Vietnamese Billiards and the Identification Error: The Same Shot Under Different Rules

I was sitting in the fourth row of a billiard club on Nguyen Thien Thuat Street, Nha Trang, on a Saturday evening. On the table, a player was setting up a three-cushion carom position: the cue ball tight against the long rail, the two object balls split toward opposite corners. Beside me, a group of visitors whispered: "Why not just hit the ball straight?" They were watching a three-cushion shot through the eyes of an eight-ball pool player.

That is the starting point of nearly every misunderstanding in Vietnamese billiards today. The same cue, the same green baize, but three-cushion carom, nine-ball pool, eight-ball pool, snooker and Russian pyramid are five disciplines with entirely different frames of reference. No single technical metric can be shared across all five. What looks self-evident is being ignored in many places, from a social-media status line to analyses labelled "expert".

Vietnam is one of the fastest-growing billiards markets in Asia over the past decade, but that growth has been uneven. Three-cushion carom has the deepest foundation. Over nearly twenty years of following international events, I have seen Vietnam consistently represented in the main draw of three-cushion World Cups organised by the Union Mondiale de Billard (UMB). The landmark was 2026, when Bao Phuong Vinh won the three-cushion world championship in Ankara, becoming the first Vietnamese player to take that title. The same generation includes Tran Quyet Chien, Nguyen Quoc Nguyen and Nguyen Duc Anh Chien — names that regularly appear in knockout rounds.

Nine-ball and eight-ball pool have grown strongly at grassroots level thanks to a dense club network and open tournaments. Snooker exists as a narrow segment, demanding on players because of table cost and size. Russian pyramid appears only in a small community. At market level, this is a chain linking clubs and training rooms, tournament systems and broadcast, through to sponsorship and accompanying products such as cues, gloves and tips. Each link operates on its own logic.

Here I want to state clearly what many domestic outlets get wrong: calling everything "billiards". When a newsroom writes "Vietnamese billiards player wins championship", readers cannot tell whether it is carom, pool or snooker. Technically, these three disciplines do not share a single unit of measurement. I once tried a small exercise: translating a short billiards news item into English for a foreign colleague. He immediately asked back: "Carom or pool?" Without that answer, the item means nothing to anyone outside the domestic market.

Take a specific example. In three-cushion carom, the scoring unit is the number of cushions the cue ball contacts — at least three — before striking the object ball. An inning can run to dozens of points if the player holds position. In nine-ball pool, the unit is the number of balls potted in the correct order, and a rack can end after just a few visits. In snooker, the unit is points, with a maximum break of 147. These three systems cannot be converted into one another.

This leads to a problem with player data. Title counts, century breaks and maximums are metrics specific to snooker and do not apply to carom. Conversely, average points per inning and the success rate of the break shot are the native language of carom. When an analysis mixes the two sets of metrics, it loses professional value.

Rankings and tournament structure sit in the same trap. The UMB ranking for three-cushion carom and the rankings of international pool systems are two separate worlds. A player can top carom yet appear in no pool ranking, and vice versa. Prize structures reflect this too: carom World Cup events tend to offer more modest totals than major pool events, while competitive depth in carom is very high because the number of elite players is small.

The power map shifts differently. In carom, European and Asian players split most of the leading places. In pool, a young generation from several Asian countries is rising fast. Vietnam sits in the group with a solid carom foundation and is expanding into pool, but cannot yet claim comparable depth across every discipline. Notably, the pace of change differs: carom moves slowly because the elite layer is stable, while pool moves much faster.

At a deeper level, the development chain determines how durable success is. A billiards nation is only stable when it has three layers: clubs and training rooms, a tournament system, and a pipeline of next-generation players. Vietnam's carom has a fairly good tournament layer but a thin pipeline. Pool has a dense grassroots layer but lacks a structured international competition pathway. Miss any layer, and elite success becomes an isolated phenomenon rather than a system.

What Vietnamese readers rarely hear: blurred discipline identification is not harmless. It creates a form of "achievement inflation" in the media. A title in a less competitive system can be described on a par with one in a far tougher system, simply because both are called "billiards champion". Readers have no way to verify if the article does not state the discipline.

On the commercial side, I have to be blunt. Most media and sponsorship resources flow toward disciplines that can produce short, compelling content, where a rack can turn on a single shot. Three-cushion carom, with its long innings and slow rhythm, is often treated as "the rest". Sponsors need images and moments; carom needs patience. That is a structural asymmetry, not the audience's fault.

One more point rarely mentioned: the more disciplines coexist in one market, the higher the governance risk. As grassroots tournaments proliferate, questions about the transparency of prize-money formats, entry conditions and organiser responsibility grow too. This is an area the media should monitor regularly, rather than reporting only after something has happened.

The first step of any sound analysis is identifying the discipline precisely, before saying anything about technique. Without that step, every number is mere decoration.

Next time you read a headline about a "Vietnamese billiards player", ask yourself: which table, which balls, which rules. That answer decides the rest of the story.