Vietnamese Billiards After World Titles: The Data Notebook Is Still Empty

The billiard hall in Nha Trang turns its lights off at eleven at night, but the sound of balls colliding stays in my head for a long time afterwards. That night, a young player had just lost a match in which he had led by seven points. He sat on a chair, his cue standing beside him, staring at the cloth as if rereading a poem whose last two lines had been torn away. Nobody in the hall wrote anything down. No innings log, no success rate for the cushion paths, not a single note about the fact that he had changed the way he applied spin from the seventeenth inning onwards. By the next morning, the only thing left in the fan groups was the score: a seven-point margin, and a defeat. I stayed half an hour longer, looking at the balls resting on the green cloth, and asked myself: if someone wanted to learn from this match tomorrow, where would they even begin.

In recent years, Vietnamese billiards has entered a growth cycle that has surprised even people inside the trade. Halls have sprung up from narrow alleys in Saigon to seaside resort towns in central Vietnam, staying open late, air-conditioned, fitted with tables that owners invest in carefully. Amateur tournaments at district and provincial level take place almost every weekend. A new class of players, born after 2026, raised on online video instead of one-on-one lessons with a teacher, has grown up believing billiards is a trade you can live from, and even live well from. That is the material foundation for everything that follows.

On 3 September 2026, in Ankara, Turkey, Tran Quyet Chien became the first Vietnamese player to win the world championship in carom three-cushion, organised by the Union Mondiale de Billard (UMB). The final was the first all-Vietnamese final in the history of the event, against Bao Phuong Vinh. For those who follow the discipline in Vietnam, it was a historic moment: the world title in a billiards format regarded as the standard of technique belonged, for the first time, to a player from central Vietnam. In the stands that day there were red flags with a yellow star, Vietnamese living in Europe who had flown in, and a generation of young players watching from screens in Nha Trang, Da Nang and Binh Duong.

On the other branch of the sport, Vietnamese pool has made its own mark through names such as Duong Quoc Hoang, the most recognisable Vietnamese face in pool at international events. Vietnamese players now appear more regularly at professional pool tournaments in the region and worldwide. Prize money at some pool events is now enough for a young player to survive if he competes continuously. At the same time, Vietnamese sponsors are paying more attention, because a sponsorship package for a billiards event still costs far less than football or basketball, while the streaming audience is not small at all.

But behind the hall lights and the medals there is a gap that very few people want to talk about, and it sits somewhere other than technique. I have spent many nights in halls from Nha Trang up to Binh Duong, and what caught my attention was not the quality of the shots. What caught my attention was the notebook.

At international level, carom three-cushion is a well-measured discipline. The Union Mondiale de Billard publishes player rankings, and every tournament preserves the standard metrics of the format: average per inning, number of innings in a match, the longest run by a player in the event, the count of high runs. Specialist carom media such as Kozoom provide live scoring inning by inning, along with smaller statistics such as success rates for particular cushion paths. In other words, a world-class three-cushion match leaves behind a technical trace that can be looked up years later.

Average per inning is the truest thing about a player, and also the least mentioned in Vietnam. A three-cushion match lasting forty innings and ending fifteen to thirteen could be a chaotic affair in which both players kept leaving each other bad positions, or a tense contest at a high level in which every inning was calculated like a chess move. The same score, two entirely different stories. To tell them apart, someone has to record the innings and the points per inning. In Vietnam, that work barely exists outside a handful of major events.

Compare that with snooker, where an open database such as CueTracker preserves almost every result, scoreline, century-break count and head-to-head record across decades. It is thanks to that layer of data that snooker fans can argue about things beyond trophies: who has held form longer, who plays better in long-format matches, who has beaten whom in the last five meetings. There, data becomes a shared language, so that memory does not depend on who happens to remember better.

The strongest billiards nation in Southeast Asia holds an enormous archive of memory and almost no searchable archive of data. We know exactly which year Tran Quyet Chien won the world title, but it is very hard to answer a simpler question: at last year's national three-cushion championship, what was the average per inning of a semi-finalist. That is a basic technical question, and it has been left blank.

At domestic tournaments, the most common form of archiving is still photographing the draw sheet. Results are posted on social media as a few images with a caption congratulating the champion. The electronic scoreboard placed next to the table is usually wiped once the event ends, because it serves the audience in the room, not future reference. Some events record averages, but only in the early rounds, and never publish them as open data. The amateur tournaments, where thousands of young players actually learn the trade, are almost completely blank.

So how do Vietnamese fans remember billiards. Through short clips, through cut-and-shared highlights, through a collective memory of a certain night in a certain hall. That way of remembering is rich in emotion and very easy to lose. A player retires, a hall owner closes shop, a community page is shut down, and an entire period of the sport can vanish from history within a few years. The memory of Vietnamese billiards is in the hands of people who have no obligation to preserve it.

The clearest consequence is in coaching. A three-cushion teacher in Vietnam today who wants to show a student why a top player chose one cushion path over another has to open a video and guess. No innings record, no positional notes, no remark about the player changing his plan after losing two straight innings. Teaching and learning therefore depend on the teacher's intuition and the student's diligence in rewatching footage. In billiards nations with better data systems, part of the craft has already been converted into numbers and patterns, shortening the time students spend groping in the dark.

There is one kind of data that can be gathered right away even on a tight budget. If every national event needed just one person to record innings and points per inning for matches from the quarter-finals onwards, within a few years we would have a picture thick enough to talk about the style of an entire generation. We would know whether a young player improved by reducing wasted innings or by increasing consecutive scoring innings. We would know who plays better from behind, who fades when a match drags. Those are questions a scoreboard can never answer, but a notebook can.

Born in the Philippines and living in Vietnam, I see the contrast clearly. Back home, basketball is documented to the point where a fan can look up a player's statistics from a game played twenty years ago. Philippine pool, which has produced some of the world's leading players, is still largely passed down by word of mouth. The stories of money games in Manila halls are told better than any statistics table, but they fade with the teller. Vietnam stands at exactly that crossroads, with an advantage the Philippines does not have: the sport here is still rising, and a habit of record-keeping can be established now, while it is still cheap.

There are things even international events do not record fully, and they are the soul of this game. The seconds a player spends bent over the table before striking, the number of times he changes his plan after realising the position is not what he calculated, how he handles the first inning after falling three points behind. Those are the moments I call the silences of a match, and the match truly begins from the moment the ball touches nothing at all. Recording them demands a person who sits long enough and patiently enough; it does not demand expensive technology. A notebook and a pen are still enough.

The irony is that most debates about Vietnamese billiards revolve around other things. People worry about a missing next generation, about a lack of money to stage events, about young players being drawn into gambling and suspicious matches. Those worries are grounded. But there is a deeper blind spot that rarely gets named: we cannot trace anything. We cannot trace form, cannot trace a player's development over time, and most importantly, cannot trace anomalies.

Traceability has a value few people consider: it protects the players themselves. A billiards scene without data has no way to prove that a defeat was down to form, to a wrist injury, or to something else. Every suspicion becomes a rumour, and rumour has no mechanism to be refuted. Conversely, when results and metrics are recorded fully and publicly, an anomalous result stands out against everything around it, and honest players have evidence to defend themselves.

There is a paradox worth stating plainly. The greater the achievement, the more easily the data gap is hidden. When Tran Quyet Chien won the world title, all of Vietnamese billiards had the right to be proud, and that pride cast a light that made people believe the system behind it was working too. Vietnam hosting and successfully staging several international events in recent years creates the same impression. But staging a tournament and preserving its knowledge are two different things, and the second is still unaddressed.

I understand that feeling quite well. In 2026, when halls closed and tournaments stopped, I went three hundred and ninety-eight days without sitting in a billiards hall. I stayed home, replayed old matches, and realised I had nothing to look up but memory and a few blurry clips. I once wanted to write a long piece about a national final I remembered vividly, but when I sat down, I could not produce a single metric to cite. The piece never took shape. I learned one thing from that: personal memory can carry a story, but it cannot carry a sport.

A young editor once said something to me that I have carried for years: too much emotion, too little data. At the time I took it as a rejection. Later I understood it as an accurate description of how our sports industry operates, and of how I myself was writing. I learned to read matches through numbers, but only when those numbers know how to dance. With Vietnamese billiards, the problem today is that we have too few numbers to dance with.

The work required is not as big as people think. The metrics I keep mentioning already exist on the scoreboard of every tournament, written by hand by someone sitting beside the table, and erased when the event ends. All we have to do is keep them. A spreadsheet, one person in charge, a rule that results from the quarter-finals onwards must be published with innings counts. Do that for three years, and Vietnamese billiards will own a heritage money cannot buy.

Every inning is a whisper, and a season is a long conversation. The pity of Vietnamese billiards right now is that the conversation is happening, is good, and is forgotten the moment it ends. In a few years, when the generation now at its peak begins to slow down, we will want to look back and understand why they were so good. Will anyone be patient enough then to open the notebook and read what happened, or will we once again be guessing from blurry clips and each other's memories.