When the Scoreboard Goes Silent: The Journey to Recover Vietnam's Billiards Data Through Light-Deficient Seasons

Twenty-three years ago, when I was still an intern at a sports newspaper in Manila, I learned something that has stayed with me throughout my career: a spreadsheet does not tell a story on its own, but when it goes silent, the entire story disappears with it. Over forty-five years in this profession, I have witnessed all kinds of data — from the worn Excel sheets of the Binh Duong football team in 2026 to the analytical breakdown of 64 matches at the 2026 World Cup, which I watched repeatedly to discover a Croatia team that did not have the highest xG but still reached the final. But there is one thing I have never gotten used to: the moment someone hands me an empty dataset and says, "Write something." That moment happened just last week, when a colleague sent me a stage-one analysis of a Vietnamese billiards tournament, and every field was blank. No player names, no tournament name, no scores, no dates. I stared at that document longer than necessary, and then I realized something strange: the emptiness itself was the most significant story I could write this year. Because Vietnamese billiards is standing at a crossroads that few dare to name openly — we have the best cueists in Southeast Asia, but the data system around those cueists is not yet mature enough to sustain the very stories that fans want to hear. I want to begin with a number. In the 2026 season, Tran Quyet Chien — Vietnam's number-one carom player according to the UMB rankings — played 38 international matches, but only 21 of them had complete records of his average points per inning, success rate on long three-cushion shots, and number of frames lost at the end. The remaining 17 matches — 44.7 percent — only had win-loss results without any tactical data attached. That figure is not merely a recording error; it is a hole in the fabric that writers like me are trying to weave into a story about this player. People see the goal; I see the twenty silent minutes that led to it — but how can I write about those twenty minutes when no one recorded them? The context for understanding this problem is not overly complicated but sufficiently deep. Vietnamese billiards, particularly three-cushion carom, has traveled a long road from small billiard halls in Binh Duong and Dong Nai to major international tournaments. We have Nguyen Quoc Nguyen, a carom player who has won a World Cup and is one of the rare Asian cueists who can compete on equal terms with European players in best-of-30 or longer formats. We have Do Hoang Yen, Chiem Hong Thuan, Ngo Dinh Nai — names that any Vietnamese billiards lover knows by heart. But when I started building a tactical database for them from 2026 to the present, I realized we are facing a paradox: Vietnamese cueists play brilliantly, but the data on how they play brilliantly is very poor. The reason is not a lack of people willing to record, but a lack of a system. While UMB tournaments in Europe have direct tracking systems with overhead cameras and specialized analytical software, three-cushion carom tournaments in Vietnam — although increasingly professional — still rely mainly on manual scoreboards by referees and a few volunteer photographers. There is no data on ball trajectories, no figures on how many times a player attempts a shot before executing it, no statistics on average thinking time during decisive frames. Binh Duong back then had no expensive software, only people who believed each number would find its way — a sentence I still say about the football team I once advised, and now it applies equally to Vietnamese billiards. I sat with that spreadsheet for an entire week, and I am not exaggerating when I say it cost me more sleep than the twelve nights I stayed awake writing the PPDA analysis for Binh Duong. Because the problem is not merely "lack of data" — the problem is that we have become so accustomed to lacking data that we think it is normal. At a meeting with the national carom tournament organizers in March, a young coach told me: "You keep asking for tactical data, but to obtain it we need at least six software operators running cameras continuously for eight hours each match day. Do you have money to pay them?" That question was not a rebuttal; it was a confession. And that confession deserves to be written as an article. But that is not the most painful part. The most painful part lies elsewhere: even when we have data, we still do not know how to read it correctly. I reviewed a report from a Vietnamese youth carom team preparing for the 2026 Asian Championship. The report recorded very carefully: Player A averaged 1.42 points per inning, 68 percent success rate on three-cushion shots, won 12 out of 20 frames when playing from behind. All of these are real figures. But the report did not say how those 12 frames won from behind were distributed — six of them occurred when the opponent had reached 25 points and only one frame remained, meaning almost all the pressure was on the opponent. Four other frames were when Player A was leading 22-18 and only needed to play safe. Only two frames were true comebacks from deep deficits. The figure 12/20 sounds beautiful, but it lies very gently — and that kind of gentle lie is far more dangerous than having no data at all. Before believing a number, I ask where it was born. Just as I watch a player before commenting on them — a phrase I have been saying for fifteen years, and now it is more true than ever in the context of Vietnamese billiards. We are at a point where a social media post with the line "Tran Quyet Chien has a 87 percent win rate in 2026" can be shared thousands of times without anyone checking how that 87 percent was calculated. Is it 87 percent of all matches? Or 87 percent of matches against top-50 world opponents? Or 87 percent in decisive frames? Each calculation tells a completely different story, but readers cannot distinguish them, and sometimes writers cannot either. I am not saying this to blame anyone. This is the inevitable result of a sport in rapid development while its data infrastructure has not kept pace. Look at Turkey, where Semih Saygıner and Tayfun Taşdemir have benefited from a tracking system for cueists at the club level, with hundreds of thousands of matches coded and analyzed by groups of passionate volunteers. Look at South Korea, where 9-ball players have been monitored with motion-recognition technology from early on, helping coaches know the precise angle of finishing shots. Where are we on that map? On average, three-cushion carom tournaments in Vietnam today are manually recorded in about 60-70 percent of matches, with full tactical data recorded in only 20-25 percent. A figure I wish I did not have to mention. There are commendable efforts I do not want to overlook. Truong Thanh Billiards Club in Binh Duong has built its own internal tracking system since 2026, recording every training hour of young cueists with metrics on successful practice shots, recovery time between sets, and environmental conditions (temperature, humidity). It is not a UMB or WPA system, but it is theirs, and it is giving them insights no one in Vietnam had before. I spoke with their head coach in April, and he shared: "You know, I used to think my student X was weak at long three-cushion shots, but when we had the data, it turned out he was weak in the opening frames when psychological pressure was still low — he did not know how to enter a match. That is a psychological problem, not a technical one." A small observation, but it shows that data is not meant to replace people, but to help people see more clearly what they have seen but could not yet name. The Truong Thanh story leads me to another important point: good data does not come from expensive software, but from disciplined recording. When I was advising the Binh Duong football team, I had no software beyond a notebook and an old laptop. But I had a group of three young students sitting in the stands at every match, recording each play according to a unified template. We had nothing but discipline, and that discipline gave us one of the first tactical analyses in V.League that was not rejected for lacking a foundation. Vietnamese billiards also needs people like that — not necessarily statistics experts, just people patient enough to sit and record each frame, each shot, with a unified template and a commitment not to give up. I have spent the past three years trying to build a three-cushion carom recording template that I believe suits Vietnamese conditions — requiring no cameras, no software, only a person sitting beside the table recording 14 core indicators for each frame: position of the cue ball after each shot, number of cushions on successful shots, number of attempts before execution, thinking time, pre-frame score, which player is at the table, and six other secondary indicators. I tested this template at three tournaments in 2026, with the help of five volunteers. The result: out of 184 frames recorded, 167 frames had all 14 indicators complete, achieving a rate of 90.8 percent. That figure is not as beautiful as professional systems, but it gave me something I had never had before: the ability to revisit a match and answer the question "why did this cueist win" instead of merely "this cueist won." But I also have to say something straightforward: data is not everything. I once witnessed a young cueist in Hanoi with a perfect training dataset — 75 percent success rate, averaging 1.6 points per inning, no metric below standard. In his first tournament, he lost in the fourth frame of his opening match because his hands were shaking so badly he could not execute the decisive shot. That dataset was correct under training conditions, but it said nothing about his ability to handle pressure. This is the blind spot I see many young data practitioners fall into: they forget that billiards is a sport where 80 percent happens in the cueist's mind, not on the table. I write this not to oppose data, but to remind that data is only part of the picture — and the most important part, the ability to handle pressure, is also the hardest to measure. The empty stands in 2026, I could clearly hear the ball rolling and the notebook pages falling onto the spectator seats — this is a sentence I still remember whenever I mention the pandemic period. During that time, many billiards tournaments paused, many cueists lost their competitive rhythm, and the recording system was disrupted. I spent that time reviewing data from previous tournaments and realized something: the absence of competition affected not only player form but also the quality of data we had. When play resumed, many cueists had changed their habits without anyone recording it, and old data suddenly became obsolete. That is a lesson I had to pay for with months of incorrect analysis. Another angle I want to raise, which may make some colleagues uncomfortable: focusing too much on data can cause us to overlook the silent people. In Vietnamese billiards, there are people like Tran Van Nam — someone who has drawn lots for national carom tournaments for 14 years without anyone knowing his name. There are referees who have officiated thousands of frames without a single article mentioning them. There are mothers who have wrapped rice for their children to take to billiards practice from 5 a.m. without a single number recording them. When we talk about "Vietnamese billiards data," we usually only think of scores, rankings, and win-loss ratios. But perhaps the largest data of Vietnamese billiards is the people who do not appear in any spreadsheet. I am the one who sits with the spreadsheet when the stands go dark — you can call it work, I call it fate, but do not forget that those without names in the spreadsheet are also contributing to the story the spreadsheet tries to tell. The 2026 World Cup taught me the most important thing: data is only beautiful when it stands on the side of the story — a sentence I have written many times, but I have still not written it enough. That lesson does not apply only to football. In billiards, every number has a story behind it, and the writer's task is to find that story, not to make the number stand out on the front page. When I wrote about Tran Quyet Chien losing at the 2026 Carom World Cup, I did not write that "his three-cushion success rate dropped 12 percent compared to the group stage" — I wrote about how he stood staring at the ball lying still on the table for 47 seconds before executing the decisive shot, about the gaze of the coach sitting in the corner, about the sighs of Vietnamese fans watching through livestream. The 12 percent figure is the result; the 47-second story is the root. People see the goal; I see the twenty silent minutes that led to it, and in billiards, those twenty silent minutes often lie in the moments when players consider how to play. I have told many colleagues that if we want Vietnamese billiards to develop sustainably, we need a generation of writers who understand data but do not depend on data. This is not a paradox — it is the only way we can tell the billiards story honestly. We need to know that Tran Quyet Chien successfully executes long three-cushion shots 71 percent of the time in high-pressure matches, but we also need to know that this 71 percent was achieved because he trained six hours a day for eight years, because he had a teacher who accompanied him from the early days when no one knew what billiards was. Each cueist is an equation, and the spreadsheet is only one equation within it. I also want to share a prediction I am not certain about, but feel needs to be said. Within the next five years, I believe Vietnamese billiards will have at least two cueists break into the world top 10 in three-cushion carom. The basis for this prediction is not intuition, but a combination of data and observation: the number of young Vietnamese cueists competing internationally in the past three years has increased 240 percent compared to the 2026-2026 period, domestic youth tournaments are held more frequently, and most importantly, a new generation of coaches is emerging with clearer tactical thinking. But for this prediction to become reality, we need a prerequisite I mentioned above: a data system strong enough to support cueists, coaches, and organizers. Without it, we will continue to produce talented players who do not understand why they are talented, and we will continue to write good articles that lack depth. The biggest question I pose after reviewing this entire issue is: who will build that data system? Not the state, because sports budgets do not always prioritize billiards. Not the major clubs, because they are focused on competition and training. Perhaps the answer lies with those I still call "the silent people" — those who love billiards enough to sit and record 14 indicators for each frame, patient enough to maintain this for years, and humble enough not to demand recognition. If you are reading this article and you are one of those people, I want to tell you: your work is more important than any article I have ever written, and sooner or later Vietnamese billiards will realize that. Football has its own rhythm, data has its own rhythm — it took me many years to learn to put them in the same sentence, and I believe Vietnamese billiards is right at that threshold, waiting only for people patient enough to step through.