands coexist, often in the same city, sometimes in the same training room. But we have no data system capable of telling them apart. When a newspaper reports that "a Vietnamese cueist won the Asian title", readers must guess whether it was carom or pool. When a sponsor asks where Vietnamese billiards stands on the world map, the answer depends entirely on which strand the responder has in mind. That ambiguity is no small matter. It directly shapes how we invest, select and develop athletes.

Start with three-cushion carom, the strand Vietnam is strongest in and the most recognised for. It is the discipline where Tran Quyet Chien rose to a world title, putting Vietnamese billiards on the map of powerhouse nations. His generation also includes Duong Quoc Hoang and Ngo Dinh Nai, names tied to the period when Vietnamese carom reached out across the continent. In carom, the data is fairly clear: analysts measure the average, meaning points scored divided by innings, and the highest run in a single turn. A world-class cueist sustains an average above 1.5 points per inning; the very top players can exceed 2.0. This is data comparable across borders, and it explains why Vietnamese cueists are sought after by international events.

But step into pool and the entire frame of reference changes. Pool does not measure average per inning but win rate, break-and-run rate — breaking and clearing the table in one turn — and pots. A strong pool player can post a break-and-run rate above 30 percent on a good day. Those numbers are different in kind from carom, not convertible. A brilliant carom cueist may not control the cue ball well in a pool break, because the power and contact points are entirely different.

Then there is snooker, the discipline with the most sophisticated data system of all. Snooker measures the century break — a single turn scoring 100 or more — the maximum break of 147, and win rate by frame. Here, data is used not only to compare but to value a player. A century break is not just a number; it is a gauge of cue-ball control at the highest level, where a slight error in power is enough to ruin an entire visit.

Worth noting is that each strand has its own governing body. Professional snooker is run by the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association together with World Snooker Tour, using a two-year ranking based on accumulated prize money. Pool is managed by the World Pool-Billiard Association and organisations such as Matchroom, with events like the Mosconi Cup splitting teams by nation. Carom is governed by the Union Mondiale de Billard, with a World Cup system held across continents. Four systems, four scoring methods, four calendars — yet in Vietnam, all of them are sometimes wrapped into a single sports news item.

These three data systems cannot be mixed. A three-cushion cueist averaging 1.8 is not "better" than a snooker player with 50 century breaks. They play two different sports, with two different skills, on two different tables. But in everyday Vietnamese speech, both are called "a top billiards cueist". That is the biggest blind spot. When we merge four strands into one label, we quietly erase the differences in skill, in development path and in commercial potential of each. A young talent excellent at pool can be undervalued simply because he has no carom index. A veteran carom cueist can be compared wrongly with a snooker player simply because both are called "billiards".

The ambiguity of identity is not merely a language problem; it is the root cause that prevents Vietnamese billiards from building a serious data system, and therefore from optimising talent development.

In Vietnam, billiards is not a sport funded systematically from the state budget. It grew out of private training rooms, billiard cafes, and amateur events sponsored by businesses. That means data is all the harder to accumulate, because no body stands at the centre. Information is scattered in coaches' heads, in handwritten notebooks, and in the memory of long-time fans. When a cueist retires, part of the data about him disappears too.

Across three years of logging, I noticed a pattern: training rooms in Vietnam often teach two or three strands at once, but rarely have a coach specialised in any single one. Students learn three-cushion by watching, pool by playing, and snooker — if at all — by watching videos online. There is no standard curriculum, no evaluation system, no data tracking progress.

Based on my experience following matches, a young Vietnamese cueist often spends two to three years just to determine which strand he truly belongs to. During that time he plays everything, is unevenly good, and no index reflects his real ability. By the time he settles on a direction, he has missed the golden phase for building technical foundations. This is an invisible cost no balance sheet records.

Compared with developed billiards nations, the difference lies in how early they separate the strands. A child in Europe playing carom is placed into a carom academy, with its own curriculum and indices. A child playing snooker in England enters the snooker junior circuit, where every match is recorded and analysed. In Vietnam, we let the children swim in one shared pool, then wonder why so few rise to the surface.

This leads to a consequence in selection data. With no standard index per strand, choosing the national team depends too much on individual observation and short-term tournament results. A cueist who wins an open event may be noticed, while a cueist with high stable indices but few big titles is overlooked. We are judging by impression, not by data. And impression, as every analyst knows, is the thing most easily fooled by a few flashy moments.

Back then Binh Duong had no expensive software, only people who believed every number would find its way. I recall that lesson whenever I sit before a messy billiards data sheet. Our problem has never been a lack of technology. The problem is that no one has yet sat down to define what we are measuring.

Before trusting a number, I ask where it came from. For Vietnamese billiards, that question still has no complete answer, because most of the numbers we have do not clearly belong to any strand.

World Cup 2026 taught me the most important thing: data is only beautiful when it knows how to stand on the side of the story. For Vietnamese billiards, that story has four different chapters, and we cannot write them onto a single page.

At this point, an obvious counterargument appears: is the diversity of four strands actually Vietnamese billiards' strength, and does separating them only rob it of flexibility? I weighed this for a long time.

But true flexibility does not come from merging labels. It comes from each strand being understood correctly, so that a player can then switch consciously. A carom cueist wanting to try pool needs to know which skills he brings and which he lacks. If everything is called "billiards", he switches only by instinct and fails without understanding why.

The counterintuitive point lies here: what holds Vietnamese billiards back from going far is not a lack of talent, but the ambiguity of definition that prevents data from accumulating. Every year passes, and we add thousands of matches but not one layer of data clean enough to learn from. We play a great deal yet know very little about ourselves.

One correlation must be stated clearly: a rising number of training rooms does not automatically produce world-class cueists. That correlation only matters when paired with a training and measurement system per strand. Otherwise, we are merely multiplying the number of players, not the quality. This is a lesson Vietnamese football has been through, and billiards now stands at a similar crossroads, only on a smaller scale and with less fanfare.

There is one positive sign: amateur billiards events in Vietnam are multiplying, and some are beginning to be classed by strand. That is a signal that an awareness of identity is forming from the ground up. But for those signals to crystallise into data, someone or some organisation must take responsibility for recording, standardising and publishing. No one does that work for free, and no one does it well without patience.

I am the one who stays with the spreadsheet after the stands have gone dark — you may call it work, I call it fate. And what I see most clearly after three years is this: Vietnamese billiards needs a small but foundational act — call each strand by its right name, and measure what you actually play. No million-dollar software required. Just a notebook, a convention, and people who believe every number will find its way.

When the sign outside the training room reads "three-cushion carom" instead of just "billiards", that will be the first sign that we are ready to take ourselves seriously.