Four Sports, One Name: The Biggest Blind Spot in Vietnamese Billiards

In a small billiards hall on Tran Nguyen Han Street in Hai Phong, three eleventh-grade students slap the table almost at the same moment, arguing over who is Vietnam's number one cueist. The first names Tran Quyet Chien. The second waves him off, insisting Duong Quoc Hoang is the better shot-maker. The third stays quiet for a while, then says half a sentence about a snooker player in Hanoi whom the other two have never watched for a full match.

Those three names sound like one sport. Tran Quyet Chien's table has no pockets. Duong Quoc Hoang's table has six. The snooker player's table holds fifteen coloured balls racked in a triangle and one red resting near the far cushion. Ball diameter, cushion rebound, cloth speed, scoring method, even the way a player stands and breathes before delivering the cue — nothing matches.

I stood three metres away and knew the argument would never end, because all three of them are right inside their own sport and wrong when they call the other two by the same name.

That night I reopened a folder I had kept for four years.

A Name Wider Than the Sport

The folder holds 312 logged entries: short news items, articles, club press releases, video headlines, fan messages. I tagged each one across four fields: event, cueist, discipline, source. The discipline field is the one I need most, and the one left blank most often. Only 68 of the 312 entries specify the actual event category. The rest stop at the word "billiards" — a name broad enough that nobody has to answer for its accuracy.

Vietnamese calls all of it bi-a. Under that single name, at least four distinct disciplines are crowding into the same news feed.

Carom, the pocketless game. The table measures 2.84 metres by 1.42 metres with no pockets at all. Three balls, 61.5 millimetres in diameter. The familiar formats are libre, one-cushion, three-cushion and balkline. Tran Quyet Chien and Bao Phuong Vinh compete here, under the Union Mondiale de Billard. This is Vietnam's strongest discipline, and the only one where we have ever touched the world summit.

American pool. A nine-foot table, roughly 2.54 metres by 1.27 metres, six pockets, sixteen balls at 57.15 millimetres. The common formats are 8-ball, 9-ball and 10-ball. This is the largest commercial ecosystem on the planet, run by Matchroom and the World Pool-Billiard Association. The Hanoi Open Pool Championship at the My Dinh Indoor Athletics Palace belongs to this system.

Snooker. A table 3.569 metres by 1.778 metres, fifteen reds and six colours, balls 52.5 millimetres wide, governed by the WPBSA. Vietnam has no professional event inside this system.

English billiards and Chinese eight-ball. Two separate branches, both regular fixtures at the SEA Games and Asian championships, yet almost absent from the vocabulary of the Vietnamese audience.

The difference in table length between snooker and pool exceeds one metre. Carom balls are heavier and larger than pool balls. Snooker cloth is thinner and faster, forcing cueists to control power at a level that a pool player used to smashing the break will find deeply uncomfortable. A hard stroke on a snooker table leaves a dead position; on a pool table, a hard break is the condition for winning. The same action, two opposite outcomes.

What stands out is that Vietnam's administrative system distinguishes these disciplines perfectly well. The SEA Games 31 medal table in Hanoi separated one-cushion carom, three-cushion carom, snooker, pool and English billiards into distinct events, distinct medal sets, distinct referee panels. The Asian Games do the same. The blind spot is not in organisation. It sits in storytelling.

The Spreadsheet With 47 Rows

In 2026, when domestic youth events had all but frozen, I started a spreadsheet tracking 47 cueists aged 14 to 19 in Hanoi, Hai Phong, Ho Chi Minh City, Binh Duong and Da Nang. Each record carried height, arm span, weekly practice hours, matches played across the two most recent seasons, and one discipline-specific metric: average per inning for carom, run-out rate after a successful break for pool, long-pot success rate for snooker.

After three weeks of cross-checking against video, I found a problem I had not anticipated. Of the 47 records, only 12 carried a discipline label. And of those 12, nine were wrong. A three-cushion cueist was filed under pool 9-ball because he had once won a local amateur event in a pool hall. An English billiards player was labelled a snooker player because both use a twelve-foot table.

The consequences went beyond labelling. I nearly compared the average per inning of a 16-year-old three-cushion player with the run-out rate of a 16-year-old 9-ball player, then wrote in a draft that the second one was "developing faster". Those two metrics measure different things, in two sports with different tempos, pressures and scoring structures. I tore up the draft.

After tearing it up, I realised something larger. If a person sitting in the middle of the data, with video in hand and three weeks of time, can still nearly reach the wrong conclusion, then a reader skimming the news each morning has no chance at all of being right.

I found 47 gems not because I have a sharp eye, but because I am far too reluctant to trust the reports already written. And precisely because I was so reluctant, I discovered that most of those reports were missing the single most basic field.

The spreadsheet comes before the dream. I do not draw the future; I only measure the dust of time settling on each metric.

Which Yardstick Belongs to Whom

Based on my experience watching matches at domestic events and three-cushion World Cup ties broadcast live, I hold that the three major disciplines demand three entirely different sets of metrics, and that using one shared yardstick is the most serious error in youth talent assessment in Vietnam today.

For three-cushion carom, the base metric is average per inning — points scored divided by innings taken. At the world's elite level, this figure hovers between 1.5 and 2.0. A young cueist of 16 averaging 0.6 to 0.8 after three years of steady practice is a positive signal. Below 0.5 after three years, combined with no improvement across two consecutive seasons, is a sign to re-examine the training method rather than to re-examine the talent.

For pool 9-ball, the base metrics are break success rate and run-out rate after a successful break. A young cueist with a thunderous break but a low run-out rate is not a pool talent; he is a break specialist, and if he cannot fix his cue-ball control within two seasons, the road ahead narrows sharply.

For snooker, the base metrics are long-pot success rate and safety success rate. These two measure two different halves of the same sport: one attacking, one a game of chess played on cloth.

The same 15-year-old boy, training three-cushion, will spend most of his hours reading angles and holding his rhythm through long sequences with no pocket to release the pressure. Training pool, he will drill the break hundreds of times a week and decide inside very short windows. Training snooker, he will learn to hold back — to refuse the shot, to refuse ambition, to choose a safety over a scoring chance. Three different competitive personalities, three different psychological structures.

A cueist's twenties resemble a young geological layer: handsome on the surface, prone to collapse if the foundation is never tested.

Where the Money Flows

Vietnam's billiards market carries a paradox in its cash flow. The largest commercial ecosystem is pouring into pool, the very discipline where Vietnam lacks a matching development base. The Hanoi Open Pool Championship at the My Dinh Indoor Athletics Palace belongs to the Matchroom system, with an announced prize fund in the six figures in US dollars — a level no domestic Vietnamese event in any discipline can reach.

Meanwhile, the real development infrastructure for all four disciplines remains the pool hall. Table rates commonly run from 30,000 to 60,000 dong an hour. The coaches are usually semi-professional cueists who have retired, teaching by the session, with no standard curriculum and no player-tracking system. For carom, the UMB ranking system exists, but domestic events do not connect to it. For snooker, there is almost no annual tournament long enough for a young cueist to accumulate competitive experience.

At the second tier — cueists ranked roughly 100 to 300 in the world — there is no income structure. No tour, no minimum prize, no medical staff. That tier decides whether a sport lives or dies, and in Vietnam it is empty.

The ambiguity persists for a reason: it suits whoever speaks for the sport. A headline reading "world champion" without the discipline reaches more people than "three-cushion world champion". Naming the discipline shrinks the reach, and in a market where sponsors measure by views, shrinking reach is the one thing nobody wants to do. Structure is never accidental.

A Summit and the Ground Beneath It

Vietnam's two three-cushion world titles — Bao Phuong Vinh's and Tran Quyet Chien's — both came at UMB events staged in Viersen, Germany, and the following year's final was an all-Vietnamese affair. That is a genuine achievement, beyond argument.

But a summit is not a plateau. Set against the UMB ranking, the number of Vietnamese cueists inside the world's top 50 is small enough to count on one hand. Behind those two names lies a gap in depth. In sport, depth is what decides a generation; a summit only decides a headline.

What worries me most is a scenario that already played out in Vietnamese youth football and is now repeating in billiards at a lower volume. A 15-year-old boy practises eight hours a day in a hall, drops out of school, holds no insurance, has no fallback trade. If he has not reached the world's top 100 by 22, the remaining path is coaching at an ordinary hall for a few million dong a month. His family has staked everything on a ticket whose odds are published nowhere.

The irony is that scouting networks in places like this both find geniuses and manufacture lottery tickets and broken families. Both happen simultaneously, through the same mechanism.

The counter-intuitive point sits here: the greatest risk to Vietnamese billiards is not a shortage of talent. The greatest risk is that we look through a single lens — the three-cushion lens — while the two disciplines with the most commercial oxygen globally, pool and snooker, are left abandoned in both media coverage and investment. A healthy billiards nation is not one with two world champions. A healthy billiards nation has a separate ranking for each discipline, year-round youth events for each discipline, and a second tier that can make a living.

I do not write to praise cueists. I write to preserve the cultural sediment they leave on the cloth — and the first layer of that sediment is always the correct name of the sport they play.

What Would Change My Mind

I would change my mind if, within the next two seasons, domestic results tables are published with the discipline named on every line, and each discipline has its own national ranking updated regularly. I would change my mind if a club press release could say "three-cushion champion" and still be read, and if a 16-year-old cueist's file always has the discipline field filled in before the performance field.

Until then, I keep the folder, I keep the 47-row spreadsheet, and I leave the discipline field blank in my own notes only when it truly is blank. Doubt is not for denial; it is for digging deeper before announcing a discovery.

The sediment of a championship lies not in the trophy but in the cueists forgotten when the lights go out. And a cueist can only be remembered correctly when people know exactly which sport he plays.