Three Sedimentary Layers of Vietnamese Carom Billiards

In September 2026, in Phan Thiet, Binh Thuan Province, Tran Quyet Chien stood at the three-cushion table in the deciding game of the world championship final. I sat about two metres from the screen, my left hand holding a self-built statistics sheet, my right hand timing every inning. When the final shot touched three cushions and found the target ball, the stands erupted. I added one more line to the average-per-inning column before I looked up at the trophy.

That is the bad habit of a man whose job is evaluating players. I do not trust the moment. I trust the layer of earth beneath the moment.

A year earlier, also in September, in Antalya, Turkey, Bao Phuong Vinh beat Tran Quyet Chien himself in an all-Vietnamese final. Two world titles in a row, two different cueists, one country. The media called it a miracle. I reopened the spreadsheet I had kept since 2026 and asked a different question: which layer was this miracle built on?

The sediment of a world championship is not in the trophy. It is in the cueists who are forgotten when the lights go out.

A training environment with no name on the honours board

When people talk about Vietnamese carom billiards, they usually start with the big names. I want to start somewhere else: under the tables at small clubs, where a thirteen-year-old boy stands and retrieves balls for paying customers. That is the first school, and the only school, for most Vietnamese cueists over the past twenty years.

To this day, Vietnam has no carom academy run on the closed model of a national training centre. There is no official provincial scouting system. There is no fitness standard built specifically for cueists. There is no standardised curriculum for each age group. Talent is discovered in coffee shops, in amateur tournaments, in open events organised by private clubs on their own initiative.

That structure has two faces. The first face filters by passion rather than by paperwork, and so it does not exclude children who lack the conditions for formal schooling. The second face leaves an enormous gap between the amateur player and the professional cueist. Anyone who crosses that gap usually has to find their own coach, their own table, their own money.

Between 2026 and 2026, I followed domestic tournaments and recorded a pattern that repeated itself. A young cueist appeared at an amateur event, won a few matches, was taken in by a club. He then vanished from major events within two years, usually for economic reasons rather than technical ones. That pattern is not the story of one individual. It is the story of an entire system missing its middle layer.

The World Cup held in Ho Chi Minh City in 2026 was a milestone of a different kind. For the first time, domestic fans saw the world's leading cueists play on home soil. But I noticed a detail rarely mentioned: the number of young spectators attending in person rose sharply, while the number of young cueists registering for national qualifiers in the following years did not rise in step. The pull of the stands and the pull of the profession are two different things.

The domestic tournament structure reflects this too. The national circuit consists mainly of open events co-organised by provincial federations and private clubs, with a limited number of qualifying rounds. A young cueist who wants international match experience usually has to cover the cost of travelling abroad, or wait for a wildcard from the organisers. There is no age-designed competition pathway, and no annual budget for sending young cueists to compete.

I once counted how many Vietnamese cueists appeared in the top 100 of the World Billiards Union ranking year by year. In 2026, that number could be counted on the fingers of one hand. By the end of 2026 it had grown considerably, but it was concentrated almost entirely in the over-thirty group. The under-twenty-five group was close to empty. A billiards nation with two world champions but no successor tier is a billiards nation living on old savings.

I found 47 names not because I have sharp eyes, but because I am far too lazy to believe the reports already written.

Three metrics and one difficult question

In three-cushion, the only real measure for comparing two cueists across different eras is the average per inning. At a world championship, the average for the eight quarter-finalists usually hovers between 1.2 and 1.5. The tournament leader usually exceeds 1.6. That is the threshold separating a good cueist from a champion.

According to the sheet I built from data published on the World Billiards Union website, Tran Quyet Chien's average per inning at the 2026 world championship sat around 1.5, roughly two-tenths above the tournament average. The margin is not large. It shows the title did not come from a single explosion, but from holding a high, steady level across seven matches.

The second metric is the number of run-out innings, meaning innings in which a cueist scores continuously until the game ends. This is the metric at which Vietnamese cueists often reach very high levels. Tran Quyet Chien and Bao Phuong Vinh both belong to the group capable of finishing a game from the first visit to the table. That ability was built over thousands of hours standing at three-cushion tables with uneven cushions, where a shot must be twice as precise as on a standard competition table. That is the first paradox of Vietnamese billiards: poor training conditions produce high adaptability.

The third metric is rarely mentioned: the rate at which an opponent scores three or more points on the very next inning. This measures the quality of the safety shot, the defensive stroke. In many matches involving Vietnamese cueists in qualifying rounds, this figure tends to be higher than among European cueists. In other words, the weakness lies in the part of the game where no ball drops into a pocket.

For comparison, the development models in the Netherlands, Belgium and Turkey run in the opposite direction. Federations in those countries maintain youth teams by age group, employ dedicated fitness coaches, and send young cueists to international events on multi-year schedules. Their results come from a designed pipeline, not from individuals swimming alone. Names such as Torbjorn Blomdahl and Dick Jaspers matured in that environment, where a twenty-year-old cueist already has dozens of international matches on record.

Those three metrics draw a clear portrait: Vietnamese cueists are strong in attack, strong at finishing games, but not yet stable in controlling the tempo of a match. That is why winning a long-format event is always harder than winning a short one. And it is also why two consecutive world titles carry more diagnostic value than a handful of wins at open events.

The contrarian angle: the trophy hides a sunken layer

There is another way to read two consecutive world titles. That reading does not deny the achievement, but places it where it belongs.

Scepticism is not for denial. It is for digging deeper before announcing a discovery.

Look at the income structure of a Vietnamese cueist and most of it comes from tournament prize money and personal sponsorship deals. Prize money flows only to the top group. Meanwhile, the cost of raising a cueist from thirteen to twenty-five rests entirely on the family: table-time fees, travel, lodging when competing far from home, cues, gloves, and paying practice partners. In a country where average income is still low, this is a very high-risk investment.

I call it the billiards lottery ticket. Families spend money and time, betting on a low-probability event. Most tickets do not win. Those who do not win disappear from the rankings before the age of twenty-five, and nobody records their names.

The worrying part is not how many people win the lottery. The worrying part is that the system only records the winners, while the losers are treated as personal failures. That framing pushes every reform solution back onto families, rather than onto infrastructure.

The twenties of a cueist are like a young geological layer: beautiful on the surface, but prone to collapse if the foundation is not checked.

There is one more blind spot, in the way the media reads data. After every title, articles tend to cite the most impressive numbers: the most beautiful shot, the longest run, the highest win rate. Those numbers are all true, but they are selected from the peak of a distribution. Read only the peak and you will think Vietnamese billiards is at its peak. To learn the truth, you must also read the lower tail, where the cueists ranked fiftieth or hundredth are playing.

What would make me change my verdict

The spreadsheet comes before the dream. I do not paint the future; I only measure the dust of time settling on each metric.

My current verdict is this: Vietnamese carom billiards has a summit layer, but the middle layer is still thin. Two world titles are evidence of individual quality, not yet evidence of system quality. The gap between the top ten cueists and the next hundred remains too wide.

I will change my verdict when I see three signals. First, at least five cueists under twenty-two reach the main draw of a World Cup in two consecutive seasons. Second, a training centre operates continuously for at least three years with intake from the provinces, without depending on one or two individual sponsors. Third, the number of female cueists entering the professional circuit rises steadily year on year.

Until those three signals appear, I will keep my old working method: sitting two metres from the screen, timing every inning, and recording the losses as well as the wins.

I do not write to praise cueists. I write to preserve the layers of culture they leave on the table.