When Vietnamese Billiards Sits With Its Numbers: A Data Storyteller in the Information Vacuum

On a Saturday afternoon at the Phu Tho billiards club, I sat before a laptop screen with forty-three pages of data flashing red. That was the analysis report of the national 3-cushion carom championship final I had been writing for eleven days and nights, and the only number I trusted completely was the final score: 50-42. Everything else – exact carom count, miss frequency, average thinking time per shot – I had reconstructed from my handwritten notes and four unnamed sources. A data consultant without data: that is me in Vietnam in 2026.

Vietnam is perhaps one of the countries with the highest density of billiards clubs per capita in Southeast Asia, yet one of the places with the thinnest competitive data systems. In twenty-three years of commentating snooker for VTC, I had grown accustomed to receiving statistics sheets from the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA) complete down to each shot. But whenever I returned to follow a domestic carom tournament or a 9-ball match in Ho Chi Minh City, I found myself standing before a vacuum. Nobody counts the shots. Nobody records ball paths. There is no central database for an analyst like me to anchor on.

That is why I spend much time sitting with my own notebooks – mine, and those of a few others quietly doing similar work in Hanoi, Danang, Can Tho. They are referees, technical advisors, sometimes retired players themselves. An informal network, unpaid, bound only by the belief that data will one day have value. Binh Duong back then had no expensive software, only people who believed each number would find its way.

My forty-three-page report began with a simple question: in the sixteen carom matches just played in the finals, how many shots ended in a legal carom on the first attempt? The question sounds technical, but it determines whether a player is struggling with shot mechanics or simply suffering bad luck. I counted manually from YouTube videos shot by an amateur on a phone. Total: 1,847 shots, 612 legal caroms, a rate of 33.1%. That figure sits noticeably below the 38-42% that professional UMB (Union Mondiale de Billard) players typically achieve.

But that is one match, one tournament, a tiny sample. To build any trend analysis I need data covering at least the last twenty seasons. I do not have it. WPBSA does – they publish every snooker shot within 24 hours. UMB does – they began digitising carom data in 2026. But the Vietnam Billiards & Snooker Federation (VBSF), which oversees domestic tournaments, has no website publishing comparable results, let alone shot-level data. I know this because I have asked, many times, by email, by phone, by simply sitting in their office to ask in person.

The gap between data and no data is not just a technical problem. It determines how we evaluate talent. A young rising player in Binh Duong has an eight-match winning streak. I do not know whether he wins with an average carom of 4.2 shots or 9.7. I do not know whether he scores from difficult positions or simply waits for opponents to err. I do not know whether his style belongs to the "early-attack" or "defensive-opportunist" group. In football, a regular scorer is valued by sites like Transfermarkt. In Vietnamese billiards, no equivalent valuation system exists, and no data exists to build one.

People see the goal; I see the twenty quiet minutes leading to it – and in billiards, those twenty quiet minutes can be an entire season.

A contrarian view I must acknowledge: perhaps the data scarcity is exactly why Vietnamese billiards still survives. In a sport where everything is measured, every player ranked, every shot traced – psychological pressure can kill young talent. Chinese snooker players have faced waves of mental-health struggles and illegal betting in recent years, partly because every mistake is recorded and analysed. In Vietnam, a young player can lose three in a row without anyone outside friends and family knowing. That lets him experiment, fail, and grow without being labelled a "failure" by a ranking number.

But I do not really buy that argument. The absence of data protects no one; it only makes talent harder to see. An excellent carom player in Danang may compete for twenty years and never be discovered, because no system scans widely enough to find him. A 9-ball player may pot at 78% accuracy yet have no one measuring to confirm it. The problem is not "too much data"; the problem is "no data at all". And that is a much larger gap.

Another blind spot I often overlook: running and movement metrics in billiards may not carry the same meaning as in football. In football, 11 km per match usually signals effort. In billiards, standing still more often means the player is controlling the match better. The "steps around the table" index some new software tries to measure may become a beautiful yet meaningless metric – the same way distance covered in football has been abused to evaluate players while ignoring movement quality. I wrote about this in an analysis on Doan Van Hau in 2026 – and now I see the same trap waiting for billiards data.

The Phu Tho billiards hall that Saturday afternoon, I closed the laptop. My forty-three pages of data were not perfect, but they held one truth I trusted completely: I had sat here. And the next day, I would sit here again. The question I put to VBSF, to sponsors, to the Vietnamese billiards community, is not "when will we have data?" – it is "are we ready to record it when it appears?". A young player in Can Tho just broke the national record for caroms in a single visit. No camera captured it. No data was saved. Did that shot truly exist in the history of Vietnamese billiards, or only in the memory of the twelve people present that day?