Vietnamese Carom Billiards: Excavating the Sediment Beneath World Titles

11 p.m., and the click of balls against one another still rings out steadily inside a billiards club in Hai Phong. Three three-cushion carom tables are still lit, but only one still has anyone practising for real. A fifteen-year-old boy repeats a single position over and over: send the cue ball through three cushions and bring it back to exactly the same spot. Sitting beside him, his teacher says nothing, only bends over a small notebook and records the start time, the number of successes and the number of misses. Nobody is filming. There is no audience. Only the sound of balls and the sound of a pen.

That boy is not the figure the media talks about. No viral clip, no sponsorship contract, not one line of his name on a sports ticker. Yet it is rooms like that one, not trophy ceremonies, where Vietnamese billiards is actually born.

I have sat through many nights like that. The longer I sat, the more convinced I became that what carried Vietnamese carom billiards onto the world stage was not one person's miracle, but a structure humming quietly behind the lights.

For more than a decade, Vietnamese three-cushion carom has moved from outsider status in Asia to a place among the nations named on the world ranking. The landmark that cannot be skipped is 2026, when Tran Quyet Chien was crowned world three-cushion champion in Cairo, becoming the first Vietnamese cueist to reach that summit. After him came a successor generation in sequence: Nguyen Duc Anh Chien, Ma Minh Cam, Chiem Hong Thai, Nguyen Quoc Nguyen, then Bao Phuong Vinh. These names regularly appear in the knockout rounds of the three-cushion World Cups organised by the Union Mondiale de Billard (UMB).

Vietnam has also hosted World Cup three-cushion events several times. That means domestic cueists no longer have to fly halfway around the world to test themselves against the elite. Home tables, home crowds and home pressure have become part of the growing-up process. A twenty-year-old cueist can stand across from a former world champion in the city where he lives, instead of only seeing him through a screen.

But if the story stops at the result lines, it gets told with half missing. Behind every medal sits a development system that has never been called by its proper name.

In many countries, carom billiards has academies, national training centres, contracts and salaries. In Vietnam, almost all the resources sit in private hands. A young cueist grows up borrowing a table from a club owner, having his family pay for food and lodging, and relying on a handful of businessmen who love the discipline and sponsor without contracts. There is no official scouting department. There is no payroll. There is no structured nutrition or medical programme for the youth tier.

That is the first layer of sediment I want to excavate: Vietnam's billiards achievements are built on private resources and personal relationships, not on a formal sporting system.

I come from a football background, where academies such as PVF and the HAGL Academy have built reasonably structured scouting, monitoring and injury-rehabilitation processes. There, a seventeen-year-old player has a fitness coach, a doctor, a nutritionist and a weekly updated metrics dashboard. Vietnamese billiards has nothing comparable. The comparison is not meant to diminish billiards, but to show that the structural gap in billiards is far wider than in football.

To understand why this structure still produces champions, you have to look at the discipline itself. Three-cushion carom is a sport of geometry and probability. The cue ball must contact three cushions before touching the other two balls, and the finishing position determines the next shot. A beautiful stroke is worth little if the cue ball dies in a dead spot.

Based on my experience watching matches at three-cushion World Cups, the decisive metric is not the best stroke, but the average — points scored per inning. A good amateur cueist often holds an average below 1.0. The world's top group sustains 1.5 to above 2.0 across a long tournament. The gap between those two figures is not talent. It is thousands of hours repeating one position in silence, exactly like the boy in Hai Phong that night.

The spreadsheet comes before the dream. I do not paint the future; I only measure the dust of time settling on each metric. In billiards, that dust is the number of times a position was rehearsed, the number of innings lost to a badly placed cue ball, the number of matches lost by choosing the safe option instead of finishing.

Over the past two seasons I have tracked closely a group of young cueists aged 16 to 21. What caught my attention was not the number of beautiful strokes they produced, but how their choices changed over time. The fastest-improving group was not the one with the hardest stroke, but the one that cut down the number of innings where they scored one point and lost the table. In other words, they learned to turn a bad inning into an acceptable one.

Three-cushion technique divides into three clear tiers. The first is control of speed and contact point: hitting the right thickness at the right pace so the cue ball does not fly off its line. The second is the cushion system — dividing the table by diamonds and calculating the cue ball's path through three cushions. The third, and hardest, is game management: knowing when to finish, and when to push the cue ball into a safe zone and wait for the opponent to err.

Most young Vietnamese cueists are strong in the first and second tiers. They are forged in clubs where everyone competes to play the hardest positions to prove their skill. The third tier is rarely taught, because it produces no beautiful moment to show off. A cueist who pushes the cue ball into a corner to wait for an opponent's miss does not look exciting, but he is the one who wins.

That is why I distrust highlight reels. A four-cushion shot from the corner can spread across social media, but it cannot measure the ability to sustain an average across seven consecutive days of competition.

The three-cushion table has a diamond system, usually called the point system. Beginners count diamonds to find the contact point on the first cushion, then add and subtract by fixed rules. At the top level, that system is only a starting point. Good cueists adjust for table speed, humidity, cloth quality and even the bounce of the balls. The same position with the same system gives two different results on two different tables. That is why a stroke cannot be copied from a video.

Fitness is the least discussed variable. A long three-cushion match can exceed two hours, sometimes reaching three in long-format play. Concentration in three-cushion is unlike concentration in direct contact sports, because no opponent physically acts on you. But it drains in its own way: every inning is a geometry problem that must be solved within a few dozen seconds, repeated hundreds of times. Errors accumulate quickly when blood sugar drops.

I once watched a young cueist play very well over the first two days of a tournament, then collapse in the fourth match through lapses on key innings. He had not lost any technique. He had lost the ability to keep making correct decisions under fatigue. That is a physiological and psychological problem, not a skill problem.

But there is a paradox here. A player's twenties are like a young geological layer: beautiful on the surface, but prone to collapse if the foundation is not checked. In billiards, that foundation is psychological health and income structure. A twenty-year-old cueist may be playing the best billiards of his life, but if he has nothing beyond the table and a sponsorship promise, every stroke carries the pressure of survival.

To date, most Vietnamese carom cueists have no fixed salary from the discipline. Income comes from tournament prizes, from domestic matches with a betting element, from coaching, and from unbound personal sponsorships. That income is highly volatile and unpredictable. A single World Cup prize can equal a cueist's entire annual income, but to be there he must cover his own flights, hotel and living costs. The economics are therefore often negative for those who do not go deep.

That leads to a life-or-death decision for young cueists: bet your youth on this discipline, or keep another job alongside it. Most choose the second path. And precisely because most choose the second path, Vietnamese billiards loses a share of its talent population that nobody can measure.

Scepticism is not for denial, but for digging deeper before announcing a find. I am not writing to deny those medals. I am writing to say that we are measuring exactly half the picture.

The other half is the people who disappeared. The seventeen-year-old cueist once praised after a junior event, then unmentioned three years later, because his family could no longer afford to keep him going. The nineteen-year-old cueist who moved into coaching at a small club because no tournament paid enough to live on. The sediment of a World Cup does not lie in the trophy, but in the players forgotten when the lights go out.

Read that way, Vietnam's billiards success resembles a string of miracles more than a durable system. Each champion is the product of a lucky combination: a devoted teacher, a club owner willing to spend, a family willing to invest, and a body free of injury at the right moment. When any link snaps, the talent vanishes.

This is where I must state clearly what I believe, and what I do not.

I believe in raw data, in handwritten notebooks, in tracking a cueist across multiple seasons before calling him a talent. I found 47 gems not because I have a sharp eye, but because I am too lazy to believe the reports handed to me.

I do not believe in summaries written within 24 hours of a final. A final is only one data point. A career is a whole curve, and that curve needs at least three seasons to reveal its shape.

There is a comparison I often use with colleagues, and it provokes argument. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2026 taught the sports industry something few want to admit: when the competition system collapses, cueists without a financial base disappear first. A pandemic, in a sense, is also a scout — it screens out who can genuinely stay with the discipline, and who was only riding a phase of excitement.

For Vietnamese billiards, that phase of excitement has lasted more than a decade. But excitement cannot substitute for academies, for contracts, for injury insurance and for a designed competition pathway.

What is notable is that the leading cueists themselves understand this better than anyone. Many of them open their own clubs, teach youth classes, and hunt for sponsorship themselves. They are doing the work a system should be doing. It is a responsible stopgap, but it cannot scale. One individual cannot develop a generation.

Meanwhile, the countries competing directly with Vietnam — the Netherlands, Turkey, Spain, Belgium, South Korea — have all built more stable training and competition structures. Their cueists do not worry about airfare, do not pay hotel bills out of pocket to attend a World Cup. That is structural advantage, and structural advantage always beats individual advantage over the long run.

I do not think Vietnamese billiards needs a revolution. I think it needs a spreadsheet.

A spreadsheet first means a complete list of young cueists by age, training hours, matches played per season, head-to-head record and injury status. The second step is tracking that list for at least three consecutive seasons, without early conclusions, without cutting anyone over one bad tournament.

The third step, and the hardest, is allocating budget by risk level. Not every young talent deserves the same investment. Some need two more seasons to prove themselves; some need to be pushed onto the international stage immediately. That classification must rest on data, not on feeling or connections.

And the final step is accepting that most will fail. In any development system, the share of young cueists who reach international level is always low. That does not mean the system is wrong. It means the system must be designed to catch even those who do not succeed — with a teaching career, with a club-management job, with another path inside the same discipline.

If we cannot do that, we will keep celebrating medals and keep losing the people who produced them.

Back to that room in Hai Phong that night. The fifteen-year-old boy is still repeating a position. The teacher is still writing in the notebook. Nobody knows whether he will still be holding a cue three years from now, and that is exactly the problem.

The question I leave behind is not whether Vietnam will produce another world champion. The question is: when the next champion appears, will we be able to count how many people disappeared so that medal could exist.