Vietnamese Billiards: One Name, Five Disciplines, and a Gap Nobody Counts

On the last Saturday of September, at a billiards club on Nguyễn Khánh Toàn Street in Hà Nội, all twelve carom tables were full. On the big screen, a 3-cushion World Cup semifinal was entering its second inning. At the row of tables by the door, a group of young friends had just set down their cues, looked up at the screen and asked one another: "Is this pocket billiards or cushion billiards?" Nobody could answer. The waiter just smiled.

In Vietnam, "billiards" is a single word. Behind it stand five entirely different disciplines: carom (3-cushion and 1-cushion), pool (8-ball, 9-ball, 10-ball), snooker, Heyball (Chinese 8-ball) and Russian billiards. Each has its own rules, core technique, tournament system and money flow. Yet the public calls them all "billiards". That confusion is not harmless. It is distorting how we read the achievements of Vietnamese cueists, and worse, how we allocate resources to this sport.

To understand the problem, three numbers must go on the table. First, Vietnam is one of the strongest carom 3-cushion nations in Asia, with a club network spanning provinces from north to south. Second, since the 3-cushion World Cup was brought to Bình Dương, Vietnam has become one of the few Southeast Asian countries to host an annual event in the World Billiards Federation system. Third, on the other side, professional pool and snooker in Vietnam have almost no national tournament system capable of sustaining a professional cueist.

Those three numbers draw a lopsided picture. Carom has a stage, prize money and an audience. Pool has an audience but lacks a top-tier domestic stage. Snooker exists almost only at amateur level. And all of them carry one name: billiards.

What is worth noting is that this imbalance is nobody's fault. It is the result of how the sport entered Vietnam. Carom 3-cushion arrived first, taking root in traditional clubs. Pool came later, tied to street-level entertainment culture. Snooker came last and never had a chance to break through, lacking standard tables and teachers. When those three streams merged under one common name, outsiders naturally could not tell them apart.

I once watched a sports editor call Trần Quyết Chiến "Vietnam's number one billiards player". That statement is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Quyết Chiến is a carom 3-cushion player, not a pool player. Put him at a 9-ball pool table and the result would be entirely different. A sentence missing one qualifier may seem small, but it shows an entire media system calling the thing it is discussing by the wrong name.

Start with technique, because that is where the difference shows most clearly. Carom 3-cushion is played on a table with no pockets, with three balls. A player scores by making the cue ball contact both other balls in a single shot, with the cue ball travelling through at least three cushions. The core skill is spin control and cushion-path calculation, closer to geometry than to force. A good 3-cushion player must hold thousands of positions and cushion paths in their head.

Pool 9-ball is played on a table with six pockets, with the goal of potting balls in the correct order. The core skills are precision striking, cue-ball control and tactical thinking in leaving a difficult position for the opponent. There is no "cushion path" here; there is the safety and the break.

Snooker is played on the largest table, with the smallest pockets, with 22 balls and a complex scoring system. The core skill is absolute precision at long range and building continuous scoring breaks.

Three disciplines, three skill sets that barely convert into one another. A world-class 3-cushion player can lose to a decent amateur pool player at 9-ball, and vice versa. This is not rare; it is the rule.

Yet in Vietnamese media, everything is still "billiards". The first consequence concerns perception. Viewers do not know what they are watching, so they cannot properly judge the difficulty of an achievement. When Trần Quyết Chiến goes deep in a 3-cushion World Cup, that is a world-class achievement in a discipline where Vietnam has tradition. When a Vietnamese pool player wins a regional event, that is a completely different story, in a discipline where Vietnam is still young. Merging the two into one, we both inflate the former and underrate the latter.

The second consequence concerns money. Money in sport flows according to positioning, not according to raw talent. A sponsor who pours money into "Vietnamese billiards" without knowing whether they are funding carom or pool cannot measure the effect. And when they cannot measure it, they withdraw the following season. I have read enough sponsorship plans to see this pattern repeat: a carom event named correctly survives; a pool event labelled with a generic "billiards" tag fades.

The third consequence concerns development. Without separating the disciplines, no pathway can be built. A ten-year-old entering a club needs to know what they are learning: carom to pursue the UMB system, pool to aim at international 9-ball events, or snooker to take the long road. Three pathways, three tournament systems, three cost levels. Ambiguity here means scattered development with no outlet.

There is one detail I want to stress, because it is the evidence for the whole argument. In many provinces, a club holds carom, pool and snooker tables on the same premises. Commercially, that is a sensible decision to serve multiple groups of customers. But for development, it is a trap. Young cueists are dispersed across three skill sets, none of them deep enough. The gap only shows up when we count each number instead of listening to each compliment.

I do not hunt news. I hunt the silence between two answers in an interview. And the biggest silence in the Vietnamese billiards story is here: we are winning in one discipline, struggling in a second, and barely existing in a third, yet we tell the story as if there were only one.

Look at the tournament structure to see it more clearly. The UMB system for carom runs regular World Cups, plus continental events and a world championship. That is a complete ecosystem: ranking points, qualification slots, prize money. Pool has the Matchroom system and international tours, but Vietnam has almost no permanent representative. Snooker has the World Snooker Tour with an extremely high entry threshold, and under current conditions, a Vietnamese cueist wanting to enter that tour needs resources an individual cannot self-fund.

Three ecosystems, three levels of access. Vietnam is in the position of a country standing strong on one leg, and the other leg has not been clearly identified.

To see it even more clearly, place Vietnam beside its neighbours. South Korea built a carom 3-cushion system tied to professional events and television, turning the discipline into a product with a stable audience. Japan has a long carom tradition along with a tidy club culture. China invests heavily in pool and Heyball, with big prize money and a large-scale domestic system. Each country chooses a direction and goes deep. Vietnam has a carom movement no weaker, yet has not turned it into a system with a clear product.

This is where the quiet heroes must be named, because in this story they exist but go unnamed. They are the club owners keeping standard carom tables even as rent rises. They are the coaches teaching cushion paths without a formal contract. They are the people organising amateur events so young cueists have somewhere to compete. None of them appear on a results board, but without them the entire carom system collapses in one season.

The counterintuitive point here is this: carom's success may be holding back the rest of Vietnamese billiards.

That sounds absurd. But think in terms of resources. When a discipline already has results, stars and an international event on home soil, all attention and money tend to concentrate on it. That is good for carom. But it creates an umbrella: beneath it, pool and snooker have no incentive to build their own systems, because everyone assumes "Vietnamese billiards is fine". The arena is empty, money still flows in one direction, and that concentration turns out to be an umbrella for the stubborn who refuse to look sideways.

I am not saying carom should have its resources cut. I am saying carom must be called by its right name, so the remaining resources can consciously flow elsewhere. A country strong in only one discipline is still a country strong in one discipline, not a billiards power. And if we keep calling everything "billiards", we will never see the gap clearly enough to fill it.

My three numbers broke a nascent assumption: that a strong movement means a strong system. A strong movement is a necessary condition. A strong system, with clear discipline positioning, is the sufficient one.

If I could put one question to the people running Vietnamese billiards, it would be: when you say "billiards", which discipline do you mean? Answering that concretely, with rules, with a tournament system, with a development pathway and with its own money flow, is the first step toward turning a movement into a sport. Otherwise, we will keep winning where we are strong, struggling where we are weak, and calling it all by a single name.