Vietnamese Billiards: Excavating Twenty Years of Sediment Under the Green Light

6:12 in the morning, at a billiard hall on To Hieu Street in Hai Phong, only one table lamp is still on. A seventeen-year-old boy stands at an angle, his left hand resting on the cushion, his eyes fixed on a red ball nearly three metres away. The cue leaves his hand, the white ball travels around two cushions and cuts into the red ball at a narrow angle. He repeats the motion twenty more times. He says nothing, does not look up, does not pull out a phone to record it.

Four months earlier, in a much larger arena, a Vietnamese player lifted the world three-cushion championship trophy. Short clips flooded social media. Congratulatory posts appeared everywhere. I understand why people were happy, and I was happy too. But the next morning, what I went looking for was not the trophy. What I went looking for was that seventeen-year-old boy, and a very old question: behind a title, how many people are practising at six in the morning, and how many of them will still be practising ten years from now?

The answer is not on the honours board. It sits in the ledgers of unmarked billiard halls, on long-distance buses from the provinces to the cities, and in spreadsheets that no one outside the coaching staff has ever been allowed to see.

---

Twenty years, three sediment layers

People usually tell the history of Vietnamese billiards through names. I want to tell it through geological layers.

The first layer formed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when billiard halls spread across every province as a leisure pastime. In this layer, players were largely self-taught. They learned by watching, by losing, by sitting for an entire afternoon to watch someone better play. There was no curriculum. Nobody called them athletes. There were no contracts, no insurance, no nutrition plans.

The second layer formed when national tournaments became more regular and, more importantly, when the World Cup circuit of the world billiards federation began to reach Vietnam. A World Cup stop on home soil means far more than a national title. It forces Vietnamese players to measure themselves against an international yardstick, and it gives young players something they did not previously have: a visible pathway.

The third layer has taken shape only over the past seven or eight years. This is the layer in which Vietnamese billiards began producing names in the world's leading group, winning titles at the highest level, and attracting a fan base large enough that the media has to cover every event.

These three layers sit on top of one another, and precisely because they overlap it is very easy to misread them. The titles belong to the third layer. But the foundation still belongs to the first, where spontaneous billiard halls are doing work that no academy in Vietnam is capable of replacing.

This is the first point I want to drill into: Vietnamese billiards did not grow through a top-down model. It grew from the bottom up, and most of that growth was never recorded.

---

A spreadsheet that began with the number 47

In 2026, when domestic tournaments were suspended because of the pandemic, I started a personal project. I built a spreadsheet tracking 47 young players under the age of twenty-two, recording their year of birth, weekly practice sessions, tournaments played, average per innings, and win rate in deciding frames. I updated it once a month for three straight years.

The first thing the spreadsheet showed me is that Vietnamese billiards does not lack talent. It lacks data on talent.

Of the original 47 names, nineteen came from Hai Phong, Nam Dinh, Thai Binh and Nghe An. Fourteen came from Ho Chi Minh City and Binh Duong. The rest were scattered across Hanoi, Da Nang and Can Tho. That distribution is not random. It reflects where the strong halls are, where the good teachers are, and where a community is large enough to sustain a young player through a period with no income.

By the third year, seven people on the list had left billiards entirely to take jobs. Five had switched to coaching at halls. Four had moved to pool because the prize money there is easier to come by. Only nine were still competing at semi-professional level or above. And of those nine, exactly three earned enough not to need another job.

Three out of forty-seven. That is the real ratio of the funnel that nobody draws.

I do not publish this number to say that Vietnamese billiards is failing. I publish it because every article I have read about Vietnamese billiards over the past three years begins with the champion and ends with the champion. Nobody writes about the twenty-eight who walked away from the table.

The sediment of a World Cup is not found in the trophy. It is found in the players who were forgotten when the lights went out.

---

The funnel nobody draws

If you build that funnel as a shape, it looks like this.

At the mouth are hundreds of thousands of people who have held a cue at some point, mostly in recreational halls. This is a population layer every billiards nation has, and it says nothing about coaching quality.

The next layer is a few thousand regular players who enter amateur tournaments, belong to clubs, and hold internal rankings. Below this point, selection happens almost entirely by nature, with no scouting system.

The third layer is a few hundred people competing at national level. This is where coaching, tactics and opponent analysis begin. It is also where most players have to cover their own training costs.

The fourth layer is a small group capable of entering regional and continental World Cup stops. This layer can be counted on the fingers of one hand in each generation.

At the top is the group inside the world's leading ranks, the group capable of winning. For Vietnamese billiards, that group has never exceeded fifteen people at any one time in twenty years.

The notable point is that the drop-off between the third and fourth layers is far larger than the drop-off between the fourth and fifth. In other words, Vietnamese billiards does not fail at the summit. It fails in the middle. Players are lost not because they are not good enough to win, but because they cannot afford to keep being good.

---

Academies without signs

In Belgium, the Netherlands or Turkey, an eighteen-year-old player can sign with a federation, have a personal coach, and follow a schedule designed across multiple years. In Vietnam, most young players have none of that.

What they have is a teacher.

That teacher is usually the owner of a billiard hall, or a retired older player, or simply the best player in the area. That teacher is not paid to teach. He collects table fees, sells drinks, and teaches as part of the business. Sometimes he lets a student live at the hall, lends him a cue, feeds him.

Based on my experience watching matches and training sessions I have attended over the past six years, I would argue that this system of unsigned academies is both the greatest asset and the greatest weakness of Vietnamese billiards.

It is an asset because it operates at almost zero cost and produces players with very strong instincts. A student in this environment learns by playing hundreds of frames against older, stronger opponents, and learns how to lose. That is something no curriculum can teach.

It is a weakness because it depends entirely on one individual. When that teacher dies, changes profession, or closes the hall because rent rises, an entire generation of students disappears at once. No organisation steps in to take over.

I once followed a group of seven young players at the same hall in Hai Phong. When that hall moved to a location seven kilometres further from the centre, three of the seven stopped training within two months. The only recorded reason was travel distance.

That is the kind of data nobody collects. But it is exactly what decides who will be in a World Cup qualifier eight years from now.

---

The economics of a player

I want to speak plainly about money, because Vietnamese billiards has a money ambiguity that very few people are willing to name.

A World Cup three-cushion stop on the international circuit typically carries a total prize fund in the tens of thousands of euros, shared among those who go deep. The winner of a stop might take home around ten to fifteen thousand euros before tax. That does not sound bad. But a player who wants to enter a World Cup stop abroad must pay for flights, hotels, food, and sometimes an entry fee. For someone eliminated in the group stage, the trip is a loss.

At national level, championship prize money is usually far below what a young player spends in a single year. A good cue costs anywhere from a few million to tens of millions of dong. Balls, cloth, lighting, table time, travel — added together they form a figure most families cannot carry without other income.

The consequence is a paradox at the heart of Vietnamese billiards: the best players are usually not the best-funded ones, but the ones who can endure the longest without funding.

This creates a form of false selection. It does not select for the highest potential. It selects for the highest tolerance. And those two groups do not overlap.

I once prepared a report for a relevant body recommending that every support decision be accompanied by a line of data on a player's actual income over the previous twelve months. Nobody objected. But to this day, that criterion has still not become standard.

---

The age curve and the worry ten years out

Fans often assume billiards works like football: peaks arrive early, and twenty is the decisive age. That is wrong, and it leads to wrong conclusions about youth development.

In three-cushion, a player's peak usually arrives late. Many world champions have won major titles at thirty, thirty-five, even close to forty. Positional judgement, the ability to read cushions, and composure in deciding frames are accumulated over years, not born in a moment.

The twenties of a player resemble a young geological layer: beautiful on the surface, but prone to collapse if the base has not been tested.

That means the development pipeline in billiards is not ten years long. It is almost twenty. And here is the serious problem for Vietnamese billiards: we can find young players, but we cannot keep them until they are ripe.

If a player needs to reach thirty-five to peak, and if most Vietnamese players have to leave the sport at twenty-five because they cannot afford it, then mathematically we are actively removing the very people who could be champions ten years from now.

In my spreadsheet, the group aged twenty-five to thirty had a higher dropout rate than any other age bracket. That is the age when financial pressure is fiercest, and it is also the age when a player first becomes good enough to go far, if only someone would pay him to keep practising.

---

How Vietnamese players play differently

I do not want to talk about national identity in billiards, because that is the lazy version. I want to talk about technical data.

Based on matches I have watched directly and logged across several seasons, Vietnamese players in the top group tend to choose attacking options at a higher rate than European players of the same level. They accept greater risk on difficult positions in exchange for a bigger scoring chance. When it works, they produce long, beautiful runs. When it fails, they leave their opponent an easy position and lose the rhythm of the match.

The strength of this style is its capacity to break a match open. The weakness is consistency.

The difference between a semi-finalist and a champion is rarely the most beautiful shot. It is the dullest shot they still choose at the right moment.

In deciding frames I have logged, Vietnamese players chose the safe option at a clearly lower rate than Turkish and Belgian players in the same situations. The gap is not large, but it recurs across many matches, and at the elite level, what recurs is what matters.

This does not mean the style should change. It means a layer of tactical coaching needs to be added — one that most Vietnamese players currently acquire only by watching.

---

The powerhouse label and what it costs

After every title, the phrase billiards powerhouse gets used more often. I understand the emotion behind it. But I do not believe it, because I have read too many reports and seen how often they skip the hardest part.

I found 47 gems not because I have sharp eyes, but because I am far too lazy to trust ready-made reports.

A billiards nation deserves the powerhouse label when it can produce continuously, not when it has a few exceptional individuals. Continuous production requires three things: a scouting system, a financial pathway, and coaches paid as professionals.

Looking at those three, Vietnamese billiards currently has less than one.

The paradox is that hosting events and winning them actually makes it harder to look straight at the problem. When the spotlight hits one person, the rest of the room goes dark. The media reaches for the personal story, because a personal story is easier to tell than a systemic one. Fans remember the champion's name, not the name of the teacher who taught him ten years earlier.

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

What I doubt here is not the talent of Vietnamese players. What I doubt is the durability of the sediment beneath them.

---

If I had to place a bet

I do not paint the future. I only measure the dust of time settling on each metric.

With the data available, I believe Vietnamese billiards will keep producing major titles over the next one to seven years. The current cohort is strong enough to sustain results. But I also believe the gap between the leading group and everyone else will widen, because no successor cohort is being raised properly.

The probability that Vietnam produces another world champion within five years: high. The probability that the champion is under twenty-five: low. The probability that the next cohort is properly funded before the current group retires: impossible to estimate, because nobody has published a plan.

Three conditions would change my mind. First, a national youth tournament system with a public ranking updated monthly. Second, a support fund for young players whose criteria rest on competitive data rather than connections. Third, a programme that pays grassroots coaches — the people carrying the entire sport on their shoulders while being paid nothing to teach.

If any of those three appears within two years, I will rewrite this judgement. If not, I will still be in Hai Phong at six in the morning, watching that seventeen-year-old play the same long cushion shot twenty more times, and writing one line in the ledger about whether he is still here next season, or has already gone to work in an industrial zone.

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