Vietnamese Billiards: Power Map, Value Chain and the Data Gap

Summer 2026, at an arena in Ho Chi Minh City, I sat in the press area of an international carom event and looked down at the main table. Three balls lay still on the green cloth, the overhead lights shone straight down, and the stands above were full. When the player bent down and placed his hand on the table, the whole hall went silent. No one cheered. No one clapped early. The only sound was the click of a ball against the cushion, a dry, even, almost mechanical sound. I have sat in many sports stands. In football, emotion rises with every pass. In billiards, emotion is compressed into a straight line. Spectators do not watch a match; they watch a sequence of decisions. That is exactly why billiards is a sport where data can speak volumes, if we know how to read it in the right place. That is why I spent several weeks reviewing the whole picture of Vietnamese billiards. Not to retell a few victories, but to draw a power map, a value chain, and the gaps no one has measured. ONE UMBRELLA NAME COVERING MANY WORLDS Before turning to Vietnam, one thing many viewers overlook must be made clear. Billiards is an umbrella name covering several disciplines with entirely different rules, techniques and commercial ecosystems. Carom, especially three-cushion carom, has no pockets, only cushions, and the player calculates the path of three balls. Pool includes 9-ball, 8-ball and 10-ball, played on a pocketed table. Snooker uses a large table with 15 reds and six colours. Chinese 8-ball, also called Heyball, is a variant played on a snooker-style table under 8-ball rules. In Russia and Eastern Europe, people play Russian Pyramid. Each discipline has its own governing body. Carom belongs to the UMB, the Union Mondiale de Billard. Pool belongs to the WPA, the World Pool-Billiard Association. Snooker belongs to the WPBSA and is commercially organised by WST. In Asia, the ACBS plays a regional coordinating role. These systems differ not only in rules, but in how they make money, how they organise events and how they build stars. For Vietnam, the story lies at two ends. Three-cushion carom is the spearhead of achievement. Pool is the spearhead of mass participation. Snooker has a loyal but narrower audience. Chinese 8-ball has only entered clubs in the north in recent years. I remember a coach once telling me that Vietnamese billiards is like a three-storey house with only one staircase. Every floor is crowded, but the way up is narrow. TECHNIQUE: ONE CUE, THREE DIFFERENT RULE SETS The technical differences between the disciplines are far greater than the average viewer senses. In three-cushion carom, the player has no pocket to aim at, so every calculation rests on angles of reflection and force. A good shot in carom is one where the cue ball travels through three cushions and then touches the other two balls, while leaving a favourable position for the next visit. This is a sport of geometry and muscle memory. In pool, the player has pockets as anchors, but must handle complex break shots and blocked positions. The break is so important that many believe a 9-ball match is decided from the very first break. In snooker, the player must build scoring visit by visit, and one wrong shot can swing an entire frame. Three disciplines, three philosophies. This means that when analysing a player, one cannot use the same set of metrics across all three. A carom player excels at controlling force and angle. A pool player excels at reading the table and handling situations. A snooker player excels at building long scoring sequences. Treating them as the same is the most common mistake of a novice analyst. THE CAROM LAYER: ACHIEVEMENT BUILT IN SILENCE At international level, Vietnam is best known through three-cushion carom. In this discipline, Vietnamese players have repeatedly reached the knockout stages of World Cup events. Names such as Tran Quyet Chien and Nguyen Quoc Nguyen have become familiar to the global carom community. The maturity of a generation of players, mostly born in the late 1980s and early 1990s, has lifted Vietnamese carom from an apprentice position to genuine competitiveness. I have spent many evenings sitting after match hours to record every shot of the leading players. What I realised did not lie in the beautiful shots. It lay in the bad shots that were controlled. A great player is not one who never loses position; he is one who turns a lost position into a deliberate defensive one. In carom, people usually measure by the average, the points scored divided by the number of visits. This is the core metric, much like xG in football. But like xG, the average only means something when placed in context: which opponent, which table, which pressure. An average of 1.5 against a weak opponent says little compared with 1.2 in a final lasting 40 visits. The key point is here: Vietnamese billiards holds a solid layer of international achievement, but the data layer behind it remains thin. We have good players, audiences and events, but we lack a recording system thick enough to turn each match into accumulated knowledge. I once tried to reconstruct a carom season from memory and scattered video, and I failed. Not because I lacked patience, but because the data did not exist in a usable form. THE POOL LAYER: LARGE PARTICIPATION, LARGE VARIANCE In the pool layer, the picture is entirely different. Vietnamese pool has a very strong mass movement, especially in the big cities. Players such as Duong Quoc Hoang have made progress on the regional and international stage, especially in 9-ball. But pool is a discipline where the break decides a great deal, and luck weighs more heavily than in carom. That makes pool harder to analyse in data terms, because variance is higher. In a 9-ball match, a good break can open up an entire rack. Conversely, a bad break can hand the chance to the opponent. For an analyst, this means a small sample of matches is not enough to conclude. Hundreds of matches are needed to separate signal from noise. This is why I am always cautious when someone says a pool player is in form. The sense of form is usually built from the last three to five matches. But three to five matches is too small a sample to say anything certain. I have seen players win five in a row and then lose seven, and no one calls it a crisis. THE SNOOKER LAYER: THE LARGEST GAP In the snooker layer, Vietnam has no player in the official professional system of the WST. This is a large gap, because snooker is the discipline with the strongest media and sponsorship ecosystem in the billiards world. But it must be said plainly: snooker demands expensive table infrastructure and a long training pathway that Vietnam has not yet built. A standard snooker table is larger than a pool table, with smaller pockets and faster cloth. The cost of a competition-standard table is several times that of a pool table. Not to mention that snooker requires the player to learn a complex scoring and tactical system, where one visit can last dozens of minutes. But this is also an opportunity. If Vietnam builds a few standard snooker academies, and if a Vietnamese player enters the WST system, the media effect would be enormous. The question is who will invest in a ten-year pathway, when results can only be seen at the end of the road. THE TOURNAMENT SYSTEM AND THE GAP BETWEEN LAYERS A mature billiards ecosystem needs three tiers of events: grassroots, national and international. Vietnam has a very strong grassroots tier, with thousands of clubs and hundreds of open events. The national tier has national championships organised by the federation. The international tier has carom World Cup events hosted in Vietnam in some years, attracting the world's leading players. But there is a structural problem. The grassroots and national events are not connected by a unified ranking system. A young player who wins a grassroots event has no clear path to the international stage. The gap between the two tiers is where talent is lost. I once followed a young player in Binh Duong. He won almost every grassroots event in the province for two consecutive years. But when I asked about his path to professionalism, he just smiled. No one had told him what the next step was. That is the biggest gap: not a lack of talent, but a lack of a path. Football has academies, youth teams and age-group leagues. Vietnamese billiards has very little of that. And when there is no path, talent will choose another profession. PRIZE STRUCTURE AND THE TOP-HEAVY PROBLEM Looking at the prize structure of international events, one feature is clear: money concentrates at the top. In many events, the champion receives several times the runner-up, and those reaching the knockout stage receive only small sums. This creates a top-heavy market: a small group of players can make a living, while most must do other work. For Vietnam, the consequence is that many talents are forced to choose between passion and income. I know players who can match international opponents but still have to run a shop or coach to make ends meet. This is a point that pure data analysis cannot see, but anyone who sits with the numbers must admit. POWER MAP AND GENERATIONAL TRANSITION If we draw the power map of world billiards, it can be divided into several groups. The carom leaders include European nations such as Belgium, the Netherlands and Turkey, along with South Korea and Japan in Asia. Vietnam sits in the chasing group behind but with a fast rate of progress. In pool, the Philippines, Chinese Taipei and the United States are traditional powers, with mainland China rising strongly thanks to heavy investment in Chinese 8-ball. In snooker, the United Kingdom remains the centre, with mainland China the second force. Where does Vietnam sit on this map? In carom, we are a formidable Asian force. In pool, we are a large mass market but with modest international results. In snooker, we are almost absent. There is a notable generational transition. The golden generation of Vietnamese carom is entering a mature phase of experience, but behind them the next class is not yet thick. This is the biggest long-term risk for Vietnamese billiards: achievement is at its peak, but the talent pipeline has not been completed. THE VALUE CHAIN: FROM THE POOL HALL TO DERIVATIVE PRODUCTS Let us look at billiards as a three-segment value chain. The upstream is infrastructure: pool halls, tables, cues, balls, cloth, lights. This is where the largest flow of money passes, and also where Vietnam depends heavily on imports. High-quality tables mostly come from abroad. Premium cues too. This is a weakness in added value. The midstream is players, events and media. This is where Vietnam has strength in people but weakness in media infrastructure. Vietnamese billiards events are not yet produced to international television standards, and there is no live data system good enough for analysis. The downstream is sponsorship, derivative products and fan culture. This is the youngest segment. Vietnamese billiards does not yet have many big brands investing as in football, and has no strong collectibles or digital content market. If I had to choose one segment to invest in, I would choose the midstream. Because that is where data can create value fastest, turning each match into a knowledge asset. HOW DATA IS CREATED, OR NOT There is a common misunderstanding: people think sports data naturally arises from matches. Not true. Data must be designed in advance, collected during the match, and stored afterwards in a consistent structure. At major international events, each table has its own recorder, and data is pushed to a central system almost in real time. At most domestic events, recording still relies on memory and pen and paper. That means we are losing data at the source. I once proposed to several domestic tournament organisers a standard recording template, simple enough that a volunteer could do it. Some adopted it, some did not. But even when adopted, the data was not connected to a common system. THE COUNTERINTUITIVE ANGLE: THE BOOM HIDES A SILENCE Here I want to say something that may make many people uncomfortable. Vietnamese billiards is in a phase called a boom. More halls open, more events appear, more people play. But if we look closely, most of this boom lies in the grassroots and entertainment layers. It has not yet converted into correspondingly strong international competitiveness. There is a paradox: the more players, the easier it feels that the sport is healthy. But the number of players does not automatically produce world-class players. Between those two numbers is a gap only a training system can fill. A second paradox concerns data. People often think that as the sport grows, data naturally fills up. Not true. Data must be designed, collected and stored deliberately. Otherwise, each match passes and disappears, leaving behind only memory, something that cannot be analysed. I once told a coaching friend that we are losing thousands of matches every year. Not because they are not played, but because they are not recorded. And a match that is not recorded, to an analyst, almost never existed. CAREER AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PLAYERS There is an aspect rarely discussed: the psychological life of players. Billiards is a sport of prolonged concentration. A match can last hours, and a single moment of lost focus can overturn an entire position. I once watched a young player perform very well throughout a tournament, only to lose form in the final. Not because of technique, but because of psychology. He had never stood before the pressure of a title-deciding match. This is why I believe psychological training is no less important than technical training. In countries with developed billiards, players usually have a psychologist and a support team. In Vietnam, most players swim alone. As for income, the structure is fragile. A top player can live on prize money and sponsorship. But a mid-ranked player usually has to coach or take another job. This precariousness drives many away from the sport before they reach their peak. THREE RISKS WORTH WORRYING ABOUT There are three risks I consider most worrying for Vietnamese billiards. The first is governance risk. Billiards is a sport with a high risk related to betting. Any incident of match-fixing or betting could seriously damage the sport's reputation. The lack of a transparent monitoring system is a loophole that must be addressed before it becomes a problem. The second is training risk. When the current golden generation retires, who will replace them? Without a next class, international results will fall quickly. The third is market risk. If sponsorship money flows only into entertainment-style grassroots events, while professional events lack investment, the sport will become a bubble, swelling on the surface but hollow inside. The signals I will track in the coming season include: the number of young players reaching the knockout stages of international events; the number of events with a live data system; and the number of big brands sponsoring at the professional level. CONCLUSION: A QUESTION TO SIT WITH People see a shot; I see the twenty quiet minutes leading to it. People see a champion; I see thousands of uncounted hours. And people see a booming sport; I see a value chain not yet connected. Vietnamese billiards does not lack talent. It lacks a system to record, connect and nurture that talent. Before believing a number, I ask where it comes from. And the question for Vietnamese billiards is the same: where does this achievement come from, and where will it lead? The arena will light up again tonight. The three balls will lie still on the cloth once more. And I will sit again with the numbers after the stands have gone dark, you may call it work, I call it my lot.