Vietnamese Billiards: Technique Has Reached the Top, Data Is Still Left Behind

A clock in a billiard hall on Nguyen Thien Thuat Street, Nha Trang, reads 1:12 in the morning. A young player sets his cue down on the rail, walks around the table twice, then sits on a plastic chair. The three-cushion shot he just attempted travelled in the right direction but lacked pace; the red ball stops roughly two knuckles short of the final cushion. Nobody in the hall records anything. No camera, no score sheet, no one counting how many times he has tried that exact line over the past four hours. The owner says one sentence: "You were close this time."

I am sitting at the next table, notebook open, realising I have nothing to write but a feeling. Forty-four years of watching this sport have taught me one thing: what is not recorded is forgotten faster than people assume. The match truly begins at the moment the ball touches no one.

A nation that plays billiards, a billiards culture without memory

Vietnam is among the countries with the densest concentration of billiard halls in Southeast Asia. From Hanoi and Da Nang to Nha Trang and Can Tho, billiards is not the sport of one social class; it occupies every alley, stays open late, and has become part of the rhythm of the evening. Carom three-cushion has long been the traditional strength, while 9-ball and 10-ball pool have grown sharply over the past decade.

International results have followed that popularity. The Union Mondiale de Billard (UMB) has brought the world three-cushion championship to Binh Duong, and the professional 9-ball circuit has staged a Hanoi Open in Hanoi. Names such as Tran Quyet Chien, Bao Phuong Vinh and Nguyen Quoc Nguyen have lifted Vietnamese billiards into the world's top group in the three-cushion discipline; in 9-ball, Duong Quoc Hoang and the generation behind him have reached deep rounds of international events.

Yet there is a paradox rarely discussed: a country that plays this much billiards has no data memory to match. Domestic tournaments end, a list of champions is published, and everything disappears. There is no national database holding innings counts, averages, or the geometry of individual positions. We have a collective memory of players, but no technical record of them.

The only measures still alive

In three-cushion, the fundamental measure is the moyenne, the average points scored per inning. In a 40-point match, if a player needs 24 innings to finish, his moyenne for that match is 1.667. If he needs only 18, it is 2.222. That single number tells almost the whole story of form, of position-building, and of how quickly a player reads the table. Alongside it sit best game, the highest single-match moyenne of a tournament, and high run, the longest unbroken sequence of points within one inning.

In 9-ball, the statistical system is far richer. Accu-Stats developed the TPA (Total Performance Average), a composite performance measure covering both a player's ability to capitalise on good positions and his handling of difficult ones. Professional promoters publish additional figures: break-and-run percentage and safety success rate.

The problem is that nearly all of those numbers are produced by international organisers. When Vietnamese players compete abroad, they are measured. When they compete at home, they are not. Based on my experience following three-cushion matches in Nha Trang and through international broadcasts, the asymmetry is obvious: we know a player performed well at a world event, but we have no way to compare him with himself two years earlier, because nobody kept the numbers from two years earlier.

Where Vietnamese players stand in the data

If Vietnamese billiards had to be profiled using only what has been recorded, the strength lies in sustained scoring. Vietnamese three-cushion players stand out in innings that have rhythm — they read the cushion, calculate pace, and maintain continuity as the red ball keeps returning to the right position. That is a skill that demands long hours at the table; it cannot be built by practising a few hours a week.

A second observation comes from tournament structure. International three-cushion events are generally played to 40 points, long enough for fundamental technique to express itself. Professional 9-ball events are played to races of 7 or 9 — far shorter, where a lucky break or a small error in the fourth rack can decide the whole match. Put differently: Vietnamese billiards is strongest where match length protects technique, and most exposed where brevity amplifies randomness.

That is a tactical conclusion, not praise or criticism. It explains why the same player can look immovable at a three-cushion event and yet exit early from a two-day 9-ball tournament.

The frames nobody counts

I learned to read matches through numbers, but only when those numbers know how to dance. And there are certain frames no number ever reaches.

Try counting the time a player spends circling the table before he sets his bridge hand. Count how often he changes his selection after already bending down. Count the innings in which he deliberately plays safe instead of attacking, and measure the position that decision leaves his opponent in the next inning. Such data exists in every match played on Vietnamese soil, every night, across thousands of tables. It is simply not recorded.

In three-cushion this matters more than anywhere. Most points in a three-cushion match do not come from the most beautiful shot; they come from the position created one inning earlier. A player who scores three points in a row is usually the beneficiary of a previous inning in which he chose exactly the right contact point to leave the red ball in the favourable half of the table. Nobody records that previous inning. Spectators remember the finishing shot, not the shot that cleared the path.

I do not write about the finishing shot. I write about what the finishing shot conceals.

Humidity, cloth and ball sets: the forgotten variables

There is another layer of data Vietnamese billiards almost never folds into analysis: the physical condition of the table.

Air humidity directly affects cloth speed and cushion rebound. A table in Nha Trang on a rainy September evening behaves nothing like the same table at noon in March. A freshly replaced ball set travels differently from one that has been struck for months. Cushion compression changes with room temperature. These are variables a professional feels through his hand, yet they have never been written into a ledger that could be compared across tournaments.

To picture how granular this could get, consider a single practice note: room temperature 27 degrees Celsius, humidity 78 percent, session length 3 hours 40 minutes, simple position conversions 61 out of 80 attempts, estimated moyenne 1.42. Four lines. But if a young player kept four such lines every day for three years, we would hold a technical profile that no training centre in this region currently possesses.

Infrastructure: scouting by memory

The biggest consequence of missing data is not in media. It is in talent identification.

In snooker, a public database such as CueTracker preserves every match, every frame and every break of nearly every professional for decades. At major 9-ball events, performance statistics are published immediately after each match. A coach inside those systems can look up whether a pupil is weak at safety play or weak at converting breaks, and adjust the training plan on evidence.

In Vietnam, scouting still rests largely on the eye of experienced people and on word of mouth. That is not wrong — many great players were discovered exactly that way. But it carries a fatal limit: memory does not compound. The best teacher can hold a few dozen students across a few years, while a database can track thousands across decades.

And when a player leaves his local hall for another city, the only file that travels with him is somebody else's recommendation. No number goes along.

The paradox: more numbers does not mean more understanding

Here I have to argue against the very case I have just built, because that is the most honest part of this trade.

Adding data does not automatically create understanding. I have seen three-page statistical tables built around a single tournament, and the conclusion drawn from them differed little from what anyone who watched three matches could already say. Numbers turn into decoration easily: a handsome percentage, a tidy chart, and behind it an empty conclusion. An editor once wrote four words in the margin of my manuscript that I have carried ever since: too much emotion, too little data. But if he were alive and reading some of today's analytical writing, he might write the reverse: too much data, too little emotion.

The real blind spot sits elsewhere. The countries with the densest billiards data infrastructure do not automatically dominate the sport — the Netherlands, Belgium and Turkey produce leading three-cushion players such as Dick Jaspers or Eddy Merckx mainly through club tradition and competitive environments, not through spreadsheets. Data is a necessary condition for a billiards culture to understand itself. It is not a sufficient condition for winning.

Vietnam is missing something important. That something is not a magic wand. It is a notebook written in consistently.

The first recorded inning

I think often about the Vietnamese players who are fifteen and sixteen today. They are the first generation whose every inning could be recorded — with a phone, with a free app, with the simple habit of writing three lines after each practice session.

If that happens, ten years from now we will see a picture nobody can currently imagine: where the breaking point of a career lies, how many years it takes a three-cushion player to lift his moyenne from 1.2 to 1.8, and what actually occurs in the silence between two innings.

What I do not know is whether we will sit down and write those three lines every evening.