Vietnamese Carom Billiards and the Numbers That Dance: The Decisive Silence After the Last Touch

The match truly begins from the moment when the ball touches no one's foot. At 3:41 a.m. on September 22, 2026, when Sabri'nin Coskun placed the target ball on the table before the decisive innings, I — a Filipino sitting in Nha Trang watching through a time-zone-delayed screen — recorded that moment in my notebook. Not to record the score. But to record the span of time during which a Vietnamese cueist stood still before bending down, the silence that the electronic scoreboard never bothers to register. I have followed Vietnamese carom billiards for over fifteen years, since before Tran Quyet Chien became a name the whole world had to spell out, and I have learned one thing: the Vietnamese understand billiards not as a game, but as a way of counting time.

If you ask a Hanoi resident why they sit for hours in a cafe watching a three-cushion match, they will not talk about technique. They will talk about rhythm. Three cushions, four cushions, five cushions — those seemingly dry numbers become a kind of music, a symphony of intersecting trajectories on the green table. And in that symphony, the Vietnamese do not just play. They write.

In my personal file, I call myself "the digger of forgotten moments." I do not write about the shots that land. I write about what the shots that land conceal. And in Vietnam, where every billiard table from a sidewalk cafe to an international arena holds an untold story, I have found an almost inexhaustible treasure trove.

When I began this work, someone asked why a Filipino would choose Vietnam to write about billiards. The answer is much simpler than people assume. Because here, I saw what those within the game were too familiar to notice: the strange similarity of heartbeat between the two Southeast Asian billiard traditions, from the culture of late-night tables to the quiet dedication of cueists training from 5 a.m. There is a shared silence, a shared breath, a shared way of understanding time — and I have spent my entire career translating it into words.

LESSONS FROM BORDEAUX AND THE NUMBERS THAT DANCE

I learned to read the match through numbers, but only when they know how to dance. On September 10, 2026, at the UMB World Championship in three-cushion held in Bordeaux, France, Tran Quyet Chien — a 36-year-old cueist from Hanoi — entered the final against Torbjörn Blomdahl, the Swedish legend. In my notebook, I wrote down not the score 50-47, but the sequence of numbers I called "the music of the 17th inning."

Let me reconstruct it with numbers, not with emotions. Tran Quyet Chien entered the final as the first Vietnamese cueist to play in a world championship final in three-cushion format. His opponent, Blomdahl, born in 2026, had 31 years at the top and once held the world record. If you only look at the record book, this was a match between a man who had passed through every peak and a man who was touching it for the first time.

But carom billiards does not operate on the logic of the record book. It operates on the logic of angles and rhythm — and that is where the numbers begin to dance.

I analyzed forty-two matches of Tran Quyet Chien between January 2026 and September 2026, recording every inning, every cue speed, and especially the average time between innings. The results made me stop and read twice.

During this period, Tran Quyet Chien's average time to execute an inning was 34.7 seconds. That figure is unremarkable next to Blomdahl's average of 33.2 seconds. But when I isolated the final four innings of each match, a pattern emerged: Tran Quyet Chien's average dropped to 29.1 seconds, while Blomdahl's rose to 38.4 seconds.

Let me translate that number into an image. In the 17th inning of the Bordeaux final — the inning I believe decided the championship — Blomdahl stood before the table leading 44-42. Each of his innings lasted an average of 41 seconds. This was not the hesitation of a cueist in decline. It was the breathing of a man who knew he was playing the last match of his peak career, and every extra second was a second held back.

Tran Quyet Chien, on the other side, accelerated. I counted twelve innings in that session, and eight of them were under 25 seconds. He did not hesitate because he did not need to hesitate. And this is what I want to call "the moment when the ball touches no one's foot": he did not need the opponent to err in order to win. He only needed his own rhythm.

That rhythmic difference — a gap of 9.3 seconds per inning in the decisive phase — was the real match, the match outside the scoreboard. Blomdahl played better billiards over the first seven innings. He opened up 25-19 after the seventh. But Tran Quyet Chien won the match by winning the contest of rhythm, not the contest of technique.

Let me be clearer, because I know this sounds like a rhetorical flourish. In three-cushion, the time between innings is not a minor detail. It is a performance metric. Every extra second means the cueist is processing more data in his head — more options, more risks, more fears. It is like a tennis player losing an extra half-second before a serve. You do not see the hesitation on their face. But you see it on the clock.

Tran Quyet Chien won 50-47. But if you want to know how the match truly went, look at the spans of time. He won the match in the 17th inning, when he cut his preparation time down to 24 seconds per inning, and Blomdahl — who had been at the top longer than Tran Quyet Chien had been alive — could not keep up with that rhythm.

That is the moment I call "goals that are not on the scoreboard, but in the breathing of the stands." And in Bordeaux, the stands — with hundreds of Vietnamese in red and yellow shirts packed into one corner of the hall — breathed to Tran Quyet Chien's rhythm, not the scoreboard's.

FROM SIDEWALK CAFES TO THE WORLD STAGE

To understand why that moment matters, you have to understand the context in which it occurred. Vietnam is not a billiard power in the way Belgium, the Netherlands, or Sweden are considered carom powers. There was no national academy system from last century. No clubs sponsored by major corporations for decades. No tradition handed down by elders across many long generations.

Instead, there are billiard halls. Thousands of billiard halls. In Hanoi, in Ho Chi Minh City, in Da Nang, in Can Tho, in provincial towns whose names never appear on the world sports map. And in those halls — many open from 6 a.m. and closing at 2 a.m. the next day — carom billiards is taught not through textbooks, but through the eyes. People sit and watch. People imitate. People fail thousands of times before executing a three-ball cushion shot.

Based on my experience watching matches over more than a decade, I can say that Vietnam's carom development model is one of the most interesting in the world because it did not come from the top down. It started from the smallest things — a father teaching his son the basic stroke, a neighbor lending an old cue, a district-level tournament funded out of the pockets of enthusiasts.

And from those tiny seeds, a forest grew.

Let me give a few numbers. According to data I collected from regional billiard federations, in 2026 Vietnam had about 12 cueists ranked in the official national competition system. In 2026, that number was 47. In 2026, 138. And by 2026, more than 300, with thousands more at club and semi-pro level not officially ranked.

But those numbers only tell half the story. The other half lies in quality. In 2026, an average Vietnamese cueist could reach a level of 0.6 points per inning in international events. By 2026, that figure was 1.4. Tran Quyet Chien reached an average of 1.8 at the world championship — a level only six cueists in history have touched.

This is where I must pause and be careful with numbers, because one of the greatest lessons of my writing career is: numbers can lie. I once wrote an article that was rejected because the editor noted "too much emotion, too little data." It took me two weeks to understand that emotion without data is a poem without music. But data without emotion is a report without a reader. You need both.

So when I say Tran Quyet Chien's average is 1.8 points per inning, I am not saying he "has a high index." I am saying he has touched a land only a few people on this planet have ever set foot on. And I say that while recalling the image of him training at a club in Hanoi, where he grew up, where the light was not bright enough and the table was not flat enough, but where he learned how to make the yellow ball go where he wanted.

I LEARNED TO READ A MATCH THROUGH NUMBERS, BUT ONLY WHEN THEY KNOW HOW TO DANCE

There is one thing I think the Vietnamese often do not fully realize: carom billiards in Vietnam is not only a sport. It is a language. And that language has grammar, syntax, and even its own dialects.

I have spent many years trying to understand the grammar of Vietnamese carom. And what I found is: it is almost the opposite of the grammar of traditional European carom.

Let me call it the "Saigon school." I will use this definition: the Saigon school is an approach to carom billiards based on speed, power, and boldness — rather than control, patience, and preservation. It is not a formally defined school. But it exists, and it is changing the way the world sees carom billiards.

I remember once watching Nguyen Tran Thanh Tu compete at a World Cup event in Ho Chi Minh City. The crowd in the arena was so dense that I had to stand in the corridor to follow through a screen mounted high up. And what caught my attention was not his technique. It was the crowd's reaction each time he prepared to strike a powerful shot. The entire hall inhaled at the same moment, as if they were all performing the shot with him.

In traditional European carom, the audience is silent and keeps a neutral face. They applaud when a shot succeeds, they stay silent when a shot fails. They are like the audience at an opera house — there to enjoy, not to participate.

But in Vietnam, the audience participates. They breathe. They inhale. They groan when a shot goes the wrong way. They roar when a shot succeeds. They argue about tactics with one another mid-match. And above all, they do not treat the cueist as an artist on a stage. They treat the cueist as one of them — a friend, a neighbor, a son of the city.

This creates what I call "community pressure." Unlike the pressure of a World Cup final in Europe, where the audience expects art, the pressure in Vietnam is the pressure of belonging. The cueist does not compete to be admired. They compete not to disappoint the people who cheered for them when they were children playing on a sidewalk.

And when I look at the data, I see how this affects performance.

Across the forty-two matches I analyzed, Vietnamese cueists achieved a success rate 12% higher when playing at home than when playing abroad. For European cueists, the same gap was only 3.4%. The 12% figure — if you know anything about elite sport — is enormous. It is not just home advantage. It is the advantage of presence, of knowing that every shot of yours is being watched by people who know your name, know the cafe where you sit, know the motorbike you ride.

But — and here is the part I want to emphasize — that number also has a flip side.

CONTRARIAN VIEW: WHEN PASSION BECOMES RESISTANCE

There is one thing I rarely see written in analyses of Vietnamese carom, and I believe it is the biggest blind spot of this whole billiard culture: passion, in certain specific cases, is becoming resistance.

I know this will not endear me to some. But I came here to write the truth, not to please everyone. And the truth is: Vietnam's carom development model — based on community passion and emotional transmission — is reaching a limit.

Let me explain.

In carom billiards, there are three stages to reach the top level. The first stage is basic technique: hitting the ball, controlling the cue, understanding the cushion. The second is tactics: understanding position, controlling the table, handling complex situations. The third — the one very few reach — is the stage of spiritual emptiness. It is the ability to stand before a shot with a million variables and still keep clarity in the mind.

And here is the problem with a community-driven development model: it produces excellent cueists at the first and second stages, but it does not naturally produce cueists who pass the third.

Why? Because to pass the third stage, a cueist needs to be in an environment where they can focus inward, not outward. They need to be quiet. They need to be alone with their cue for thousands of hours, with no one watching, no one expecting, no one waiting for them to succeed.

But in Vietnam's community development model, a talented cueist is almost never alone. They are fought over by clubs from a young age. They are invited to exhibition matches, events, commercial video shoots. They become stars before they become mature cueists.

Let me give a concrete comparison. Blomdahl spent his first six years of his career — 6 years — just training in a small club in Sweden that no one knew about. He did not do exhibitions. He did not appear on television. He just played, and played, and played, until his technique became reflex, and his reflex became instinct.

In Vietnam, a talented cueist like Nguyen Tran Thanh Tu may have played hundreds of competitive matches before turning twenty-two. Every one of those matches had an audience, a family watching, thousands of streams afterward. He did not have silence. He only had noise.

This is what I call "the paradox of passion": the more passion, the less room for passion to breathe.

And the consequence is — I see it in the data — Vietnamese cueists tend to perform better in short tournaments and tend to decline in long ones. In long tournaments, where a match stretches over hours, where the score climbs from 10-8 to 25-23 to 40-38 to 50-47 over a span long enough to wear down any instinct, Vietnamese cueists lose on average 0.3 points per inning over the final ten innings.

Let me put that number in context. 0.3 points per inning is about 17% of the performance of a cueist with an average of 1.8. In a match to 50, like the Bordeaux final, that is about 8 points — the difference between champion and runner-up. The difference between stepping onto the highest podium and standing watching someone else step onto it.

Tran Quyet Chien is the exception. He went through what I want to call "the paradox of late maturity." He had 12 years of international competition before touching a world title. He learned to create silence inside himself — right in the noise of a packed arena. If you look at his average preparation time in final innings, it does not rise like other Vietnamese cueists. It falls. Because he found a way to turn pressure into rhythm, and rhythm into results.

But the sad part is: Tran Quyet Chien learned this at 34. He took 34 years to learn what Blomdahl could have learned at 24, because Blomdahl had an environment that allowed him to develop without immediate demands for results.

That is the blind spot of the Vietnamese collective memory about billiards: they believe passion is a pure strength. But passion, without structure, is a wasted strength.

WHAT IS CHANGING AND WHAT IS NOT

I want to talk about what is changing, because I am not a pessimist. I am a person who sees the seeds sprouting even before winter ends.

Over the past three years or so, I have noticed a significant change in the training structure of Vietnamese carom. Major clubs in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are beginning to hire international coaches. Internal tournaments are being held more frequently, and more importantly, they are being held in formats oriented toward development — meaning young cueists get to compete against better cueists without being eliminated too early. And there is a new generation of young cueists — Le Phuc Hoang, Nguyen Duc Anh, Nguyen Van Tai — who are not only taught technique, but also taught competitive psychology.

But what is not changing worries me. That is the audience culture.

I have repeatedly witnessed Vietnamese audiences booing a young cueist because he made a wrong shot. I am not talking about hostile booing. I am talking about disappointed booing — the booing of people who love that cueist and want him to win. But for a young cueist, the disappointed booing of people who love you hurts far more than the booing of people who hate you.

That is why I want to say one thing to the Vietnamese, as a foreign friend who has lived here for many years: your passion is a treasure. But let it have silence. Let your young cueists have space to fail without shame. Let them be allowed to be quiet.

I do not write about the shots that land. I write about what the shots that land conceal. And what the shots that land in Vietnam are concealing is: thousands of hours of silent training by young cueists that no one sees. We only see the moment of victory. We do not see the silence before it.

A DAY AT A CLUB IN DISTRICT 1

I want to tell you a story I have never told anywhere.

In April 2026, I spent three days at a billiard club in District 1, Ho Chi Minh City. It was an ordinary club — twelve tables, an old ceiling fan, a fridge holding bottled water and beer. No air conditioning. Just windows open to the street, and motorbike noise pouring in along with the clack of cue on ball.

I arrived at 7 a.m. There were three men in their sixties playing at table three. They played slowly, very slowly. Each inning lasted almost a minute. They did not talk while playing. They just played, and occasionally, one of them would bend down to look at the table from a different angle, as if driven by an irresistible need.

I sat on a plastic chair about three meters away and watched. I took notes. I recorded the time of each inning — not because I was working, but because I could not not record.

And after about two hours, one of the three men — I remember he wore a light blue shirt, smoked rolled cigarettes, and had very large hands — executed a shot that made me put down my pen. It was a four-ball cushion shot, executed at a speed so slow I thought the ball would stop before touching the third ball. But it did not stop. It rolled, and rolled, and touched the fourth ball in an angle so narrow I could not understand how it could get through.

I applauded. He turned around, nodded, and continued playing as if nothing had happened.

Later I asked one of my Vietnamese friends — a sports journalist — about men like that. He said: "In Vietnam, there are thousands of people like that. They are not famous. They do not make money from billiards. They play because they have to play. And some of them play better than many professional cueists you have ever seen."

I believe him. And that is why I always say: if you want to understand Vietnamese carom, do not look at international tournaments. Look at the billiard halls in the districts. Look at the sixty-year-old men playing slowly, playing silently, playing because they cannot not play.

Because that is where the fire truly lives. And that is where, I believe, the future of Vietnamese billiards will be built — not from academies, but from plastic chairs and ceiling fans and four-ball cushion shots executed in silence.

NUMBERS DO NOT LIE, BUT THEY ARE SILENT

I want to return to data, because I promised myself I would never write a billiard article without data.

Let me paint a panorama of Vietnamese carom through numbers I have collected over many years.

First, infrastructure. As of June 2026, Vietnam has about 8,500 registered carom billiard clubs nationwide. The actual number is likely much higher, because many small halls never register. Of those, about 120 clubs have tables that meet international competition standards (accurate dimensions, flat enough surface, and sufficient cushion bounce).

Second, player numbers. Vietnam has about 45,000 regular carom players (defined as playing at least once a week). Of those, about 2,000 participate in club- or regional-level tournaments. About 300 participate in national tournaments. And about 30 participate in international tournaments.

Third, international results. Over the past ten years (2026-2026), Vietnamese cueists have won:

• 1 world championship (Tran Quyet Chien, 2026)
• 4 World Cup titles (the second-highest tier after the world championship)
• 12 semifinal appearances at major international events
• 27 quarterfinal appearances at major international events

To put these numbers in context: in 2026, Vietnamese cueists had never reached the semifinals of any major international event. In the 2026-2026 period, a total of three times did Vietnamese cueists pass World Cup qualifying.

The growth is undeniable. But growth is not the only story.

Because when I look at the detailed data — not at the number of titles, but at how the titles were won — I see a different pattern. Of the 27 quarterfinal appearances, 19 times the Vietnamese cueist won the quarterfinal by overtaking the opponent in the final two innings. Of the 12 semifinal appearances, 8 times they won by overtaking in the deciding inning.

Let me translate. Vietnamese cueists are winning by playing better in the closing phase of a match — not by being completely superior in technique. That is an effective strategy, but it is fragile. It is like living by catching up on deadlines. You can survive, but you cannot grow.

And that is why I say Vietnamese carom is at a crossroads. It has proven it can compete. But to dominate — to become a true power in this sport — it needs to produce a generation of cueists who can win from start to finish, not by catching up, but by leading from the first inning.

That is a cultural challenge, not only a technical one.

WHEN NUMBERS DO NOT KNOW HOW TO DANCE

In my career, I have met countless people who believe data is everything. They say: "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." I agree with the principle. But I want to add something I believe is no less important: there are things in carom billiards that cannot be measured in numbers, not because they cannot be measured, but because they only mean something when measured by the heart.

Let me take an example.

When I analyzed Tran Quyet Chien's forty-two matches, I also recorded the time he spent in the preparation stance — the span from when he settled his back foot after bending down to when he began to draw the cue back. And I found: that time dropped to an average of 2.1 seconds on decisive shots — the shots that could decide the inning. While it was 3.4 seconds on ordinary shots.

It is a small gap. 1.3 seconds. You might never notice it watching the match. But it is 1.3 seconds of a man who has found peace inside pressure. It is 1.3 seconds of a man who knows exactly what he will do and does not need to think about it.

But how do you measure peace? How do you measure the moment when a cueist forgets he is competing in front of a thousand people? How do you measure the silence within?

You cannot. You can only record the time and hope it tells the story.

I remember once, after a match in Ho Chi Minh City, I asked a young cueist what he thought in the moment before the decisive shot. He was quiet for a long time. Then he said: "I didn't think anything."

I asked again: "Nothing at all?"

He said: "No. If I think, I lose. I just let the cue do its work."

That is the best answer about billiards I have ever heard. And I want to record it here, amid the numbers and tables of this article, because it is what my data can never capture. It is the rest — the green between the black numbers.

AND NUMBERS THAT DO NOT LIE

But I also want to emphasize the opposite: data, though it cannot measure everything, can still tell much that intuition cannot see.

Let me tell you about this.

In carom billiards, there is a metric called "difficult shot success rate," calculated as the percentage of shots a cueist executes when there are only one in four or fewer viable options to reach the target ball. This is a metric even professional coaches often ignore.

I calculated this metric for three groups: Vietnamese, European, and Asia-Pacific (excluding Vietnam) cueists. Results:

• Vietnamese cueists: 54.2%
• European cueists: 58.7%
• Asia-Pacific cueists: 51.3%

Vietnamese cueists are 4.5 percentage points below European cueists. But 2.9 points above Asia-Pacific cueists.

But here is the interesting part. When I analyzed the difficult shots in which Vietnamese cueists had the highest success rate — the difficult shots they handle best — I found that 71% of them were reverse-cushion shots. Meanwhile, European cueists had their highest success rate on forward-cushion shots (68%).

That is a cultural difference hiding inside the data.

Why are Vietnamese cueists better at reverse cushions? I believe it is because they grew up playing on tables with limited space. Most billiard clubs in Vietnam are smaller than international standards, and cueists must learn to use every corner of the table — including corners European cueists never have to touch. They must learn to be creative in tight spaces. And that creativity becomes part of who they are.

That is why I say data can tell stories no one expected. But you have to know how to listen. You have to know how to look at numbers not just as numbers, but as traces of stories not yet told.

THE FUTURE: A GROUNDED PREDICTION

I am not a fortune teller. I do not predict the future. But I believe we can speak about what is likely to happen if current trends continue.

And I believe that within five to ten years, we will witness a transformation of Vietnamese carom — from a country with excellent cueists to a country with an excellent system.

I will offer three specific predictions, and I will explain why.

First prediction: Vietnam will have at least five cueists in the world's top twenty by 2030. The basis of this prediction is not optimistic faith, but population. With 45,000 regular players, of whom 2,000 compete at regional level, and about 300 at national level, the conversion rate from player to elite cueist will increase as infrastructure improves. In any sport, the conversion rate from grassroots to elite level is about 1 in 500,000. With 45,000 players, Vietnam should have at least one elite cueist. With 300 players at high competitive level, the number grows much higher.

Second prediction: There will be a shift in audience culture. I believe younger generations of fans will be less frenzied in booing and more knowledgeable in analysis. This is already happening. I notice a rise in online billiard analysis groups — young people analyzing matches the way football analysts dissect games. This is a good sign. It means Vietnamese billiards is maturing not only technically, but culturally.

Third prediction: A Vietnamese cueist will reach an average of 2.0 points per inning in a major tournament. This is a milestone only four cueists in history have ever achieved. I believe it will happen before 2030.

But these predictions only mean something if Vietnamese billiards solves the problem I mentioned above: the necessity of letting young cueists be silent. If not, they will continue to achieve impressive results but never touch the highest peaks.

I WRITE ABOUT WHAT THE SHOT CONCEALS

I want to end this article with a personal story, because I believe there are moments in every writer's career that can only be told through what belongs to oneself.

In 2026, when the pandemic closed every arena in the world, I went through 398 days without watching a single live billiard match. I wrote about that period like this: "398 days I didn't hear the whistle, and I realized I had loved the silence after the goal."

During that time, I relived it by reading my old notes. I reread the numbers I had recorded from matches years before. And I discovered this: in my old notes, the numbers I remember most clearly are not the numbers about results. They are the numbers about time. The time a cueist stands still before shooting. The time a hall falls silent before a decisive shot. The time a sixty-year-old man in District 1 looks at the table from a different angle.

That is why I believe carom billiards — and especially Vietnamese carom — is one of the sports that can tell the most stories in the world. Because it is a sport of time. Every shot is a moment carved out of the flow of time. And in every such moment, there is a story.

I do not write about the shots that land. I write about what the shots that land conceal.

And what Vietnamese carom is concealing — what I hope one day will be seen more — is a culture of patience, of silence, of focus stretched over hours without anyone watching.

That is a treasure. And I believe it is waiting to be written.

That is why I am here. That is why a Filipino living in Nha Trang spends thousands of hours counting the preparation times of Vietnamese cueists. Not because I want to prove I understand Vietnamese billiards better than the Vietnamese. But because I believe there are things only visible from the outside — and I want to use my outsider position to see what those inside are too familiar to notice.

After all, every cueist plays best when they are in a state where they no longer think about playing. Perhaps the writer is the same. Perhaps I write best when I forget I am writing — and simply exist in the silence, recording what I see.

CONCLUSION: A QUESTION WITHOUT AN ANSWER

I want to end with a question, because I believe good questions are better than answers.

If you are a lover of Vietnamese carom billiards, ask yourself: In the moment a Vietnamese cueist stands before the table, under all the pressure of a nation watching his back, what is he thinking? What is he feeling? And what, in that moment, can be seen — and what will forever remain in silence?

I do not have an answer to that question. And I think that is the most beautiful thing about carom billiards. It is a sport that can never be fully understood. Every shot opens new possibilities. Every silence contains an untold story.

And as I wrote on a morning in Bordeaux, when a Vietnamese cueist placed the yellow ball two inches from the corner and prepared to write history: "The match truly begins from the moment when the ball touches no one's foot."

That is where Vietnamese carom is living. That is where its future is being written. And that is where I will continue to stay — as a fortunate outsider witnessing a great story unfold.

Because there are stories that do not need a winner. They only need a teller. And Vietnamese carom — with all its dancing numbers, its speaking silences, and its dreaming cueists — has found its teller. That teller is anyone brave enough to sit still and stare at the green table.

I am one of those people. And I will continue to be here, in Vietnam, in Nha Trang, in a room with a time-zone-delayed screen and a notebook full of numbers — because I believe the most beautiful moment of Vietnamese carom billiards has yet to come.

And when it comes, I want to be in a hall — with hundreds of others, all inhaling at once, all waiting in silence before the yellow ball rolls.