One Baize, Three Rule Systems: Why Vietnamese Billiards Data Must Start Over

One Baize, Three Rule Systems: Why Vietnamese Billiards Data Must Start Over On a November evening at a billiards club in Binh Duong, I sat taking notes beside a nineteen-year-old player. He was playing three-cushion carom. Every shot was an equation he solved in his head before the cue touched the cue ball. I counted 58 cue-ball contacts that travelled through the full three cushions before reaching the target, across four consecutive racks. Nobody in the room recorded that figure. No scoreboard at the venue recorded it. And the tournament software did not record it either. That was the moment I understood the problem was not the player. The problem was that we call everything happening on a green baize surface "billiards", and then expect a single dataset to describe it. One word, many worlds In Vietnam, the word "billiards" does not describe one sport. It describes a family of sports. A three-cushion carom table has different dimensions, a different ball set, and different rules from a nine-ball pool table. A snooker cue is longer, heavier, with a smaller tip. The opening break shot exists in pool and snooker, but in three-cushion carom it is nearly meaningless. The concept of a "century" — one hundred points in a single visit — only makes sense in snooker. In pool, people say "break and run". In carom, people say "series". Three vocabularies, three worlds. And in Vietnam, all three coexist under one roof. The Vietnamese billiards market holds a beautiful paradox. Three-cushion carom is the most played discipline, the most watched, and the one with the deepest international record. Nguyen Quoc Hoang, Tran Duc Minh and Nguyen Anh Tuan are familiar names at three-cushion World Cup finals. Alongside them, nine-ball and ten-ball pool put Vietnam on the world map in a different way: Duong Quoc Hoang won the WPA World 10-ball Championship in 2026 in Las Vegas — the first world pool title by a Vietnamese player. The third tier is snooker — smaller in scale, but with a national tournament system and a group of young players growing up in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Three disciplines, three rule systems, three data systems. Yet most of the statistical tables I have seen in Vietnam — including those I built myself in my early years as a consultant — blended them together. And that is the trap. When data speaks the wrong language I once received a report titled "Vietnam Billiards Performance" from an analytics outfit. One line read: "average pot rate 62 percent". The number was pretty. It was also meaningless. In pool, "pot rate" is the share of successful pots out of all attempted shots with a target. In three-cushion carom, there is no concept of "potting" in that sense — you do not drive a ball into a pocket, you construct a path for the cue ball to contact both target balls after at least three cushions. In snooker, "pot success" is calculated differently again, and depends on ball position on the table. Combine three definitions into one column, then average them, and you produce a number that belongs to no sport at all. It is not wrong because the arithmetic is wrong. It is wrong because the identification is wrong. Before I trust a number, I ask where it was born. The same way I watch a player before offering a verdict. Identification is a gate, not a footnote In billiards analysis, determining the discipline is a mandatory first step, not optional. The reason is concrete: the same term carries different meanings across rule systems. A break shot is a core element of nine-ball pool and does not exist in snooker. A "century break" is meaningless in nine-ball. The concept of a clearance belongs to snooker, not carom. Skip the identification step, and every judgement that follows — technical, tournament-related, governance-related, supply-chain related — becomes guesswork. In Vietnam this matters more than elsewhere, because cross-pollination between disciplines is high. A young player may play carom in the morning, pool in the afternoon, and snooker at the weekend. Clubs often place several table types side by side. Fans follow all three while rarely distinguishing the rule systems clearly. I understand why. Back in Binh Duong in those years there was no expensive software, only people who believed each number would find its way. We learned the trade by writing notes by hand, cross-checking video, and fixing definitions for every shot type ourselves. When we moved to pool, we had to erase almost everything we had learned in carom and start again. What the scoreboard does not tell There is another layer of data Vietnamese billiards has not exploited: tournament structure data. A pool event runs on a race-to-X format. The prescribed number of racks directly affects upset probability. A race-to-4 match leaves far more room for surprise than race-to-11 or race-to-17. In three-cushion carom, formats are usually set by target score — 40 points, 50 points, or 60 points — and that completely changes how a player distributes risk across visits. But when Vietnamese tournaments publish results, they rarely publish the accompanying format. You see "3-1" without knowing whether that is three racks out of four, or three sets out of four. You see an upset without knowing it happened in a short format that inherently favours the underdog. People see the pot. I see the twenty quiet minutes that led to it. The contrarian view: transparency is not automatically the answer Here I must say something that may irritate many people in the industry. The general trend in Vietnam is to want everything more transparent: more cameras, more statistics, more charts. I understand that wish. But transparency does not equal accuracy. A misidentified dataset can still be presented beautifully, comprehensively, and persuasively. It is more dangerous than a sparse dataset, because it creates the feeling of understanding. Correlation is not causation. A player who wins many matches does not necessarily win because his metrics are high. Perhaps he drew an easier bracket. Perhaps he played in a shorter format. Perhaps his opponent was tired after a long journey. If you look only at the final number, you will credit skill while the cause sits in the structure. I fell into this trap once. Years ago I built a model to predict pool match outcomes based on each player's average pot rate over the previous three months. The model called about 61 percent of matches correctly. That sounds acceptable. But when I split the data by format, I found the model performed well in long matches and was almost guessing in short ones. The problem was not the player. The problem was that I had merged formats into a single model. The lesson: split first, then combine. Where data meets people I am the one who stays with the spreadsheet after the stands have gone dark — you may call it work, I call it my lot. But I do not stay because of the spreadsheet. I stay because of the people the spreadsheet has not yet seen. The nineteen-year-old in Binh Duong may never appear on an international statistics table. But his 58 three-cushion contacts are a different kind of data. They say he understands the geometry of the table at a level no software can grade. They say he practises in silence, in a club with no spectators, on an evening nobody recorded. The story of Vietnamese billiards does not lie in big numbers. It lies in small numbers nobody has yet bothered to count. And the task of the data professional is to find the right language to count them properly. What must happen next Vietnamese billiards is at a rare favourable moment. International events are coming to Vietnam. Vietnamese players are going out into the world. Public interest rises every year. But that momentum will slow if the data system behind it does not keep pace. There are three jobs to do, and none of them requires expensive technology. First, separate data by discipline from the collection stage onwards. Do not let one column hold carom, pool and snooker together. Second, record the format alongside the result. A result without a format is half a story. Third, redefine each metric for each discipline. A good metric for pool may be a meaningless one for carom. None of these three jobs needs expensive software. They need the patience of people willing to stay behind after the stands have gone dark. World Cup 2026 taught me the single most important lesson: numbers are only beautiful when they know which story to stand beside. In Vietnamese billiards, that story has three voices. The data professional must learn to hear all three before writing down the first number.