The Sediment Layers of Vietnamese Billiards: The Spotlight and the Forgotten Cueists

The Sediment Layers of Vietnamese Billiards: The Spotlight and the Forgotten Cueists

Close to eleven at night, a billiards hall tucked deep in a small alley in Hai Phong keeps its lights on. Three three-cushion tables stand against the wall; only one still has players. A seventeen-year-old boy, thin-framed, bends over his cue, eyes fixed on three balls, white, yellow, red. He plays a four-cushion path and mutters the count back to himself. No one in the hall pays him any attention.

At the same moment, a television on the wall replays a world final from Europe. The stands are packed; the screen runs figures: average points per inning, the number of times a complex system was cleared. Here, nearly ten thousand kilometers away, another cueist is redrawing those paths with no one recording them. Vietnamese billiards has two scoreboards: one that appears on television, and one that nobody prints.

I sit in the corner of the hall and open my notebook. Six years of following billiards, and I still keep the habit of writing down every cueist I meet, every system they play, every time they quit halfway. The boy in front of me may be a new sediment layer not yet excavated.

Vietnamese billiards is world-famous in one very specific branch: three-cushion carom. It is a confrontation game on a pocketless table, three balls, in which a player must calculate the cue ball path so that it strikes both other balls after at least three cushion contacts. Vietnamese players are so good at it that many major international tournaments are staged in Ho Chi Minh City and Binh Duong. Cueists such as Tran Quyet Chien, Ngo Dinh Nai, Ma Minh Cam and Nguyen Duc Anh Chien regularly reach the closing rounds; some have won a World Cup and held the world number one ranking.

But that is the peak of a pyramid. The base of that pyramid lies in another branch: pocket billiards, or pool, in its 8-ball, 9-ball and 10-ball variants. In this branch, Vietnam has Duong Quoc Hoang, who has made his mark on the international stage, along with a young generation growing up in billiards halls across the country.

The fates of the two branches are almost unrelated. The three-cushion branch has a federation, a national tournament system, World Cup berths, coaches and sponsorship. The pool branch has almost nothing beyond the halls and the wagered matches between two cueists.

I once sat down and counted. In a city like Hai Phong, billiards halls outnumber mini football pitches. Every hall is an unnamed classroom, and every owner, whether they know it or not, is doing the work of a scout.

To understand why the three-cushion branch travels far while the pool branch stands still, you have to look at the technical structure of the two games. Three-cushion is the game of systems. A good cueist does not win on feel but on sets of pre-calculated paths, sorted by ball position and number of cushions. At world level, people speak of hundreds of systems, and training means repeating them until they become reflex. This is precisely why the game can be taught, passed on and standardized. A boy in Hai Phong can learn the same system as a cueist in the Netherlands, provided someone shows him and there is a table to play on.

Pool is different. 9-ball and 10-ball depend heavily on the break and on handling random situations. A table with pockets creates probability. A good break can decide an entire rack, and a cueist needs only a run of three or four lucky racks to go deep in a tournament. That randomness makes pool harder to train methodically, but it also makes it more attractive to gamblers, where a single match can change a life.

This is the intersection I want to dig into. Vietnam does not lack good cueists; it lacks a system that keeps them in the profession. In the three-cushion branch, international prize money is enough for a few people to make a living, but only a few. In the pool branch, there is almost no domestic professional tournament with enough money to support a cueist, so the money that sustains the trade comes from wagered games off-stage.

I once spent three months recording the match schedules of a group of twenty young cueists in three cities. The result forced me to reconsider how I read billiards. In those three months, their official matches could be counted on the fingers of one hand, while their wagered matches were dozens of times more numerous. In other words, the real training system of Vietnamese billiards is not in any training center; it is in the halls, under the yellow light and the sound of cue on ball.

That cuts both ways. The good side: the intensity of live competition is extremely high. A young cueist in a Hai Phong hall clashes with adults, with money on the table, under pressure, every day. No school can teach that kind of pressure. Many of Vietnam's leading three-cushion cueists grew up in exactly such halls, not in a formal academy.

The bad side: the underground economy of wagered games creates dependency. Young cueists learn to play to win bets, not to perfect technique. They learn safe paths, disruptive tricks, instead of foundational systems. When they step onto the international stage, where there is no betting and no familiar opponent, they fall apart.

I call it the billiards lottery ticket. Every young cueist who walks into a hall is like buying a ticket. Very few win, but tickets are sold to very many, and the seller never loses. The families of these young cueists often do not know what they are betting on until their child turns twenty with no trade other than a cue.

There is another, more popular reading that I always distrust. People often say Vietnamese billiards succeeds thanks to blood and passion. I do not believe those words when they are used to explain an achievement. Doubt is not for denial; it is for digging deeper before announcing a discovery. If passion alone were enough, many countries more passionate about billiards than Vietnam would have gone just as far.

What Vietnam has, and has in great density, is a network of billiards halls spread across every province, operating almost continuously, with low table-rental costs and a constantly replenished stream of new players. That is infrastructure. That is a structural reason, not an emotional one.

But that infrastructure is being run by a system with no brakes. There is no age-control mechanism, no rule on minors participating in betting, no clear transition path from the hall to the national stage. A young cueist can play well in a hall for ten years without a single match recorded in any file.

In the three-cushion branch, things look better, but they are fragile in another way. When results depend on a small group of top cueists, their retirement will leave a gap. How many Vietnamese cueists under thirty are in the world's top ranks? I ask myself that and answer with a modest number. The current golden generation is at its peak, and behind them, the depth is not proportional.

For years I followed a young cueist I believed would go far. At seventeen he played systems that many adults in the hall could not understand. At eighteen he won big wagered matches in a row. At nineteen he began playing to keep money rather than to improve. At twenty he disappeared from youth tournaments. I do not know whether he regrets it. I only know that my spreadsheet records a curve that rose and then flattened, and no column records the reason.

A cueist'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 the competition system, sponsorship contracts and a career path. Without a foundation, talent is only a thin sediment layer, beautiful until one big defeat washes it away.

I have been asked why I do not write about the champions. I answer that people have written about them enough, to the point where their names have become a brand. The sediment layer of a championship is not in the title; it is in the cueists forgotten when the lights go out. People remember who lifts the trophy, not who loses in the qualifiers for lack of a tournament berth.

There is a technical detail I always want to make clear. In three-cushion, the gap between Vietnam's top cueists and the rest of the world has narrowed to just a few percentage points of average per inning. At that level, the decisive factor is no longer technique but managing the mind before decisive innings. And mental management, in turn, depends on whether a cueist has played enough under high pressure. A cueist who plays all year in a hall against familiar people will differ from one who plays all year on the international stage, even if their systems are identical.

This is where I have to raise a harsher question. If wagered matches are dozens of times more numerous than official ones, what percentage of a young cueist's ability is formed in an environment with betting? And if one day a cueist is found to have fixed a match in a tournament, will that story reflect their personal character, or a system that raised them on bets for years? I do not have enough data to answer decisively. I only record the question, leave it there, and wait for more layers of evidence.

The spreadsheet comes before the dream. I do not paint the future; I only measure the dust of time settling on each figure. And the dust in Vietnamese billiards is thicker than people think, because most of it lies in halls where no one keeps records.

Some argue that Vietnamese billiards should focus entirely on three-cushion, since that is where the results are. I understand the logic, but I do not fully agree. Abandoning the pool branch means abandoning the majority of players, and also a market that could feed the peak branch in return. In many countries, money from pool and commercial billiards tournaments flows back up to fund the development system. Vietnam has not managed that, partly because the pool branch is seen as an underworld rather than an industry.

But there is a reason for that view. When a large part of a sport's activity takes the form of uncontrolled betting, looking at it with suspicion is understandable. The problem is that suspicion does not produce solutions; it only pushes that activity deeper into the dark, where it is even harder to track.

I once tried to apply my method to the pool branch: building a tracking sheet for a group of young cueists, recording their matches, win rate and cash-ins. After six months, I realized my spreadsheet was useless, because there was no official data source to cross-check. In three-cushion, I can look up international results. In pool, I only have hearsay. I found the gems not because I have a sharp eye, but because I am too lazy to trust ready-made reports, but here, there is not even a report to doubt.

That is the paradox of Vietnamese billiards. The strong branch is thin in numbers. The crowded branch is thin in data. And in between, young cueists pass through their twenties with no one knowing their names.

I do not think this picture will change in a single season. But I think there are specific intervention points that could make a difference in three to five years. First, an official youth tournament system for both branches, with results published and archived, to create baseline data. Second, a minimum sponsorship mechanism for young cueists, so they can choose to train instead of having to play for money to survive. Third, a clear rule on age and betting, not to prohibit but to separate the youth competition environment from the betting environment.

Those three points sound simple, but each demands something Vietnamese billiards lacks: a record-keeper. People often think a sport's development needs athletes, sponsors and audiences. I think it needs someone to sit down, take notes, cross-check and publish what they see. That is the least glorious work, and also the most lacking.

Back to the hall at nearly midnight. The seventeen-year-old boy is still playing. I walk over and ask which system he is training. He looks up, surprised that anyone would ask, then names a system I know is difficult. He says he learned it from an online video; no one showed him. I ask whether he competes in any tournament. He shakes his head. He has never heard of a youth tournament in Hai Phong.

I write his name in my notebook. In three years, he might be a name on a scoreboard everyone knows. He might also vanish like the other cueists I have recorded. What I know for sure is that if no one writes his name down, both scenarios will pass in silence.

I do not write to praise cueists. I write to preserve the sediment layers they leave on the table. And in Vietnamese billiards, the thickest sediment lies under the lights of halls with no signboard, waiting for a decent excavation.