The Empty Cell in the Spreadsheet and the Discipline of the Billiards Writer

The screen is still on. A spreadsheet opens with twelve column headers: discipline, tournament, format, prize fund, ranking, average per inning, rate of leaving the opponent with no safe shot, number of match days, data source. Every header exists. Every data row does not. Those cells are not empty because someone was lazy. They are empty because the thing that belongs in them never existed.

In the room, the cue still rests against the rack. On a carom three-cushion table 2.84 metres long and 1.42 metres wide, three balls sit still in three different corners and nobody touches them. That moment, the absolute stillness of the table before the player bends down, is the moment I trust most in this sport. The match truly begins at the moment when nobody is touching the table anymore.

A spreadsheet full of empty cells is that same kind of moment. And in sports writing, it is the most overlooked moment of all.

Billiards in Vietnam has stepped out of the frame of "a game for a small group in a roadside cafe". Billiard halls in Nha Trang, Da Nang, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City stay open until nearly dawn. World Cup three-cushion stages have been held on Binh Duong soil. The volume of Vietnamese-language billiards writing rises with every season. Content grows faster than verified data, and this is where the story becomes worth telling.

Based on my experience following matches over more than four decades, most numbers in a Vietnamese billiards article come from three sources: the organiser's electronic scoreboard, a video on social media, and the writer's memory. The third source is the most dangerous, because it never identifies itself as a source.

In 2026, a sports magazine rejected my piece with exactly one line of feedback: "too much emotion, too little data". It took me two weeks to understand that the editor was not wrong about me, only about the order. Data does not replace emotion. Data is the evidence for emotion. Since then, every article of mine has set aside at least one passage for dry numbers, placed beside wet prose, like a stone laid next to a river.

And then I ran into a harder kind of problem: the problem with no numbers at all.

In billiards analysis, the hardest skill is not reading a number, but knowing which cell must be left empty.

The first rule of any billiards statistics sheet is identifying the discipline, and this is where Vietnamese deceives us. "Bi-a" is a catch-all word. It contains snooker, it contains eight-ball and nine-ball pool, it contains one-cushion and three-cushion carom. Tran Quyet Chien and Duong Quoc Hoang are both Vietnamese cueists, but they stand at two ends of a technical spectrum that barely intersects: one plays on a pocketless table with three balls, the other on a pocketed table with nine numbered balls. The word "break" in pool means the opening shot; on a carom table there is no equivalent concept. The word "average" in carom means points divided by innings; in pool, people measure the rate of breaking and clearing the rack. Blending those two measurement systems into one sheet corrupts the sheet right at the header row.

Skip the discipline-identification step and every analysis afterwards is methodologically worthless. That is why I never begin a data report with the winner's name. I begin with the question: which discipline are we talking about, on which table, under which rules. I learned to read a match through numbers, but only when those numbers know how to dance.

The number that dances most visibly in carom is the average per inning. It sits at the top of every summary sheet, and it conceals almost the entire match. In a match to 40 points, a player closes at an average of 1.60, nothing remarkable. But break the match apart: over the first twenty innings he scores 14 points, an average of 0.70. Over the last eight innings he scores 26, an average of 3.25. The same cueist, the same match, two completely different people. The figure on the summary sheet is only the average of two mental states, and an average is under no obligation to describe either one.

The metric that actually decides matches is the one rarely written down: the number of innings in which the player left his opponent at the table with no safe shot remaining. On a pocketless carom table, a few millimetres of error at the contact point can multiply across three cushions. There is no pocket to rescue you, so every dead inning is an inning measured with callipers. Those innings produce no points, never reach the summary sheet, and they are precisely what separates the world number 30 from the world number 3.

That is the empty cell inside a match in progress. The empty cell inside a data sheet is a different thing altogether, and this is where I want to linger.

I do not write about the finishing shot. I write about what the finishing shot conceals.

The collective memory of billiards spectators records the final stroke very clearly: the ball tracing three cushions, the click of contact, the applause. That memory erases the thirtieth inning, when the player stood over a layout where the most beautiful attacking line had a low probability of success, and he chose to push the ball into the corner cushion instead of attacking. Nobody applauds a decision like that. But the match was decided there, not at the finishing stroke.

Writing has the same blind spot, except it costs more. When data is missing, the writer's reflex is to fill the cell with adjectives: impressive form, competitive character, nerves of steel. Adjectives are the cheapest and most slippery material. They cannot be verified, so they are never contradicted. And once a sourceless number is pushed onto social media, it travels into comparison tables, into forecasts, into places where a small error can carry real monetary value. In billiards, a sport with an active betting market in Asia, a fabricated ranking or average stops being a stylistic flaw. It becomes a false signal sent out into the world.

The discipline I learned after many years sits somewhere else: enduring an empty cell.

There are three states of missing data, and a writer must tell them apart before putting pen to paper. First, the data exists but has not been collected; this case needs more time, not more guesswork. Second, the data exists but is unreliable; this case requires stating the level of uncertainty clearly. Third, the data never existed at all, for instance a metric the organiser does not measure; in this case the only correct conclusion is "insufficient data to assess". Those three states lead to three different ways of writing, and merging them into one is the fastest way to lose the trust of specialist readers.

An honest data report is recognisable by how clearly it states which cells hold numbers, which do not, and why.

What does this mean for Vietnamese billiards? It means that when a domestic event ends, the most worthwhile thing to write may not be the list of qualifiers. The most worthwhile thing may be the question: did this event archive the inning count for every match? If it did, we can talk about Vietnamese billiards using our own data instead of borrowing numbers from abroad. If it did not, the most honest way to open an analysis is to admit that we are missing a foundation.

I went 398 days without hearing the click of balls during the period when billiard halls were closed, and I learned one thing in that silence alone: the gap is part of the data, rather than standing outside it.

The best billiards writer I have ever read is not the one with the most numbers. It is the one who knows how to stop at exactly the twelfth empty cell, type four words into it, "no data available", then close the file and go looking for a source.

Vietnamese readers are mature enough to read a conclusion like that. The only remaining question is: who will be the first to dare print it on a sports page?