Forty-Five Minutes in the Chair: What the Scoreboard Cannot Measure About Vietnamese Billiards

The clock in the Binh Duong arena read 21:47, and there was nothing to watch on the table.

The Vietnamese player's opponent had just potted and begun a run. The red ball travelled down the long cushion, touched the third cushion, then crawled back toward the opposite corner to find the yellow. The stands were silent. The commentator was silent. The only sound was ball striking ball, dry and short, like a fingernail tapping wood.

Then the Vietnamese player sat down.

He took the chalk from his breast pocket and turned it three times between thumb and forefinger. He put the chalk down. He took the towel to the tip of his cue. Folded the towel. Put the towel down. Took a sip of water. His eyes rested on the table, but they did not settle on any particular ball — the look of a man rereading a page he already knows by heart.

That run lasted eleven points and forty minutes. When it ended, he stood up, and in the next inning he scored fifteen.

I have sat in the fourth row of that arena many times over nearly a decade. What I carried home was not the beautiful shots. What I carried home was those forty-five minutes of silence. The match truly begins at the moment when nobody touches the ball.

To understand why a country without the long billiards tradition of England or Belgium sits among the world's leading carom nations, people usually start in the wrong place. They start with the trophy list. They talk about a golden generation, about passion, about destiny. Not wrong, but not enough. The real story sits in commercial rent, in the price of an hour of table time, in the number of competitive matches a twenty-year-old can accumulate in a single year.

Vietnamese billiards runs on two parallel economies, and those two economies share the same table.

The economy of noise is the pool-hall system — pool, snooker, rows of green-clothed tables packed into narrow alleys, air conditioning running day and night, selling soft drinks and instant noodles, serving mostly young customers. Table rates in Nha Trang, where I live, run from thirty to sixty thousand dong an hour, depending on the district and the table. For a student, three hours of pool costs less than a cinema ticket.

The economy of silence is the three-cushion carom club system — known locally as bi-a phang — where people pay by the month or by the training session, where internal rankings exist, where coaches exist, where practice begins at eleven at night and ends when the sky brightens. This is where players with UMB ranking points are made.

These two economies do not compete. They feed each other. The pool hall teaches a fifteen-year-old how to hold a cue, how to stand, how to lose to a friend from the same neighbourhood. The carom club receives that child back seven years later, when he has enough patience to sit still for forty-five minutes without anyone watching.

From the mid-2010s, an official World Cup leg of the Union Mondiale de Billard was staged annually in Binh Duong, bringing the leading names of Europe and Asia — Dick Jaspers, Torbjorn Blomdahl, Eddy Merckx, Frederic Caudron, Cho Myung-woo, Semih Sayginer — to compete on Vietnamese soil. That changed the opportunity structure for local players: previously, earning ranking points meant a twelve-hour flight and ten days in a European hotel. Afterwards, they competed at home, slept at home, ate at home, and walked out to a crowd chanting their names.

Tran Quyet Chien, who rose to number one in the UMB three-cushion ranking, is the most prominent product of that structure. Behind him came a next class: Bao Phuong Vinh, Nguyen Duc Anh Chien, and younger names most Vietnamese fans will only learn in the next three years. Alongside them, veterans such as Ngo Dinh Nai and Ma Minh Cam still serve as the trade's transmission belt inside the clubs.

But names do not explain a system. Structure is what deserves attention.

The arithmetic of density

Over three months of observation in Khanh Hoa, I counted eleven billiards venues with roughly seventy tables within a two-kilometre radius of my home. A European city of comparable population typically has fifteen to twenty tables, mostly inside clubs with annual membership fees.

Table density creates three things money cannot buy simultaneously: cheap playing time, nearby opponents, and frequent opportunity to lose.

A teenager in Nha Trang can meet ten opponents of his own standard in a week, at ten different venues, for under two hundred thousand dong in total. A teenager in Antwerp who wants ten opponents of his own standard must drive three hours, pay for a hotel, and wait for the weekend.

I learned to read matches through data, but only when the data knows how to dance. Table density says nothing about an individual's talent. It says something about how many times a person is permitted to be wrong before finding the right line.

The economy of cheap failure

Losing a provincial tournament in Vietnam costs somewhere between one hundred and three hundred thousand dong: entry fee, fuel, water, occasionally a shift off work. Losing an open event in Europe typically costs three hundred to five hundred euros, before lost wages and train fares.

That gap has a direct effect on the speed of learning. A twenty-five-year-old Vietnamese player may already have played several hundred official ranking matches. A Belgian player of the same age and the same raw ability may have played a few dozen equivalent matches.

In three-cushion carom, decisions usually fall on rare situations: a ball frozen to the cushion, a blocked stance, a few millimetres between two object balls. Nobody can practise all of them. The player with more matches owns a larger mental sample library to search under pressure, within twenty seconds. That advantage does not live in the wrist. It lives in the number of exposures to uncertainty.

Put differently, part of Vietnamese billiards' record has been built on cheap defeats. Every loss in a provincial event uploads data into memory. The cost of uploading data here is low enough that people upload far more of it.

Screens and the knowledge commons

From around 2026, carom matches began to be streamed live on social platforms and video services. This is the least discussed change and the most consequential.

Before that, billiards knowledge in Vietnam passed by word of mouth: one teacher, a handful of students, a few translated books. After that, knowledge passed through screens: amateur fans began speaking the profession's language — average per inning, success rate on difficult positions, consecutive scoring runs. A boy in Dong Nai could rewatch a specific position twenty times, in slow motion, and try it on his own table the following evening.

This is the cheapest form of knowledge transfer in the history of the sport. It compresses a decade of learning into three or four years, and it requires no foreign coach.

The ritual of the gap

A three-cushion match lasts roughly one hundred minutes. In that time, each player executes about twenty innings, each lasting forty to sixty seconds. The rest of the time, they sit.

In a semi-final in Binh Duong where I timed the chair myself, the Vietnamese player's total time seated was forty-seven minutes out of one hundred and eight minutes of play. Nearly half the match took place while he was not touching his cue.

That is where the scoreboard cannot reach. I have watched a player recover from eleven points behind after forty minutes in the chair, and another player lose his rhythm after only twelve minutes of trailing. The difference was not technique. It was how each man handled time when nobody was watching.

The ritual among Vietnamese players in that gap is fairly consistent: the chalk turning in the hand, the towel, the water bottle, the eyes fixed on the table. Nobody looks at the scoreboard. The scoreboard cannot help the next inning. Only the table can, and the table does not change whether the score is 5-12 or 14-14.

I have written it before and I write it again: some victories are not on the scoreboard; they are in the breathing of the stands. In Binh Duong the stands held their breath for those forty minutes. Nobody coughed, nobody stood up for a drink. The only sounds were balls and ceiling fans. When the Vietnamese player rose from the chair, the crowd applauded as if watching a man return from a long journey, even though he had not struck a single shot.

The pipeline from the provinces

What is striking about Vietnam's carom roster is where its players come from. Binh Duong, Dong Nai, Ho Chi Minh City, Khanh Hoa, Da Nang. Most did not emerge from structured academies in major metropolises, but from clubs opened by a few enthusiasts, often attached to a coffee shop or a small workshop.

Three development models currently compete in the region. South Korea builds national strength on a corporate and municipal team model, with salaries, full-time coaches, and a dense domestic tournament system. Europe keeps a century-old club model based on membership fees, long national league seasons, and a layer of semi-professional players with other day jobs. Vietnam runs an unofficial hybrid: families invest, clubs supply tables and opponents, a few equipment sponsors supply cues, gloves and cloth, and an on-site international tournament supplies ranking points.

This model is cheap, flexible and highly effective at producing a small elite. It also has a clear ceiling: it depends on a handful of hotspots. When a club in Binh Duong grows, it pulls players in from the provinces. When a club in another province closes, an entire stream disappears unrecorded.

The mathematics of the short format

One technical point is rarely discussed: most of Vietnam's best international results come from World Cup legs, where the format is short — usually races to forty points, split into sets. Short formats increase variance. A player can beat a clearly stronger opponent by potting early and holding two good runs.

Long formats, such as the individual world championship, demand consistency across many hours, many days and many different tables. At the time I compiled the data, no Vietnamese player had won a world championship in the long format.

This does not diminish the World Cup titles. It places them in the correct analytical frame: Vietnam is very strong in short races, where explosion is rewarded, and has not yet proved itself in long races, where endurance is rewarded. The two formats require two different kinds of player, and a mature billiards nation needs both.

It is also why I do not read rankings the usual way. Number one is an outcome. It is not a description of capability. A player can reach number one through four short events played within six months and still leave an open question at a two-week championship.

The blind spot of collective memory

The story people tell about Vietnamese billiards is a story about passion. A nation that loves the game, a golden generation, a few exceptional individuals rising above circumstance. That story is easy to hear, easy to remember, and easy to repeat in post-match interviews.

It skips one verifiable detail: if passion were the cause, doubling commercial rent in central districts would have no effect on the supply of players. If infrastructure is the cause, it affects everything.

And in many cities, rent has risen. Well-known halls in the centre are drifting toward the ring roads, where space is cheaper but customers travel longer. Every kilometre of displacement is a group of students who no longer drop in after school. That shift never appears on a trophy list, is never mentioned at an award ceremony, and is not compiled by anyone.

The second blind spot is the prodigy filter. Every time a seventeen-year-old wins two matches at a regional event, the media calls it a phenomenon. But for a seventeen-year-old, two wins is a very small sample. The data required to speak of a career is hundreds of matches across three years, and nobody holds that data while the story is hot.

The third blind spot, and perhaps the most important: collective memory records the scoreboard and forgets the chair. People remember the decisive shot in the final inning. Nobody remembers the forty-five minutes before it, when a man sat still and talked to himself. Those forty-five minutes decide the match, and no camera points there.

The biggest risk to Vietnamese billiards over the next five years is not a shortage of talent. It is the narrowing of the cradle. A billiards nation can survive on a few stars. It cannot survive long on a few stars and an increasingly expensive cradle.

What I want to know in five years

I do not write about scoring shots. I write about what scoring shots conceal. And the most concealed thing in any sport with a chair is the structure that produced the player — the way a fifteen-year-old, on some Tuesday evening, walks into an alley pool hall, pays thirty thousand dong, and begins a fifteen-year road.

What I want to know is not who will win another World Cup leg. What I want to know is whether, by 2030, in Nha Trang or Dong Nai or Can Tho, a fifteen-year-old can still pay thirty thousand dong for an hour of table time, and still find ten opponents of his own standard within two kilometres of home.

If the answer is yes, Vietnamese billiards will keep producing great sitters in the chair. If the answer is no, we will still have medals to talk about, but no cradle to talk about them from.