Vietnamese Billiards: A World Champion and the Data Gap Nobody Has Filled

Vietnamese Billiards: A World Champion and the Data Gap Nobody Has Filled Trần Quyết Chiến bends over the table and places his cue tip on the cue ball. Nobody measures the time he thinks before that shot. Nobody records the speed of the ball, the spin, or the contact distance between tip and ball. When the match ends, what remains is a score sheet, a few photographs, and the memory of the people sitting in the stands. It was an ordinary evening in the Vietnamese billiards world. And precisely because it was so ordinary, I felt the need to write about it. For years as a data consultant, I have been used to every match leaving behind a trace that can be measured. In billiards, that trace usually disappears before it can even form. Before trusting a number, I ask where it came from. Just like looking at a player before judging him. For Vietnamese billiards, that question currently has no source to answer. Vietnam is one of the strongest carom 3-cushion nations in Asia. Trần Quyết Chiến has risen to become a 3-cushion world champion, one of the greatest milestones in Vietnamese sport. In pool, names such as Dương Quốc Hoàng and Nguyễn Anh Tuấn have regularly appeared at international events. The domestic movement is strong, with hundreds of clubs and thousands of small tournaments each year. But achievement and data are two different stories. A player can win a world title while nobody knows exactly how many seconds he takes to complete an inning, how successful his difficult shots are, or how his cue-ball control changes across two hours of play. In Europe, billiards analysis systems have existed for a long time. People record every shot, every inning, every safety exchange. That data helps coaches understand why one player wins and another loses despite comparable technique. In Vietnam, we still rely mainly on feeling. In Asia, South Korea and Japan have moved a step ahead. Their carom tournaments are regularly recorded and analysed, creating a data foundation for training. Vietnam's results are no worse, yet it lacks that accumulation. I spent months analysing billiards matches recorded by domestic and international broadcasters, to see what could be drawn out. The results showed some fairly clear signals. The first is thinking rhythm. In carom 3-cushion, the time spent thinking before each shot is an important indicator. Top players tend to keep a steady rhythm — not too fast to lose control, not too slow to lose focus. When analysing Trần Quyết Chiến's matches at major events, I noticed he often keeps a steady thinking rhythm throughout, even when trailing. That is a sign of mental stability. Without comparison data, however, people would simply call it character. The second is success rate by table zone. In 3-cushion, a good player does not just pot the ball; he must calculate the path, the contact angle, and where to leave the cue ball for the next inning. If the cue-ball position after each shot can be recorded, we can see who truly controls the table and who is merely scoring through luck. The third is how a player handles pressure. This is the indicator I care about most. On decisive shots, technical error tends to rise. Some players start well but fade in the final innings. With data, we can point to exactly when they lost their rhythm and find out why. That is what I imagine. In reality, obtaining those numbers requires time, effort, and a little faith in small things. Bình Dương back then had no expensive software, only people who believed that every number would find its way. I think the same can apply to billiards. But I have to be honest. Data is not a magic wand. And this is the part I want to discuss in more depth. There is a familiar trap: people see a champion and try to assign him beautiful numbers to prove he deserves it. That is backwards. Data must be recorded first, under objective conditions, and only then used to explain achievement. Otherwise, we are merely decorating a conclusion we already had. I have seen this in football. People package distance covered and sprint counts as effort indicators. But running more does not necessarily mean being effective. A player who runs twelve kilometres may simply be running in the wrong positions. In billiards it is the same. A player who takes many shots is not necessarily playing better than one who takes fewer but more effective ones. The second thing to be wary of is that correlation is not causation. A player with a high success rate at one tournament may not sustain that form at another. Small sample sizes easily create illusions. In billiards, a tournament has only a few dozen matches, and each match a few dozen innings. Those numbers are enough for reference, but not enough for firm conclusions. And the third thing, perhaps most important: billiards is a sport where the decisive moments lie in details that cannot be measured. A shot that goes down in history may come from feeling, from intuition, from a single tip contact that cannot be explained. If data makes us forget those moments, we have lost the very soul of the sport. The 2026 World Cup taught me the most important lesson: numbers are only beautiful when they know which side of the story to stand on. So which direction should Vietnamese billiards take? I do not believe in grand campaigns or expensive software. I believe in small, persistent steps. A few clubs can start recording the inning-by-inning results of young players. A few coaches can note down their students' thinking time by hand. Those small acts, done consistently over a few years, will build a data store large enough to illuminate the path of development. I am the one who stays with the spreadsheet after the stands have turned off the lights — you may call it a job; I call it a fate. For Vietnamese billiards, I want to believe more people will sit down with me. Not to turn this sport into a math problem, but to give quiet players one more chance to be seen as they truly are. What I want to know right now is not who will win the next tournament. It is whether any of us will sit down, record a single inning, and believe that it will lead to something bigger.