Points Yes, Innings No: Vietnam's Billiards Data Gap

The electronic scoreboard at a billiards club on Lach Tray Street in Hai Phong, on the last Saturday of June, displayed exactly one kind of information: points. The match had entered its seventh hour. One player led 38-35, four points from the finishing mark. Nobody in the room knew how many innings the two men had played in total. In three-cushion carom, that missing piece of information decides how the entire match should be read. The average — points divided by innings — is the founding measure of the discipline, and the rankings published by the Union Mondiale de Billard use it as the standard of comparison. A player who scores 40 points in 22 innings holds an average of 1.82. A player who scores 40 points in 35 innings holds only 1.14. The same scoreline, two different levels. The board in front of me could not tell those two players apart. I asked the organisers for the innings sheet. What came back was a phone photo of a handwritten scrap of paper: two scrawled columns, four frames missing in the middle. At home I reopened my tracking file and wrote on the first line: not enough data to conclude. That small incident sits inside a larger problem. Over two decades, Vietnamese billiards has travelled from a leisure pastime in local halls to international arenas, carried by names such as Tran Quyet Chien, Bao Phuong Vinh, Ngo Dinh Nai, Duong Quoc Hoang and Ma Minh Cam. The number of clubs has risen, the number of amateur tournaments has risen, the number of players has risen. The one column that has not risen is the innings column. The cause is not laziness among organisers. It is conceptual. Billiards is not one sport but a cluster of disciplines: three-cushion carom, one-cushion carom, eight-ball pool, nine-ball pool, snooker, English billiards. Each has its own unit of measurement, and the word “point” means something different in each. Merging them into a single statistical table is a methodological error at the root. The domestic tournament system mirrors that gap. A national season runs through several stages from north to south, each hosted by a different locality with its own note-taking habits. There is no shared form, no central archive, so a player's record across a whole season exists only in the memory of those who happened to be present. Data never lies, but I have misheard it before. That time I used the scoreboard of an amateur event to rank twelve players, then discovered the organisers recorded points per frame but aggregated them per match. The standings flipped entirely once I corrected the calculation. I keep a nine-column sheet, built over years of working as a betting analyst. It begins with discipline identification, then moves to player profiles, tournament format, the power map, the rules and governance framework, livelihood and psychology, risk, public narrative, and finally the supply chain of the whole industry. Such a sheet only lives when real data exists. Hand me a blank page and I will hand back a sheet full of N/A. Identifying the discipline governs everything downstream. An average of 1.50 in three-cushion carom belongs to a continental-level player; an average of 1.50 in one-cushion carom belongs to a serious beginner. A century break is a career milestone in snooker, while 100 points in nine-ball pool is sometimes just two clean racks. Without settling the discipline, every comparison that follows is methodologically meaningless. Player profiles are the part I must reconstruct by hand most often. Ranking titles, seasonal averages, head-to-head records, and in snooker the count of century breaks and maximum 147s. In Vietnam most of that material is scattered across news reports rather than held in any database. To build a player's portrait I read hundreds of articles, each in a different format, each naming the event differently. Format also skews results. A 40-point three-cushion match differs fundamentally from a 50-point match, because the maximum number of innings is capped and the room for a comeback shrinks accordingly. Round-robin rewards consistency, while knockout rewards the single moment. Ignore format and I will misread every result, including the correct ones. The power map of world carom is clearly bipolar. Europe holds the centre through Dick Jaspers, Torbjorn Blomdahl and Frederic Caudron. Asia presses close with Cho Myung-woo, Kim Haeng-jik and Heo Jung-han alongside the Vietnamese group. This flow of talent matters more than any single ranking list, because it shows whether a billiards nation is rising or settling for its current position. Rules and governance are the least noticed column. The UMB runs the international competition system for carom, while continental and national federations handle the rest. Alongside that, the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association banned two Chinese players, Liang Wenbo and Li Hang, for life in June 2026 following an investigation into match-fixing. Earlier, in 2026, English player Stephen Lee received a twelve-year ban. Those cases reach beyond one discipline and shape how the public views every billiards event with suspicion. Livelihood and psychology are almost unmeasurable in Vietnam. For most players, income comes from coaching, paid exhibition matches and small sponsorship deals rather than prize money. A man ranked third nationally may still need to accept a paid match in a province to make ends meet. That pressure never appears on a scoreboard, and it changes how a player approaches the twentieth inning. Public narrative runs on its own rhythm. Whenever a Vietnamese player goes deep in an international event, the whole scene is mentioned for a few days, then falls silent until the next time. That short burst of excitement leaves long-term investment — halls, coaching, data — without a foundation. A sport cannot be built on emotional peaks spaced months apart. The industry supply chain also sits in fog. Halls, equipment, cues, cloth, media and derivatives are linked, but there are no public sales figures in Vietnam. I can only observe indirectly through newly opened clubs and hourly table rates. That is second-order data, not source data. When I asked one organiser to add an innings column to the match record, someone laughed. The crowd laughed. The data did not. A year later, I re-wrote that piece. Here I must warn myself. Correlation is not causation. The player with the highest average in a tournament is not necessarily the champion, because an average accumulates dead innings, while a title lives in the last three innings under maximum pressure. I once built a ranking model on averages and got the wrong answer in exactly the matches that mattered most. Analysis has a boundary that is easy to cross. When data thickens, the analyst starts telling players how to adjust their rhythm at the table. Most such verdicts come from outside the table. The tension in a wrist at the eighteenth inning, the pause between frames, the way a man stands up after a miss — only the person in the room sees it, and no camera records enough. When the stands stopped being a fortress, I learned to listen to empty arenas. Two seasons played without spectators taught me that applause is not a neutral variable. Players shoot better with a crowd and shoot differently in a silent hall. Dropping that variable from a model is self-deception. I keep one rule when writing: if the data is not enough, I say so. A report full of N/A is more honest than a report thick with data from bad sources. I do not write to persuade anyone. I write so that the data has a witness. Three thousand matches taught me that one match can teach more than all of them. The Saturday night match in Hai Phong, the one for which I could not obtain a single innings sheet, taught me more than a month of reading data. Next tournament round I will sit down again with my notebook and four columns. If the organisers record innings next to points, I will have one more column to cross-check. If they do not, I will still write it down, with a line in the margin: not enough data to conclude.