Three Disciplines, Three Datasets: Why Vietnamese Billiards Still Cannot Read Itself

The match ended on the 31st inning of a 50-point three-cushion game. The winner finished with a lower moyenne - points per inning - than the loser. I stayed twenty minutes longer in a billiard hall on Lach Tray Street in Hai Phong, copied every inning into my notebook, and understood that I had almost reached the wrong conclusion.

An average cannot measure a series of 14 points inside a single inning. It cannot measure the moment an opponent chalked his cue at 48-46 and then missed a simple cushion shot. Billiards has data, and plenty of it. That data simply sits in three different boxes, and most Vietnamese viewers have never opened any of them.

Three disciplines, three languages

World billiards has no single governing body. Snooker is run by the WPBSA and World Snooker Tour, played on a 12-foot table with tight pockets and small balls. Pool covers 8-ball, 9-ball and 10-ball, governed by the WPA, played on a 9-foot table with larger balls. Carom covers three-cushion, one-cushion and free game, governed by the UMB, played on a pocketless table with the largest balls, where the cue ball must contact two object balls.

That difference is not administrative paperwork. It determines the entire measurement system. Snooker counts centuries. Pool counts runs of racks. Carom counts moyenne and série. Three languages, three grammars, none of them directly translatable.

The technical consequences are concrete. A world champion in snooker can lose to the world number 50 in 9-ball, in 9-ball itself, because the break shot, cue-ball control and rhythm of delivery are fundamentally different. A ranking in one discipline says nothing about another.

I made exactly that mistake. In my first year on the job, I used a pool player's win rate to predict a carom result, reasoning that billiards is billiards. The error lay in applying one discipline's measurement system to another. It was a systemic error, and it did not originate in the data - it originated in my decision to skip the step of identifying the discipline first. Since then, every spreadsheet I build opens with a mandatory line: identify the discipline first, everything else after.

A power map in motion

Snooker remains the home turf of the United Kingdom. Three men born in 2026 - Ronnie O'Sullivan, John Higgins and Mark Williams - have dominated the sport for more than thirty years, and the World Championship at the Crucible in Sheffield still pays 500,000 pounds to the winner. The structure is stable to the point of being hard to believe.

China has pushed in on both levels. In snooker, it has produced a systematically trained young generation. On the product level, it invented a discipline of its own: Chinese 8-ball, a 9-foot table with tightened pockets, large balls, and rules close to American 8-ball. A discipline born from a domestic market, waiting for no federation's approval.

Carom has a different map. Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Turkey and France have taken most quarter-final places at world three-cushion championships for two decades. Dick Jaspers, Frederic Caudron, Torbjorn Blomdahl, Marco Zanetti and Eddy Merckx have sat in the leading group for a very long time.

What stands out is that two Asian countries broke through that wall. Tran Quyet Chien and Bao Phuong Vinh have both won world titles in three-cushion, alongside a group of Vietnamese players who regularly reach the deep rounds of World Cup legs. South Korea also fields players who appear consistently in quarter-finals at major events.

The Philippines sits in an entirely different corner: a pool superpower, with Efren Reyes, Francisco Bustamante, Carlo Biado and Johann Chua - a chain of world titles stretching across four decades.

The industry chain: strong at the front, empty at the back

Cut the billiards chain into five links: billiard halls, players, tournaments, media, sponsorship and equipment.

Vietnam is strong at the front. The number of billiard halls nationwide runs into the thousands, concentrated in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Hai Phong, Da Nang and Binh Duong. This is the largest self-generated training infrastructure in Southeast Asia, and it operates with almost no public investment.

The middle link has formed too: a national championship system in three-cushion, open cups, and Vietnam hosting a leg of the UMB Three-Cushion World Cup on several occasions.

The final link is empty. Broadcast rights generate no revenue. Match data is not collected systematically. Sponsors enter through relationships rather than through reach metrics. A world champion returning home may be unable to find a single complete statistics page for his own final.

What the next cycle is waiting for

What Vietnamese billiards lacks sits in the reading stage, not in the source. The UMB publishes average and series figures for every match at major events. World Snooker Tour publishes dozens of metrics per player. The sources exist, and they are free.

What is missing is a shared standard for reading them, and people willing to read.

Meanwhile, money has moved faster than oversight. Billiards betting exists in many markets, including ones where the sport has no thick defensive mechanism. In 2026, a former world snooker champion was banned for six months and fined 75,000 pounds after appearing in a video discussing frame-fixing. He was cleared of fixing, but was found to have failed to report the approach.

In 2026, ten Chinese players were banned, two of them for life, after a prolonged investigation into betting and match-fixing.

In carom, where small tournaments are dense and public data is thinner, that gap is wider. A sport without public data has no self-defence mechanism. The risk then becomes systemic, and it spares no individual.

So when someone asks why I still hand-record every inning, I answer by opening the notebook. Data never lies, but I have misheard it before. I do not write to persuade anyone. I write so that data has a witness.

Three thousand matches taught me that one match can teach more than all of them. The night on Lach Tray taught me that an average column is only correct when you know which discipline you are standing in. The next cycle of Vietnamese billiards will not be decided by a beautiful cushion shot. It will be decided by someone willing to sit down, open the third box, and start counting.