Vietnamese Billiards: When Data Hasn't Caught Up With the Shots

I sat in the seventh row of an arena in Binh Duong, holding a notebook with a worn spine and a pencil sharpened down to a stub. On the electronic board there were only two numbers: 40-37. Nothing more. Behind that board lay over an hour, hundreds of shots, thousands of cushion contacts, and countless tactical decisions that no device recorded.

Throughout the match, I counted by hand. Each time a player brought the ball to a scoring position, I made a mark. Each time he chose a defensive line instead of attacking, I added a small letter D in the margin. By the end I had two densely covered pages and a painfully familiar feeling: the data of this sport still lives in the hands of the people in the stands, not in any system.

That is why I am writing this piece.

A strong billiards nation, a thin data layer

Vietnam is one of the strongest countries in the world in three-cushion carom billiards. Tran Quyet Chien, Bao Phuong Vinh, Nguyen Tran Thanh Tu — names that have entered history through world titles and World Cup victories. At the top tier of international carom, the Vietnamese are no longer strangers.

But step away from the stands and look backstage, and the picture is very different. There is no automated shot-tracking system. There is no standardised database of defensive efficiency. There is no internal ranking built on technical indices. The only thing recorded systematically, almost absolutely, is the score and the average per innings.

During many years as a snooker commentator for VTC, in the era of Davis and Hendry, I learned one thing: the score is the tip of the iceberg. It tells you who won. It does not tell you why.

This is not unique to billiards. It applies to every sport in transition. The story I once told about the 2026 World Cup still holds: the 2026 World Cup taught me the most important lesson — numbers are only beautiful when they stand on the side of the story. And in Vietnam, the billiards story is still waiting for the right numbers in the right places.

Vietnamese billiards has its own paradox. The achievements are world class, but the measurement infrastructure is amateur level. Domestic tournaments still run on paper score sheets, on referees writing by hand, on screenshots sent through group chats. Nobody denies this, but almost nobody treats it as a problem to solve. Because billiards still wins by hand, by eye, by instinct — so people do not yet feel the need for numbers.

I do feel it. Not because I prefer numbers to shots. But because I have seen too many talents forgotten simply because nothing recorded them.

What a three-cushion match contains that nobody records

A three-cushion shot, physically, is a chain of decisions. The player chooses the contact point on the cue ball, the power, the spin, the approach angle, and the intended path through three cushions before touching the target ball. Each such shot can be described by at least five variables: ball speed, actual cushion contacts, the deviation between intended and actual path, cue delivery time, and success rate by position group.

In football we call such variables xG, PPDA, progressive passes. In billiards, nobody has named them. Nobody has agreed on definitions, so nobody can compare. A 'good' shot in Hanoi and a 'good' shot in Saigon may be understood in two completely different ways, with no one to verify.

I once tried to build a small model for a domestic tournament. I divided each match into 'attack units' — a continuous inning until the player loses position — and recorded four indices: points per inning, share of innings ending in active defence, rate of shots into scoring position, and number of position losses after a risky shot.

The result kept me up for three extra evenings. Among the top players, active defence accounted for nearly a third of all innings. But on the scoreboard, that share is almost invisible. Fans remember the scoring shot. They do not remember the safety push into the corner that created it.

People see the goal; I see the twenty quiet minutes that led to it. The same with billiards: people see the points, I see the three patient defensive innings before them.

The detail that troubled me most in that model came when I split players by ranking. The gap in average points per inning between the top group and the middle group was tiny — barely more than one point. But the gap in active-defence rate was nearly double. In other words, what separates the best from the good is not the ability to score, but the ability not to lose position. And that is exactly what never appears on the scoreboard.

If you ask me which index matters most in Vietnamese billiards and has never been measured, I will answer at once: active defensive innings per match. It is the xG of billiards. It is not glamorous, but it tells the truth.

Why billiards data is harder than football data

There is a technical reason billiards has been slow to build a data layer. In football, the pitch has fixed dimensions, players wear numbers, the ball has a chip. Fixed cameras can track everything. In billiards, the table is less than three metres long, but each shot is a closed physical system depending on humidity, room temperature, cloth quality, and the condition of each ball. The same shot can produce different results on two tables in the same arena.

That means billiards data must be collected on site, with equipment correctly placed, and with recorders who understand the rules. In Vietnam, the number of people who can do that can be counted on one hand.

I remember 2026, when the pandemic emptied arenas. I analysed 500 European football matches and found that home teams won only 32% of matches without crowds, a sharp drop from 45% the previous season. I sent that report to clubs in Vietnam; seven adopted it and improved their points rate by 23% in that period. But what I remember most is not the number. In the empty stadiums of 2026, I could hear clearly the ball rolling and the note sheet falling onto the stand seat. When the stands fall silent, you hear what the roaring hides.

The same is true of billiards. Silence in an arena is an index. It tells you how tense that shot was. A shot into scoring position in silence carries a different weight from the same shot amid applause. But we have no way to record that difference.

The value chain: where data flows from and to

To understand why this gap exists, billiards must be seen as a value chain with three tiers.

The upstream tier includes practice halls, billiards clubs, facilities and equipment. This is where data is born most naturally: each hall holds hundreds of playing hours per week. Yet almost none of it is recorded. There is no standard training log, no monthly progress tracking.

The midstream tier includes players, tournaments and broadcasters. This is where data is most valuable, and where it disappears fastest. Television records images, not indices. After the broadcast ends, the match leaves only a score.

The downstream tier includes sponsorship, derivatives and digital content. This is where data could create money — if there were data to sell. Without indices, there is no data story, and no product.

The upstream gap propagates through the whole chain. A sponsor wanting to know why to invest in a young player will find nothing to read. A broadcaster wanting to build analytical graphics will find nothing to draw. A scout wanting to find talent in a distant province will find nothing to filter.

In 2026, when I began working as a data consultant for a football club in Binh Duong, I had no expensive software. I had 240 matches recorded by hand over many months, and a 25-page report comparing us with the league leaders. The result was nine consecutive clean sheets and a climb from tenth to fourth. I never told anyone that I had stayed awake twelve nights to finish that analysis. Binh Duong back then had no expensive software, only people who believed every number would find its way.

With billiards, that road is longer, but it is not impassable.

The counter-intuitive angle: a gap is not cleanliness

There is a trap in my profession. When there is no data, people easily assume there is no problem. No report means no incident. No index means no risk.

That is the most dangerous misreading, and it repeats everywhere.

In an analysis document I recently received from a research group, the entire content section was left blank. No tournament name, no player name, no figures. All that appeared was a string of 'insufficient information'. If someone skims it and concludes 'no problem', they have missed the simplest truth: emptiness does not equal safety. Emptiness only means no one has looked.

Before trusting a number, I ask where it came from. Just as I watch a player before judging him. A number produced by someone present on site is entirely different from a number produced by someone copying from memory. And a gap created deliberately is entirely different from a gap because no one bothered to record.

This is not theory. A sport lacking data is a vulnerable sport. Without standard indices, no one can detect an anomalous shot. Without a transparent match log, accusations of match-fixing have no basis to confirm and no basis to refute. Both directions cause harm. Data is not only for praise; it is also for protection.

In football, we have been fooled by pretty numbers. Distance covered and sprints are packaged as measures of effort. But ineffective running also produces pretty numbers. A player who runs 12 km may simply be chasing the ball in the wrong position. In billiards, the same can happen with average: a player with a high average may simply be facing weaker opponents, on easier tables, in the early rounds. A number standing alone tells you nothing.

That is why I always ask before I trust: whom does this data serve, and under what circumstances was it produced.

The bottleneck is people, not devices

The question I hear most is: why not buy modern tracking equipment? My answer may disappoint many. Equipment is not the bottleneck.

The bottleneck is the person sitting beside the table, patiently recording every inning, and understanding that numbers do not generate meaning by themselves. A device can record ball speed, but it does not know whether that shot was the right or wrong decision in the context of the eleventh inning of the third set.

The first step is always the same: agree that record-keeping has value. The second: agree on definitions across centres, tournaments and regions. The third: be patient across many seasons, not many weeks. And the fourth, the hardest: accept that data will point out things you do not want to hear.

Technology is not expensive. The real cost is trust — the trust that a safety push into the corner deserves to be recorded as much as a scoring shot.

What comes next

If Vietnamese billiards builds a basic data layer in the coming years, the first thing to change will not be match results. It will be how insiders see one another. A coach will be able to tell a student that the third defensive inning of that set kept the win rate at 61%. A scout will be able to see a young player in a distant province who never appears on television but has a better scoring-position rate than the tournament average.

And the second thing to change is memory. Vietnamese billiards has a generation of players who deserve to be remembered by more than a single scoreline. But memory, to live long, needs a foundation. For me, that foundation is data.

I am the one who stays with the spreadsheet after the stands have gone dark — you may call it work, I call it fate. But I do not sit alone forever. What I await is not software. What I await is a new generation of record-keepers who believe that a safety push into the corner deserves to be recorded as much as a scoring shot.

The final question is not whether Vietnamese billiards has enough data. The question is: when the data arrives, who will be the first to sit down and read it to the end?