Vietnamese Billiards: The Cushions That Never Reach the Scoreboard

The wall clock in a billiard hall in District 3, Ho Chi Minh City, read one forty-seven in the morning. The owner switched off two of the lights, leaving a single pool of yellow light over three-cushion table number four. A cueist with silver-flecked hair, somewhere past fifty, bent down so low his chin almost touched the cue. He did not shoot. He only aimed. The cue ball lay tight against the long cushion, some three hand-spans from the object ball, and behind it was a dead angle that anyone watching would have called the end of the road. He aimed like that for almost forty seconds, then straightened up, shook his head, and walked outside for a cigarette.

No one recorded that silence. No camera, no scoreboard, no commentator. But if anyone asks me where Vietnamese billiards truly begins, I will not point to a televised final. I will point to the moment that man straightened up.

The match truly begins at the moment the ball touches no one's foot.

I first wrote that line on paper years ago, in a cafe on Tran Phu Street in Nha Trang, trying to explain to a sports-journalist friend why I do not write about winning shots. I learned to read a match through numbers, but only when those numbers know how to dance. And in Vietnam, the numbers of billiards have never danced on the sports pages. They lie still in short news lines: who won, who lost, by what score. What remains, what is worth writing, is left behind in the yellow light of late-night halls. This article is an attempt to drag those moments into the open.

I. Two traditions, one country

To understand Vietnamese billiards, you must understand that it is not one discipline but two, sitting side by side in the same country, sometimes on the same street.

The first is carom, also called three-cushion, French billiards, or no-pocket billiards. The table has no pockets, and the standard match dimensions are 2.84 metres long by 1.42 metres wide, with three balls: a cue ball for each player and one object ball. Points come from the cue ball contacting both other balls after touching at least three cushions. This is a sport of geometry, of physics, of patience bordering on meditation. A successful three-cushion shot is the product of hundreds of tiny calculations performed in the player's head within seconds: angle of approach, angle of reflection, spin, force, cloth friction, even the humidity of the room.

The second is pool, most often American 9-ball and 8-ball. The table has six pockets, commonly nine feet, roughly 2.54 metres, the balls are smaller, and the game leans toward speed, force, and decisiveness. If carom is a chess game, pool is a fast conversation, short, blunt, and sometimes cruel.

In southern Vietnam, carom is the tradition. The oldest halls in Saigon, My Tho, and Can Tho are mostly three-cushion tables. I once sat for hours in a hall on Cao Thang Street watching middle-aged men play carom as though playing chess. Every shot was a move, and every move had a reason. In the north, pool arrived later but grew faster, especially in Hanoi, where young people poured into pool clubs from the early 2010s.

There are victories that live not on the scoreboard but in the breathing of the stands. In Vietnam, that breathing often comes from stands with no one in them, only the click of ball on ball and the steady turn of a ceiling fan.

II. Names and numbers

If you had to pick one name to represent Vietnamese billiards on the world map, most people inside the game would say Tran Quyet Chien. Born in 2026, the three-cushion player has been Vietnam's leading figure for more than a decade, ranked among Asia's best and a regular in the final rounds of World Cup events run by the UMB, the world carom federation.

Of his generation are Ngo Dinh Nai, Ma Minh Cam, and Tran Duc Minh, names local carom fans know by heart but which travel poorly beyond the border. It is a familiar paradox of Southeast Asian sport: no shortage of craft, a shortage of stage.

Notably, Vietnam has hosted a stop on the UMB World Cup circuit in Ho Chi Minh City. It mattered, because it brought the world's best, players like Dick Jaspers, Torbjorn Blomdahl, and Frederic Caudron, to compete on Vietnamese soil before Vietnamese crowds. But what I remember most from those events is not a winning shot.

It is the silence before a cueist steps to the table. In carom, a professional's turn lasts on average only a few dozen seconds, yet the dead portion, the walking around the table, the bending down, the standing up, the chalking of the tip, takes up most of the time. And it is precisely in that dead portion that the match is decided.

III. The alchemy of numbers

I studied statistics as a student and carried it into writing. But it took years to understand that in billiards, the most beautiful number is not the one on the scoreboard.

It is the average. That is the points a player scores divided by the number of innings. A good amateur might average 0.5. A world-class professional usually sits between 1.5 and 2.0, meaning nearly two points per turn. At the very peak, in a soaring match, that figure can climb above 3.0.

But the average is only the surface. Beneath it lies what I call the silent index: the number of times a player decides not to shoot. The number of times he chooses a safety over an attack. The number of times he nudges the cue ball into a corner so the opponent has nothing to hit. These numbers are almost never recorded. And that is why we misread so many matches.

Imagine a carom match where Player A wins 40-25 in 30 innings. Everyone says A attacked well. But if you learn that in those 30 innings, 12 were safeties, and across those 12 the opponent B scored only 3 points total, the story changes entirely. A did not win because he shot better. He won because he locked B inside a geometric prison. Each time B bent down, he saw no opportunity. He saw only a wall.

That is data alchemy: turning a dry number into an image. Those twelve safeties draw a face, the face of a man patient enough to be cruel.

I learned to read matches through numbers, but only when they know how to dance. And in Vietnam, those numbers dance in silence, in halls with no spectators, among players whose names are never recorded.

IV. The anatomy of a shot

To see more clearly why billiards is a sport of preparation, let us dissect a single three-cushion shot.

A cueist stands before a difficult position. He walks around the table. He bends down in three different places, each time only to aim, not to shoot. He steps back, chalks his tip, then lowers the cue and sights. Across those thirty or forty seconds, three major decisions are made: the contact point on the cue ball, meaning the spin; the force; and the desired path after the third cushion.

Those three decisions are not independent. They are a system of equations. Change one variable and the whole result changes. Billiards, in essence, is the sport of solving equations with the body.

What is striking is that at a high level, the player no longer solves the equations consciously. He feels them. A professional carom player's intuition is built from hundreds of thousands of repeated shots, a process psychologists call procedural encoding. The body knows before the mind does. That is why older cueists can still play beautifully: muscle memory does not age with the passport.

It is also why billiards is hard to teach. You cannot teach a person by telling them to feel. You can only let them watch, thousands of times. And in Vietnam, that watching happens in billiard halls, not classrooms.

V. The reverse angle: the forgotten

There is a widespread belief in Vietnamese sports media: to develop billiards, you need stars, big tournaments, television. I understand the logic. But I think it obscures a larger truth.

That truth is that Vietnamese billiards did not grow out of big stages. It grew out of small halls, out of uncertified teachers, out of evenings when a fourteen-year-old boy stood watching adults play and secretly learned each shot.

I once spent months taking notes in a few halls in Nha Trang and Saigon. What I found was that most of the best players did not come from training centres. They came from families with a table, or from neighbourhoods with a hall. Their craft was passed on the way a trade is passed on: through observation, imitation, and correction.

A Vietnamese billiard hall is, in essence, a miniature social institution. It has a hierarchy. It has unwritten rules about who plays on which table, who pays for the drinks, who is permitted to speak up and advise. It has teachers without titles, whose authority comes solely from playing well. And it has stories handed down from generation to generation, not through books, but through evenings.

This is the blind spot of collective memory. We remember the winning shots, but forget the evenings. We remember the one holding the trophy, but forget the one who stood watching.

There is another paradox: precisely because Vietnamese billiards grew in silence, it retains something many more developed billiard nations have lost, a kind of purity. Where billiards has become a fully industrialised entertainment business, people play to win, to earn, to become famous. In Vietnam, most players still play for a simpler reason: they love the feeling of a ball rolling exactly where they want it.

Three hundred and ninety-eight days without a whistle, and I realised I had fallen in love with the silence after the goal. I wrote that about football, but it fits billiards better. Billiards has no whistle. It has only the click of ball on ball, a small, dry sound that, if you are not sitting close enough, you will never hear.

VI. What no one measures

Here I must confess something. I am a data addict, but I do not believe billiards can be fully understood through data.

In sports psychology, people speak of between-point time in tennis, or dead time in football. In billiards, that interval is so long it becomes part of the game. A professional may spend forty seconds aiming and two seconds shooting. That ratio says everything: billiards is a sport of preparation, not of action.

Hesitation cannot be measured. But it exists, and it matters. When a cueist straightens up and walks outside for a cigarette, he has just lost a small match that no one scored. He lost because he did not dare. And the memory of not daring will stay with him longer than any missed shot.

This is where I place my reverse angle: perhaps we are teaching billiards wrongly. We teach beginners how to shoot, but not how to wait. We praise a beautiful shot, but not a correct decision. We measure points, but not patience.

If there is one metric I would like to see in Vietnamese billiards, it is the correct-choice count: the number of times a player, in a difficult situation, chooses the option with the highest probability of winning, whether or not that option looks pretty. Such a metric would change how we see the sport. It would turn the safety players, the ones the media ignores, into protagonists.

VII. The heartbeat of two billiard nations

I was born in the Philippines and live in Vietnam. These two countries share something rarely mentioned: both are strong billiard nations of Southeast Asia, and both grew out of working-class halls.

In the Philippines, billiards is part of street culture. Efren Reyes, the man they call the Magician, is a legend, but he is also a man from a small town who grew up playing in alley halls. In Vietnam, there are unnamed Efren Reyeses, men who can play impossible shots but have never stepped out of their own street.

The heartbeat of those two billiard nations is the same: slow, steady, and enduring. It does not race like the heartbeat of a football match. It beats like the pulse of someone training, calm, persistent, and without need of an audience.

There are passing lanes that feel like a sacred language. In football, a pass can be a whisper. In billiards, a path of the ball can be an entire poem. And anyone who writes about billiards, if honest, must admit they are only trying to translate a poem from a language they have never fully learned.

VIII. What remains after the scoreboard goes dark

When a billiard match ends, the scoreboard goes dark. The winner packs his cue, the loser pays for the drinks, and the room falls quiet. If you stay ten more minutes, you will see something television never shows: other players return to the table, set the balls back in position, and begin again from the start.

They are no longer playing to win, because there is no one left to beat. They are playing to play.

I think that is the final truth about Vietnamese billiards, and perhaps about billiards generally. This sport does not exist because of spectators. It exists because of players. It does not need a stand to applaud. It needs only a table, three balls, and a person willing to aim for forty seconds and then decide not to shoot.

I do not write about goals. I write about what goals conceal. And in billiards, what is concealed is an entire world, a world of small decisions, long silences, and people who have never been named.

IX. An open ending

So the question I want to leave is not how to give Vietnamese billiards more stars. That question has been asked too many times, and the answer is always the same: money, tournaments, media.

The question I want to leave is this: if we are truly serious about understanding Vietnamese billiards, are we willing to sit in a hall at two in the morning, switch off our phones, and simply watch? No notes, no filming, no counting points. Just watch a man bend down, aim, straighten up, and decide not to shoot.

Because if we cannot do that, then every number we collect is just a number: beautiful, accurate, and utterly silent.

And Vietnamese billiards, with all its slow breathing, deserves to be heard, not through a scoreboard, but through the very silence it has kept to itself for so many years.