Vietnam's Three Billiards Ecosystems and a Spreadsheet in the Wrong Place

In a sponsorship report sent out early in the season, two numbers sat side by side on the same line: 1.842 and 62.4%. The first was a three-cushion player's scoring average per inning. The second was a nine-ball pool player's rack win rate. Whoever built that table made no arithmetic error. Those two numbers were produced by two different rule systems, they measure two different things, and no division on earth turns them into a common yardstick.

What stopped me was not the number but where it was placed. A three-cushion player weighed on the same scale as a pool player, and both were then labelled with a single word: form. In Vietnam we call all of it bi-a. That naming is right for daily life and wrong for data. And that wrongness is quietly entering sponsorship contracts, newspaper columns, and selection decisions.

Before I trust a number, I ask where it was born. The same way I watch a player before I judge him.

Three rule systems, three ways of measuring

Billiards in Vietnam runs three parallel ecosystems, each with its own governing body. Three-cushion sits under the Billiards & Snooker Federation of Vietnam domestically and UMB internationally. Nine-ball and eight-ball pool belong to the WPA system alongside commercial tours such as Matchroom. Snooker belongs to the WPBSA and WST. Three rulebooks, three ranking systems, three prize structures, and the point that matters most to a data person: three different definitions of a single competitive unit.

In three-cushion, the unit is the inning. A match runs to 40 points, each player has roughly 40 seconds per visit, and what goes into the scoresheet is the number of innings used. A player who wins 40-32 in 22 innings carries an average of 1.818; the loser sits at 1.455. The whole technical story of that match lives inside those two decimals, and it only means something once you know how many innings the match lasted.

That same scoresheet holds a column almost nobody reads: the run. A player who reaches 40 points in four visits, one of them an eight-point run, tells a very different story from a player who also reaches 40 but takes twenty visits at two points each. Same average, same result, entirely different levels of consistency and risk. A table that drops the run column has dropped most of the technical content.

In nine-ball pool, the unit is the rack. There is no cumulative score. A player who wins 9-8 and a player who wins 9-1 are recorded identically in the result column. What separates them sits elsewhere: break-and-run rate, dry break rate, safety success rate. Remove those three columns and a pool results sheet is just a string of wins and losses.

In snooker, the unit is the frame, and the ranking runs on prize money rolled over two years. A player can win a major and still sit outside the top 64 if the rest of his two-year window is empty. These three systems do not convert into one another, and that is precisely what most Vietnamese sponsorship tables keep doing.

Even inside pool there are two ranking systems running at once: the WPA list and Matchroom's commercial list. A player can hold very different positions on each, because each body counts the events it stages or recognises. When a domestic article writes "world number 30" without saying which list, the reader has no way to check it.

One match is not enough to call it form

A three-cushion match to 40 points usually runs 20 to 25 innings. That is the entire sample available after one evening. With 22 innings, the standard deviation of an individual average is wide enough that a player averaging 1.5 across a season can still fire a 2.0 in one match, and a player averaging 2.1 can still finish at 1.6. You need roughly 15 to 20 matches, around 350 to 450 innings, before the number starts describing ability rather than describing that particular evening.

Nine-ball pool has the same problem in a different shape. A race to 9 runs 15 to 17 racks, and every rack opens with a break whose success rate is not fully inside the player's control. A two-percentage-point gap in potting success between two players, measured across nine racks, sits comfortably inside the noise. A title won in a short format is good news for the winner and weak data for the analyst.

Snooker runs the other way. The World Championship final at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield is played over a best-of-35 format across two days under WST rules. Long formats filter noise hard, and that is why the list of world champions in this discipline is far more stable than in rack-based games. The same player with the same skill, placed in two different formats, produces two different conclusions.

Based on my experience following matches, most Vietnamese billiards writing forms a form judgement after three matches. Three three-cushion matches is roughly 70 innings, enough to see that a player is in touch, not enough to say he has changed level.

Where the money flows, the data has to stand

According to Matchroom's own announcement, the Hanoi Open Pool Championship sits inside the global nine-ball ranking system, and a tournament of that kind being staged in Vietnam changes what domestic fans get to hear. Nine-ball pool has its own metric set, its own sponsors, its own storytelling. Three-cushion has a different metric set, tied to UMB and to the domestic competitive tradition.

These two streams do not compete directly, but they share one search keyword: bi-a. When a sponsor puts money into a pool event, they usually ask about the popularity of Vietnamese billiards, and the answer they receive is often three-cushion data spliced onto pool data. That is the moment a spreadsheet in the wrong place becomes an investment decision in the wrong place.

Names such as Tran Quyet Chien and Nguyen Duc Anh Chien in three-cushion, or Duong Quoc Hoang in nine-ball pool, represent three ways of playing, three opponent pools, three calendars. Placing them side by side in a single form ranking is an easy operation and a meaningless one in measurement terms.

The error sits in the label, not in the record keeper

A principle I have held for years: an empty data cell must be recorded as insufficient information, never filled with zero. In many Vietnamese spreadsheets, empty cells get a zero, the zero enters an average, and a selection decision gets made on a number that never existed. A player who has never played pool does not have a break-and-run rate of zero. He does not have that rate at all.

The same error appears at the level of honours. A national three-cushion title and a national pool title are two different lines on a CV, but in sponsorship dossiers they are usually written the same way: national champion. The reader of the dossier understands one level. The data person understands two frames of reference.

This is the hardest kind of error to see, because it breaks no arithmetic. It only breaks the question.

The contrarian angle: the most quoted metric is the noisiest

Titles are the most quoted metric and the noisiest one. A championship in a short format can come from one week of play above a player's own baseline, while what actually predicts next season sits in the columns nobody quotes: innings per match in three-cushion, dry break rate and safety success in pool, long-potting rate in snooker.

There is a familiar trap imported from football. Distance covered was once packaged as an effort metric, and a player running 11 kilometres to no effect still posted a prettier number than one running 9 kilometres while cutting out the decisive pass. In billiards, the equivalent column is innings played. Playing many innings does not mean playing well; a player who stretches a match with safe tactics will post a higher innings count than one who finishes early, and a naive table reads that as endurance.

The second counterintuitive point concerns international comparison. Humidity in Vietnam makes the cloth slower, and slow cloth lowers averages. A player posting 1.6 on slow cloth in a Binh Duong club is not the same quantity as 1.6 on fast cloth in Europe. Comparing those two figures without recording table condition, cloth type and shot clock is comparing two different things.

The empty arenas of 2026, I could hear the ball rolling and the note sheet dropping onto the stand seat.

That year, analysing 500 European football matches played without crowds, I found the home win rate fell from 45% to 32%. The lesson transfers to billiards: a Vietnamese player's home advantage has two parts, the crowd and the table. A table that cannot separate those two parts is measuring luck, not skill.

The signal for the next round

Binh Duong back then had no expensive software, only people who believed every number would eventually find its way.

What I am waiting for next season is not new software. I am waiting for a small label beside every number in print: which rule system, which format, how many innings or how many racks, what the table conditions were. A minimum record like that is enough to make every later comparison stand up, and enough for a Vietnamese fan reading an average of 1.842 to know what it is measuring.

In billiards clubs in Thu Dau Mot or in Hanoi, there are still people writing down every inning with a ballpoint pen in a notebook, and nobody pays them. They are the layer keeping this sport's data alive, and most of what we argue about online begins on their pages.

Next time a Vietnamese sports outlet quotes a three-cushion player's average, the question should be: how many innings is that average built on?

I am the one who stays with the spreadsheet after the lights go off — you may call it a job, I call it a post.