What the Billiards Scoreboard Cannot Count

Nha Trang, 2 a.m.

In a small seaside billiards club, the lamp above the carom table is still on. The cue ball rolls out its momentum along the third cushion, hesitating in the exact instant between “in” and “not in”, then drifts away and stops one hand span short of the pocket. The whole room holds its breath. No whistle. No roaring stands. No one writes it down. The scoreboard still shows the same old number, standing still as though nothing had happened all evening.

The match truly begins in the moment the ball touches no cue at all.

I have sat beside billiards tables for more than forty years, and I learned to read a match through numbers — but only when those numbers know how to dance. What haunts me most about Southeast Asian billiards, and about Vietnam in particular, is not what we manage to record, but what we never record. The empty cells. The blank spaces that no scoreboard, however modern, ever touches.

I do not write about the score. I write about what the score hides.

A Strong Billiards Nation Living Outside the Database

In Vietnam, when people say “billiards”, most of them mean carom — specifically three-cushion. This is the discipline that fills clubs from south to north: from roadside halls with creaking ceiling fans and an iced coffee forgotten on the table edge, to international-standard tournament centres in Ho Chi Minh City, which has hosted several three-cushion World Cup events organised by the Union Mondiale de Billiard (UMB).

While snooker dominates the statistical record books of the United Kingdom — where every century break, every pot success rate, every minute of play is meticulously logged and published — Vietnamese carom, despite producing world-class cueists, largely lives in the collective memory rather than in a database.

Tran Quyet Chien — who once rose to world number one in three-cushion and has won multiple World Cup titles — alongside Ngo Dinh Nai, Pham Quoc Tuan, Ma Minh Cam and Nguyen Duc Anh Chien: these names need no introduction to domestic fans. But ask a simple question — what is their average per innings across seasons? What is their safety success rate under pressure? What is their average pace per game, measured in seconds between shots? — and you will receive very few systematic answers.

The reason is not a lack of love for billiards in Vietnam. It is that we never built the habit of record-keeping. We remember through images, through stories, through feeling. And inside that collective memory, there are always empty cells.

I still remember the 398 days when I did not hear the sound of ball striking ball, while billiard halls were closed during the pandemic. I sat at home, opened my own old notes, and realised that most of what I had written about billiards was not based on data at all. It was based on feeling. Too much emotion, too little data.

What Those Gaps Conceal

There are three kinds of empty cells in Vietnamese billiards, and each one tells a different story.

The first is a technical gap. A successful safety is not recorded as a point. A cue ball pushed into a corner cushion to lock down an opponent produces no score. Yet it is precisely those shots — not the brilliant scoring strokes — that decide long matches. In three-cushion, people easily remember a three-cushion shot into the pocket from a tight angle, but few remember a perfect push at the twentieth inning. The scoreboard does not count it. And because it is not counted, it slowly falls out of memory.

The second is a gap in time. We record the final score, but not the tempo. No one measures how long a cueist sits in the chair, studies the table and weighs the options. No one records that in a semi-final, a player took forty seconds to decide on a shot he normally plays in eight — and that those forty seconds tell us more than the final result. Some shots do not live on the scoreboard; they live in the breathing of the room.

The third is an emotional gap. The instant a cueist sets down his cue, the instant he bows to his opponent after a loss, the instant he looks up into the stands searching for someone — all of it is invisible to any statistical system. Yet that is exactly the raw material of collective memory.

The Value Chain and Its Numberless Links

To understand why Vietnamese billiards data is so thin, you have to look at the industry’s value chain — from the hall to the broadcast.

At the first link, the billiard hall, data barely exists. Small clubs operate informally, with no results system and no internal ranking. A strong player in Nha Trang can win twenty matches in a row and no one outside that room will know. This creates a paradox: the more players there are, the more matches are played, the more scattered and perishable the memory becomes.

At the second link, players and tournaments, data exists but is fragmented. Domestic events record scores, but rarely publish detailed statistics. International events have data, but in foreign languages and seldom translated for domestic audiences. The result is a gap between those inside the game and those watching: insiders know, outsiders guess.

At the third link, media and sponsorship, data appears only when there is something worth selling. Without an attractive statistical table, there is no story to tell. Without a story, there is no sponsor to persuade. Without sponsors, prize money stays thin, and players must live on other income — coaching, exhibition matches at clubs, or part-time work in an unrelated trade.

This is a self-reinforcing loop. No data means media struggles to produce depth. No depth means audiences struggle to stay attached. No attachment means sponsors do not invest. No investment means no one pays to record the data. The loop closes, and young cueists grow up in a billiards culture with no mirror.

The Southeast Asian Power Map

If you drew a power map of regional billiards, Vietnam and the Philippines would stand as the two pillars. The Philippines has a long billiards tradition with Efren Reyes — “The Magician”, who won the 9-ball world championship in 2026 — and Francisco Bustamante, two names that put Southeast Asia on the global billiards map. Vietnam has unusual depth in three-cushion carom, with a generation of cueists capable of competing on equal terms with Europe’s leading names.

Around those two pillars are emerging billiards nations. Cambodia has female cueists such as Sruong Pheavy, who have made their mark at international carom events. Thailand has a snooker tradition linked to James Wattana, once ranked among the world’s best. And China, with heavy investment flowing into Chinese 8-ball, is gradually becoming Asia’s organising and streaming hub.

What is striking is that almost no billiards nation in the region has a public, sufficiently long and detailed database for fans to consult. They are strong at the table, but weak on paper.

Through the Outsider’s Shirt

I was born in the Philippines, where billiards is part of the national identity. When I moved to Vietnam to live and work, I noticed something strange: these two billiards cultures are alike in their soul, and alike in the way the world records them.

Both produce world-class cueists. Both have a dense billiard-hall culture — where billiards is not only sport but social space, where people drink coffee, talk, and sometimes play until dawn. And both are equally under-recorded. The world knows Reyes and Bustamante through their titles, but few know the hundreds of Filipino and Vietnamese players who never reached an international stage yet bend over the table every night with the same devotion.

The outsider’s shirt let me see what locals are too familiar with to notice: that the heartbeat of these two billiards cultures beats to the same rhythm. The devotion of a cueist in Nha Trang and the devotion of a cueist in Manila are the same thing. Both are waiting for the same thing — someone willing to sit down and write it all up.

Why Cold Numbers Have a Soul

People often think numbers are cold, the opposite of emotion. I disagree. A number in the right place can tell a story that words alone cannot reach.

Imagine this: if we had a cueist’s average per innings month by month, we would see his season as a piece of music — with crescendos, quiet passages, and silences that signal a coming break. If we measured safety success rates in the final ten minutes of a match, we would see who keeps a cool head when everything collapses. Every shot is a whisper, and a season is a long conversation.

I do not ask for data to prove anything. I ask for data to preserve what is about to be forgotten. An index placed in the right spot is not a verdict; it is a photograph of a moment that will never come back.

A Counterintuitive Angle: When Numbers Lie

But I must be honest about something else.

Not every index is trustworthy. And more data is not automatically better.

In sport, people often package easily measured indicators as effort metrics. A cueist plays more shots, trains more hours, moves more around the table — those numbers look impressive. But just as in football, where distance covered and sprint counts get packaged as effort metrics, running without effect can still produce beautiful numbers. A player can hit hundreds of shots a day without improving, because he is repeating his mistakes rather than correcting them. The number of diligence is not the number of intelligence.

And here is the counterintuitive part: sometimes the very absence of data protects a certain value. When no statistical table scrutinises every shot, players in small halls are free to experiment, free to fail, free to play for joy rather than for an index. Once everything is measured, people begin playing to optimise numbers rather than to master themselves.

What I want to know is not how to get more data, but this: what do we want to measure, and what are we willing to leave outside the ruler?

In the analytical document I received about the region’s billiards, one line made me pause for a long time. It said that when there is not enough information, the correct conclusion is to admit: insufficient data, cannot assess. That is a beautiful principle. It reminds me that the true discipline of an analyst lies not in filling every gap, but in knowing which gaps may not be filled with guesswork.

Throughout my career I have made that mistake many times. I once wrote about a semi-final, devoting three full pages to the moment a cueist stood looking up into the stands, and the editor noted: too much emotion, too little data. I collapsed over that line. But now I understand: the problem was not that my emotion was wrong, but that I had not learned to place that emotion beside a verifiable foundation.

What Is Changing

Not everything stands still.

In recent years, a younger generation of Vietnamese audiences has begun to follow billiards as a sport to watch on screen, not only to play. International events are streamed live, Vietnamese cueists compete abroad, and new fan communities are beginning to form. That creates a new demand: the demand to understand, not just to watch.

That demand will soon require data. Not the academic data of research institutes, but accessible data — a player’s average across tournaments, the head-to-head record between two familiar names, the maximum number of shots in a single run. The things snooker fans in Britain have had for decades.

And when that demand arrives, someone will have to sit down and start counting. Someone will have to do the boring but sacred work: recording what is happening before it disappears.

Freezing a Moment

Back to that room in Nha Trang, two in the morning.

The cue ball has stopped. The player stands, places his cue on the rack, and walks outside. On the scoreboard, the number does not move. No one will record that on that night, a man spent twenty-three minutes trying to execute a shot he had never made, and that he still did not make it. There is no medal for those twenty-three minutes. No line of statistics holds it.

But if you asked me which moment of that evening will remain after every number on the scoreboard is forgotten, I would not hesitate. I would tell you about those twenty-three minutes.

Perhaps in ten years, when Vietnamese billiards data is thicker, we will have averages, head-to-head records, average pace per game. That will be a good thing. But I hope we keep one blank space in those tables — a cell reserved for what cannot be measured. Because if every moment is counted, who will remember the twenty-three minutes of bowing over a billiards table, when all you have is a shot that never went in?