When Vietnamese Billiards Has Not Yet Separated Its Three Disciplines: The Gap Lies in Analytical Culture

A night in Nha Trang in March, inside a packed arena echoing with applause. I sat still, watching a player from Binh Duong rise from his rest chair. Before him stood a three-cushion carom table, and on the screen flashed a line of text: 'Shot number 24.' He struck the cue ball, it traced three rails, and when the blue ball settled on the target point, the whole arena rose to its feet. The reporter beside me, notebook open, wrote three words and closed it: 'Won 2-1.' Not a single line about the shot that had just happened.

I have sat in many such press rooms. And what I understood after more than forty years observing the sports industry, from the Philippines to Vietnam, is an uncomfortable truth: Vietnamese billiards has a serious gap, but that gap is not with its players — it is with those who write about them. This is not a failure of the cue, but a failure of a classification system that has never been built. When an entire media landscape lumps everything under the name 'billiards,' we inadvertently erase three separate worlds, each with its own rule system, technique, and economic current.

Three disciplines, three bloodstreams. Three-cushion carom uses no pockets. The ball must strike four rails before closing on the target. Success here is measured by rail efficiency and point-contact precision, not by games won. Players like Tran Quyet Chien, Duong Quoc Hoang, and Ngo Dinh Nai have won World Cup titles in three-cushion carom, and what they are credited with are performance numbers on shots per turn. Pool 9-ball is an entirely different world. The break shot is the center of everything. The 9-ball hovers in a corner pocket, and sometimes an entire match is decided because a break shot drifted by half a degree. Do Khanh Hoang or Duong Quoc Hoang carry a skill set into Asian 9-ball tournaments that bears no resemblance to the skills that win them carom events. Snooker speaks of 'century breaks' — a term that exists in neither carom nor 9-ball. In snooker, people speak of 'clearance,' of 'safety play,' of 'break-building.' In carom, people speak of 'points,' 'performance,' 'rails.' There is not a single bridge connecting these two vocabularies.

Yet in many Vietnamese news reports, all three appear under one headline: 'Vietnamese Billiards Today.' Such a story, however well written, begins with an unresolved confusion.

Numbers that do not dance. I learned to read matches through numbers, but only when they know how to dance. And a number only dances when placed in the correct context. A 92% success rate in snooker means something entirely different from 92% in carom. In snooker, that figure might accompany 42 visits to the table in a best-of-19 match. In carom, the same number is roughly equivalent to a superhuman per-turn performance over a long scoring run. This is what I realized when rereading my own notes from years ago. I once had a habit of recording every number in a single column, without distinguishing disciplines. It took me two years to understand that this habit had caused me to misread many matches. When a newspaper writes 'Vietnamese player wins 7-3,' the reader doesn't know whether 7-3 is the result of three consecutive visits in snooker, seven carom points, or seven 9-ball games. Three different readings, three different efforts, three different meanings. But we called them all '7-3.' We do not lack Vietnamese billiards data. We lack a system for classifying it.

The hidden variable between three worlds. There is an intriguing paradox in how Vietnamese billiards operates. The best carom and pool players are two virtually separate professional groups. Tran Quyet Chien rarely appears on the elite 9-ball table. Do Khanh Hoang rarely plays three-cushion carom. Yet both are addressed by the media with one title: 'Vietnamese player of world class.' The title is accurate, but it says nothing concrete. And in sports, a title that is not concrete is a meaningless title. Take a rising snooker player. If they are trained in the British system, they learn 'century breaks,' 'frame management,' 'safety exchange' — concepts no carom manual contains. If they switch to 9-ball, they must relearn the break shot and the mandatory lowest-ball-first strategy. This is not a minor skill transfer. This is a migration between two different planets.

One truth I recognized while observing Asian tournaments: Vietnam's best players in each discipline often cannot excel in another, even though they use the same cue, the same table, the same potential opponents. The reason is not in the hands. The reason is in the cognitive structure. A carom player's brain is forged to read rails. A snooker player's brain is forged to manage long campaigns. A 9-ball player's brain is forged to face the randomness of the break.

Three brains. Three disciplines. One word to name them all.

When silence is the voice. I once thought the solution lay in writing more, analyzing more, producing more numbers. But I was wrong. After a long period without live sports during the pandemic, I realized I had fallen in love with the silence after each shot — the silence that modern sports media fills with too much noise. And in that silence, a truth emerged: the problem with Vietnamese billiards is not a lack of analysis, but analysis in the wrong place.

Look at how tournaments are organized. A national carom event may gather twenty top players. A 9-ball pool event may gather thirty others. But in the weekly roundup, both are dropped into one section called 'Billiards This Week.' Readers finish without knowing what actually happened. I once witnessed a young editor asked to write a piece on 'the development of Vietnamese billiards.' They struggled for three days, read dozens of old articles, and eventually produced a piece that merged carom, snooker, and pool into a single narrative. The article was published. And it helped reinforce a long-held prejudice: that billiards is one sport, not three. I call this 'inadvertent erasure.' And in sports media, inadvertent erasure is sometimes more dangerous than deliberate deception.

There are moments when I believe we have missed what we need to hear. A carom player struggling in extra time is not struggling for lack of composure, but because carom's rule system can turn a match with unimaginable speed. A snooker player losing 10-8 in a final is not running out of steam, but because safety play at frame eighteen consumes more physical energy than outsiders imagine. But the press doesn't talk about that. The press talks about the score.

Overlooked parallels. From the perspective of a Filipino living in Vietnam, I see something that my Vietnamese friends sometimes miss. Philippine billiards and Vietnamese billiards share one heartbeat, but it beats according to different disciplines. In the Philippines, pool 9-ball and 10-ball are the main bloodstream. Efren Reyes, Django Bustamante — names that put the Philippines on the world map — all came from the streets of Manila, where the pool table is part of daily breathing. In Vietnam, three-cushion carom is the main bloodstream, and Tran Quyet Chien brought Vietnam to the world pinnacle in a discipline few Asian nations master.

But when Vietnamese media reports on billiards, they often write in the vocabulary of pool — the more internationally accessible vocabulary. Meanwhile, Vietnamese carom players compete in the logic of rails and points. The result: a mismatch between the language of the media and the language of the game.

I once sat with a veteran carom coach in Nha Trang. He told me something I wrote down immediately: 'Reporters ask me about tactics, but they have no words to ask about rails.' A simple sentence, but it contains an entire system problem.

What will unlock it. I do not believe there is a simple solution. But I believe the first step must be classification. Every Vietnamese billiards report, before it is written, must answer one mandatory question: is this carom, snooker, 9-ball pool, 8-ball pool, or Russian pyramid? The answer will determine the entire language of the piece. The break shot — a core concept of 9-ball — does not exist in snooker. The century break — a core snooker metric — is meaningless in carom. The 9-ball position — the heart of any 9-ball match — has no place on any carom table.

When classification is clear, everything else follows. The statistical columns arrange themselves. The terminology finds its place. The player stories are told in the correct language of each discipline. And most importantly: readers will understand they are reading about a specific world, not a jumbled set of concepts.

I recall a sentence I once wrote in a long draft I never shared: 'the passing lanes as a sacred language.' I wrote it when I had lost faith in writing, when arenas closed and I sat rereading old data. That sentence remains true for Vietnamese billiards today. But that sacred language is only sacred when spoken with correct grammar. A three-rail path is not a pass. A break shot is not a safety. A clearance is not a carom point.

Perhaps what I want to say to my younger colleagues is this: ask before you write. Ask what discipline this is, what the rules are, what counts as success. Those three questions will free you from a flawed classification system our generation left behind.

And perhaps, in the coming years, as Vietnamese players continue to conquer Asian and world arenas, people will begin to ask: 'What discipline does he play?' before asking 'Did he win?'. That will be the day Vietnamese billiards truly matures — not on the scoreboard, but in how we tell its own story.