From the Scoreboard to the Dataset: How Vietnam Reads a Three-Cushion Match Is Changing

Saturday night, quarter-final of a domestic three-cushion event. I sat in the fourth row, notebook open, counting every inning. The young player finished with an average of 1.41. His opponent: 1.28. The score was 38-40. He lost.

On the electronic board only one number survives: the final score. Which inning he missed in, what leave he left behind, how many innings his opponent needed to score, all of it disappears the moment the referee switches the board off. Twelve years of carrying a notebook through tournaments have taught me something few people want to hear: a match is rarely decided by the number the crowd remembers best.

Vietnamese billiards is enjoying the strongest stretch in its history. Duong Quoc Hoang won the three-cushion world title in 2026, Bao Phuong Vinh repeated it in 2026, Tran Quyet Chien took the crown in 2026. World Cup three-cushion stops held in Vietnam in recent years have been packed. The grassroots game expands sideways: every district in Binh Duong, Dong Nai or Ho Chi Minh City has a handful of clubs open until nearly dawn.

The data infrastructure stands still. A professional three-cushion match in Vietnam leaves exactly two kinds of records: the final score and the referee sheet. No inning-by-inning file. No record of the leave left behind. Nobody measures how much suffering one player inflicts on another. Coaching schools pass on experience through memory and phone clips.

In 2026, when I started bringing data analysis into a football club in Binh Duong, I met the same situation. Binh Duong back then had no expensive software, only people who believed every number would eventually find its way. I spent 240 matches showing that the team held only 42 percent of possession yet created 18 chances from counterattacks, with a PPDA of 8.7, far too low to control games. Football is simply ahead of billiards here: it agreed to pay the price of measurement, even when the first results looked ugly.

I bring up the old story not to boast. I bring it up because Vietnamese billiards right now has plenty of people who can calculate a route, and very few who are willing to sit down and count once the match is over.

Average tells you about speed, not about rhythm. Over the past two months I logged 61 matches: domestic events and most World Cup matches on television. For every inning I recorded four things: points scored, quality of the leave, and the opponent's score in the following inning. The method is manual and slow, but enough to reveal what the scoreboard never says.

Average is the most quoted number in billiards. It is convenient, easy to compare, sitting right there on the board. But it is a measure of speed, not of rhythm. Two players can share an average of 1.20 and live two entirely different fates: one moves through innings at 2-2-1-2-2-1, the other at 0-0-0-8-0-12.

In 17 matches decided by two points or fewer, the winner had the lower average in 6 of them. Six out of seventeen proves nothing. I have to say that clearly, because before believing a number I ask where it was born, the same way I watch a player before judging him. But it is enough to raise a doubt: in a race to 40, what decides the match is not scoring speed, it is who holds rhythm across the last eight innings.

The second metric: how much your opponent scores when facing you. This is where I borrow a way of thinking from football. PPDA measures how many passes a team allows before pressing; it does not measure how many goals that team scores. In billiards I built a similar index: the opponent's average in innings played directly against one player. It measures the quality of the leave, the quality of the block, and the discomfort one player creates for another.

In the 9 matches where I could compute this index fully, the player with the lower opponent-index won 7 times, regardless of his own average. In this small sample, the ability to silence an opponent mattered more than the ability to score. That is a silent skill: absent from the scoreboard, absent from news reports, and decisive in who advances.

The third metric is conversion after an opponent's miss. When the opponent misses, the leave is usually friendlier than normal, and that is the moment to finish. The young players in my sample converted well while in rhythm, and dropped sharply after losing two innings in a row. This matches what I saw in football: people see the goal, I see the twenty quiet minutes that led to it, and inside those twenty minutes there are decisions nobody records.

In 2026, when European stadiums closed, I analysed 500 matches and found home teams won only 32 percent of them, down from 45 percent the previous season. An empty arena in 2026, and I could hear the ball rolling and the note sheet falling onto the stand seat. Football lost its home advantage in a way the data could measure and the senses refused to believe.

Vietnamese billiards went through a similar stretch when clubs shut their doors. My notebooks still hold a few dozen matches from that period: no crowd, no applause after a long run, just the click of balls. What I saw was not scores rising or falling, but rhythm slowing. Players took longer between innings, and the innings per match rose. Speed vanished, patience appeared. No software records that, only the one who stays behind with the numbers when the stands have gone dark.

Uniformity is arriving in Vietnamese three-cushion, just as it arrived in football. Fifteen years ago I wrote that inverted wingers would erase the traditional winger, and I received a fair number of angry letters. It has since happened, to the point where a pure winger is a rarity.

In billiards the story repeats in another shape. Vietnam's young generation grew up rewatching the matches of world champions and copied exactly one half of them: the attacking half. The safety shot, the thing senior cueists such as Ngo Dinh Nai, Ma Minh Cam and Chiem Hong Thai do so well, is fading inside coaching schools. That skill never reaches television, never produces a 12-point run, so nobody wants to learn it.

My notebook data supports the instinct to a degree: cueists under 25 in the sample attacked better across the first 15 innings, and worse across the last 8. This is where data is easily misused. Count only innings, attempts, bursts of scoring, and you will believe one player is more diligent than another, when in reality he is simply playing more innings because he scores more slowly. Ineffective running still produces pretty numbers; so does ineffective cuing.

I do not expect a data revolution in Vietnamese billiards within a single season. The first task is simple: one person stays behind after every match and writes down every inning. Do that for one season, and that unit will see the second season before everyone else. I am the one who sits with the numbers when the stands have gone dark; you may call it work, I call it my lot. So who will keep writing when the scoreboard goes off?

This article is based on personal observation and note-taking while following billiards and football events; the figures are for professional reference and are not betting advice.