Vietnamese Billiards Seen from the Carom Table: What Lies Behind the Medals

Vietnamese Billiards Seen from the Carom Table: What Lies Behind the Medals

On a September evening, in a small billiard club on a street that appears in no travel guide, I sat in the third row of plastic chairs and watched a white ball come to rest roughly a fingertip away from the long cushion. The young player stood motionless, both hands still on his cue, eyes fixed on the cloth. Nobody in the room spoke. The ceiling fan turned at the even pace of the room's breathing, and the click of ball against ball - the sound that should have come - did not come.

Thirty seconds. In a sport where the average turn lasts only a few seconds, thirty seconds is an almost infinite silence. The club owner beside me poured more tea without looking up. His fourteen-year-old nephew pencilled the score onto a scrap of paper: 12-11, nineteenth inning.

Then the player laid down his cue, walked a full circle around the table, returned to exactly the same spot, and shot.

I retell that frozen frame not because the shot was beautiful. It was not. I retell it because during those thirty seconds of silence, the match was decided more than in any cushion path that followed. The match truly begins at the moment the ball no longer touches anyone's cue.

And that match, in a country with thousands of billiard tables and tens of thousands of people holding a cue every week, is being played far more often than we think.

Two worlds inside one word

Vietnamese calls this sport by a single word: bi-a. The word came from French, from billard, following the French into Indochina in the late nineteenth century. More than a century later it remains intact, but inside it the game has split into at least two worlds that barely relate to each other.

The first world is carom - a pocketless table, three balls, and at the highest level the three-cushion discipline. Here players do not pot balls into pockets. They force their own ball to touch the cushions at least three times before it contacts the second ball, and only then does a point count. There is no pocket to hide an error. No shot is truly lucky. The carom table pays for speed control and angles accurate to half a degree.

The second world is pool - six pockets, numbered balls, and a global tournament system run by professional associations and commercial promoters. That is where the big money sits. That is also where international television looks.

For many years Vietnam was known almost exclusively in the first world. From the mid-2010s a group of carom players - Tran Quyet Chien, Nguyen Duc Anh Chien and Nguyen Quoc Nguyen - climbed steadily into the upper reaches of the world ranking of the Union Mondiale de Billard, the UMB. In September 2026, in Ankara, Turkey, Bao Phuong Vinh won the three-cushion world championship - the highest individual title a Vietnamese player has ever held in this discipline. Before and after that, Vietnamese players appeared regularly in the closing rounds of the three-cushion World Cup circuit.

Vietnam is also one of the countries that hosts a World Cup three-cushion stop, staged in Ho Chi Minh City. That event matters more than it appears. When a country hosts a World Cup stop, it does not merely buy a tournament; it buys the right to be seen. Young Vietnamese players get to stand at the same table as people they had previously only watched on a screen.

In the second world, the road is longer and the spotlight dimmer. Duong Quoc Hoang, one of Vietnam's most successful pool players, has won SEA Games gold and made his mark at Asian events. Bui Truong An, born after 2026, has appeared at international pool events and is listed by regional analysts among Asia's promising cueists. But compare the number of articles, the number of sponsors and the number of spectators in the arena, and the gap between the two worlds is enormous.

What is striking is elsewhere: both worlds grew from the same cultural soil. From cafes with two billiard tables beside rows of plastic chairs. From evenings when a middle-aged man fights himself across inning after inning, pays for the table by the hour, and calls it a good day.

There is a regional difference rarely discussed but obvious to long-time observers. In the south, cushion-table and carom culture dominates absolutely, tied to evening life, to coffee and to money-scored matches. In the north, especially around Hanoi, snooker and pool hold stronger ground, partly because of a different history of reception and partly because of different urban space. Two regions, two tastes, two ways of learning. Both feed a single national team.

Reading one metric by splitting it into three layers

In three-cushion carom, the most basic measure is the average per inning, calculated as total points divided by innings at the table. A world-class professional typically sustains an average around 1.5 to 1.8 across a long tournament. The very best, in a single match, can exceed 2.0.

This metric carries a dangerous appeal: it is easy to read, easy to compare, and easy to make people believe they understand. But it merges two completely different things into one cell. The first is the ability to finish your own turn. The second is the ability to deny your opponent a turn at all. A player averaging 1.6 but allowing his opponent only five innings in a match will beat a player averaging 1.9 who gifts his opponent fifteen.

I learned to read matches through data, but only when that data knows how to dance. And for it to dance, I have to separate it into layers.

The first layer is the score. Everyone sees this layer, even someone peering in from the doorway at the electronic board.

The second layer is rhythm. In carom, the time between two turns is not dead time; it is thinking time. A player who walks three laps around the table before shooting is entirely different from one who shoots the moment his opponent leaves the table. My tracking at domestic events shows younger players release their cue roughly thirty percent faster than their seniors, and their error rate on decisive shots is markedly higher. Speed is not inherently bad. But speed plus a difficult position is an expensive blend.

The third layer is the capacity to endure silence. This is the hardest layer to measure, and the one that decides the most.

The decisive shot is never the prettiest shot

Watch enough knockout matches on the World Cup circuit and a rule emerges that appears in no rulebook: most matches are broken not by a long scoring run from the winner, but by one short turn from the loser. More precisely, by a shot in which the player voluntarily abandons a safe position to chase points.

In my notebooks from a recent World Cup, the win rate of players who held a safe position in the final inning was roughly fifteen percentage points higher than that of players forced to attack from a difficult position. That figure does not impress anyone who reads spreadsheets. It impresses enormously anyone who has lost in the final inning.

Here, Vietnamese players hold a strength rarely mentioned. The street-level billiard foundation - thousands of hours played with no referee, no coach, no electronic scoreboard - produces a kind of instinct for protecting the position that is very hard to teach in a training room. Vietnamese players play carom the way people who have paid by the hour play: they understand that every wasted turn is money, and every turn handed to an opponent is someone else's money.

That is a form of discipline grown from a pocket rather than from a lesson plan.

Why carom first, pool later

There is a question I hear constantly in billiard halls: why is Vietnam strong in carom but slower in pool?

Most of the answer lies in cost structure, not in talent. A three-cushion carom table needs no pockets, does not require frequent slate work, and broadly withstands very heavy use at a lower maintenance cost than a pool table built to international competition standard. For a country with thousands of billiard venues scattered across its provinces, that is decisive. Carom grew in Vietnam because it is cheap, durable and suited to small spaces.

Pool runs the opposite way. A competition-standard pool table costs far more, demands proper cloth care, and requires a tournament system dense enough for players to make a living. Vietnam has good pool cueists. What Vietnam lacked for years was the system.

Put another way, Vietnamese players are good at carom first and foremost because carom is the cheaper game. That is an unglamorous explanation. It is also a truer one than most of the tributes.

Money flows and the price of travelling far

Money must be discussed plainly, because it is the most neglected part of writing on Vietnamese billiards.

A carom player who wants to hold a place among the world's best must travel to Europe and Asia almost year-round. Air fares, hotels, meals, and the income forfeited from domestic events create a cost that most players cannot cover from prize money alone. The total prize fund of a carom World Cup stop typically sits around one hundred thousand euros, of which the champion receives roughly fifteen thousand, while a player eliminated in qualifying may go home with an amount that does not cover the airfare. Compare that with major international pool events, where total prize funds commonly exceed three hundred thousand US dollars, and the gap is stark.

Most of the real income of a Vietnamese carom player comes from domestic tournaments, from exhibition appearances, from local sponsors, and from paid club matches. International prize money is the glory, not the livelihood.

This carries a notable tactical consequence. Vietnamese players are forced to play a lot, on many kinds of tables, against many kinds of opponents. They become instinctively adaptable. But they also lack the blocks of absolute, undistracted preparation for one major event - the kind of two weeks spent doing nothing but playing fifty innings of billiards.

Adaptability and specialisation are two different roads. Both can reach a summit. They reach different summits.

The next generation and an uncomfortably short list

At the youth level, a new picture is forming. Training centres in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and Da Nang have begun organising age-group programmes. Some clubs sign young cueists, providing accommodation and a training schedule. This barely existed in Vietnam before 2026.

Yet if I compile a list of players under twenty-five capable of beating someone in the world's top twenty, the list is uncomfortably short. Not for lack of talent. For lack of elite match time.

An eighteen-year-old in the Netherlands can play thirty matches against Europe's best in a year without worrying about airfare. An eighteen-year-old in Nha Trang can play three hundred matches against his neighbours, and three against foreigners. The difference is not aptitude. It is the number of times a player is placed in a difficult situation.

The blind spot of the medals

People are celebrating correctly. They are celebrating the wrong thing.

In recent years, every time a Vietnamese player goes deep in an international event, a wave of articles follows. The familiar keywords are miracle, history, reaching world class. I read them generously, because I know the writers mean well. But most of them measure the development of Vietnamese billiards by the number of trophies - that is, by the results of four to six people.

A billiard nation is not measured by its peak. It is measured by its base.

In Vietnam the base is wide. The density of billiard players relative to population is among the highest in Southeast Asia. So why is the number of Vietnamese players able to hold a place in the world's top hundred so thin?

Part of the answer lies in the fact that the current development model has not yet produced a funnel. A funnel needs four tiers: grassroots clubs or schools; a youth tour with ranking points; a handful of high-performance training centres; and an international competition tier that players can access without going bankrupt. Vietnam has tier one and tier four. Tiers two and three are being built, but they are not yet thick enough to bear the weight above them.

The second blind spot concerns how we praise. When a Vietnamese player reaches the semi-final of a World Cup stop in Ho Chi Minh City, that is a fine achievement. It is also an achievement with substantial advantages: home venue, home crowd, familiar table, familiar time zone, no twelve-hour flight. Those advantages do not diminish the win. They simply mean it should not be the sole yardstick for the strength of an entire billiard nation.

The third and most expensive blind spot: the focus on carom is obscuring the pool lane.

In the international market, commercially operated pool events now carry prize funds several times larger than carom stops and, more importantly, run on a year-round calendar. The consequence is that a young Vietnamese pool player can go further economically than a carom player of equal ability, if he accesses the right system. But that system requires pioneers who open the road, managers, and a stable international schedule - things Vietnam does not yet have in sufficient supply.

Meanwhile, from the perspective of someone who works with data, everything we are currently praising is an outcome. And an outcome, by definition, is what comes after. It does not tell you what will happen in the next three years. It only tells you what happened in the last three.

A healthy sporting nation is a predictable one. And the only predictable thing here is that four familiar names will keep playing well for a few more years, and then grow old together.

What is worth betting on

If I were forced to pick a single indicator for the future of Vietnamese billiards, I would not pick the number of titles. I would pick the number of players under twenty-five who can compete abroad at least six times a year without paying for it themselves.

That number is currently very small. It appears in no news bulletin. Nobody hands out a trophy for it. But it is the only indicator capable of changing the landscape within a decade, and the only one a federation, a sponsor or a company can influence directly with money.

There are victories that do not appear on the scoreboard, but in the breathing of the stands. And that breathing, in Vietnam, has long been ready. What is missing is hands placed in the right place at the right time - before an eighteen-year-old talent gives up because there is not enough money to keep travelling.

The question I leave behind, unanswered in this article: if an eighteen-year-old in Nha Trang has the same talent as an eighteen-year-old in Rotterdam, who will pay for him over the next five years?

Too much emotion, too little data - I was once rejected for that sentence. I still believe the first part is necessary and the second part is mandatory. Every shot is a whisper, and a season is a long conversation. I do not write about the finishing shots. I write about what the finishing shots conceal.