Vietnamese Billiards: International Success and the Gap at the Grassroots

I remember an evening in a billiard hall on Nguyen Thien Thuat Street, Nha Trang. There was no audience. Just a young player, a hall owner past sixty, and the sound of a ball rolling across the cloth. The young man stood for a long time before a shot, so long that time in the room seemed to freeze. The owner did not rush him. He poured more tea, looked at the player, then looked at the table. Then the cue came down, and the white ball travelled exactly the path the player had drawn in his mind. That was the moment I began to understand why I chose to write about billiards. A match truly begins in the moment the ball touches no one. In Vietnam, billiards does not live on television. It lives in alleys, on the second floors of old houses, under fluorescent lights and the steady hum of ceiling fans. People come after work, play a few racks, pay by the hour, and go home. No one records the score. No one preserves the best shot of the evening. Yet it is from rooms like these that a generation of players grew up and walked out onto the international stage. I learned to read the game through numbers, but only when the numbers know how to dance. And Vietnamese billiards has numbers that dance. Let us start with its strongest discipline: three-cushion carom. For more than a decade, Vietnam has risen as one of the powerhouses of this discipline in Asia, alongside South Korea, Japan and Turkey. Players such as Tran Quyet Chien, Nguyen Quoc Nguyen and Duong Anh Vu have repeatedly reached the closing rounds of the UMB World Cup events organised by the Union Mondiale de Billard. The peak came when Tran Quyet Chien won the world title, writing Vietnam into the discipline's golden book. But if we look only at the trophy, we miss something more important. Behind one champion stand thousands of billiard halls. Across the country there are tens of thousands of places to play, from carom tables set in coffee shops to pool tables in entertainment centres. This is the silent infrastructure, something no international statistics table measures. Every hall is a training ground. Every young player who grows up in one learns something nobody teaches: patience. What is notable is that two billiard cultures coexist in a single country. In the south, pool is more popular, tied to evening entertainment. In the north and centre, carom and pocket billiards hold firmer ground. This difference is not a weakness. It is a genetic pool that lets Vietnamese billiards grow in several directions at once. The Hanoi Open Pool Championship was a milestone. The event brought many of the world's leading pool players to Hanoi, with a total prize fund reaching hundreds of thousands of US dollars. A world-class tournament held in the capital showed what those in the trade had long known: Vietnam is not only a place with good players, but also a huge billiards market. When Hanoi audiences filled the stands to watch pool, it was a signal to international sponsors. But there is a blind spot. When a Vietnamese player wins a world title, the media reports it as a single event, an individual victory, a moment of pride. Very few articles trace back to the first coach, to the hall where that player trained at fifteen, to the nights when no one was watching. Collective memory keeps only the trophy. The rest sinks into silence, like a ball rolling into a pocket and stopping. I do not write about victory. I write about what victory conceals. Consider the training structure. Most Vietnamese players mature in private billiard halls, not academies. They teach themselves, find their own coaches, earn their own money to compete. A few receive support from the state or a federation, but most must manage alone. This commitment is admirable, and at the same time a sign of an incomplete system. A billiards scene cannot rely only on individual passion. The problem is not talent. Vietnamese people play billiards well. The problem is data. We do not have a system tracking players' records from grassroots to national level. We do not know exactly how many professionals we have, how many tournaments are held each year, how much money flows into the system. What cannot be measured cannot be managed. That is a basic rule of every modern sport. Another rarely discussed aspect is the betting culture that seeps into some billiard halls. It exists alongside genuine passion, and sometimes overshadows it. Young players growing up in that environment must learn to separate themselves from money-backed games to pursue a professional path. This is a reality worth facing squarely, not to judge, but to find a way toward a cleaner competitive system. In fact, some players have chosen the hard road. They compete abroad at their own expense, living on prize money and small sponsorships, training in expensive halls in Europe or Asia. I have seen photographs of Vietnamese players sitting alone in airport lounges at two in the morning, a cue wrapped in cloth, waiting for the next flight to the next tournament. Those images do not make the front page. But they are the real material of the story. There is one thing I always ask myself when rewatching footage: which moment will remain after the score is forgotten. In billiards, the answer is usually not the decisive shot. It is the silence before it. The player stands still. The arena holds its breath. Then the ball rolls. If we learned to count those silences the way we count points, perhaps we would understand this sport better. I once had a period of being rejected by editors for writing too much emotion and too little data. It took me two weeks to realise that emotion and data are not mutually exclusive. A cue is a physical object. A shot is a problem of angle and force. But a match is a story. What I try to do is place the stone of the number beside the river of emotion, so both can flow. Vietnamese billiards stands at a crossroads. On one side, international results keep rising, the market keeps growing, and international tournaments increasingly choose Vietnam as a destination. On the other, the grassroots foundation remains fragmented, lacking system, data and proper investment at national level. The gap between the peak and the base is the biggest problem for this discipline in the coming decade. What I hope for is not another trophy. What I hope for is a notebook. A place that records the names of young players training tonight in billiard halls with no audience. One day, when one of them wins a world title, we will not just know their name. We will know the whole road they travelled. Because billiards, after all, is a sport of silences. And a silence, if it is not recorded, disappears.