Vietnamese Carom and the Four Columns on the Binh Duong Scoreboard

On the corridor wall of the Binh Duong arena, a sheet of A4 paper is taped up with clear tape. Four columns: player name, innings, total points, average. That is all. No column records how often a player pushed an opponent into a difficult position, no column records the conversion rate after an opponent misses, no column separates the scoring of the deciding inning. One player finished the group stage that day with an average of 1.846. That average was good enough to be read out over the loudspeaker. He entered the knockout round, lost in the quarter-finals, then sat down in the corridor and nobody could explain why. The four columns stayed silent on the wall: enough to rank, not enough to understand. Over his last four innings, his average fell from 2.1 to 1.4. Same sheet, same column, same division, but two entirely different stories. One is a player scoring steadily; the other is a player who lost his rhythm and never found it again. The organisers' scoreboard gives both stories the same shape. Three-cushion is a sport Vietnamese billiards does not need anyone's permission to be proud of. Nguyen Quoc Hoang won the world title in 2026 in Randers, Denmark, according to data published by the Union Mondiale de Billard (UMB). Bao Phuong Vinh took the world crown in 2026 in an all-Vietnamese final. Tran Quyet Chien and Ma Minh Cam have spent years inside the top seeding group at World Cup events. Behind those names sits a wide ecosystem: thousands of billiard halls across every province, amateur tournaments at district and provincial level, late-night playing groups, hourly coaches. Binh Duong has hosted a World Cup leg for years, bringing the world's leading players to an arena a few kilometres from the city centre. Through all those years, the statistics sheet handed to spectators has kept the same four columns. My daily work is sitting with football data: xG, PPDA, distance covered, sprint counts. Before that came twenty-three years of snooker commentary for VTC, where a century break gets its own line and safety success is measured down to the percentage point. 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 when I look at that A4 sheet in Binh Duong, what I see is a gap in questions, not a gap in machinery. Those four columns answer exactly one question: who scored more per inning. In three-cushion, the average has been the standard measure for more than a century and remains the most important number in the sport. The problem is that it is the only number recorded. A single division can tell the story of a total; it cannot tell the story of a sequence. What I regret most is that the raw data already exists. At World Cup events, the refereeing team still logs every inning in order to cross-check scores and serve the broadcast. The sheet on the referee's table carries the innings count, the points of each inning, who broke each inning, which innings were interrupted by a placement error. What is missing is someone to turn those lines into metrics, and a common standard so events can be compared. Take an example from my own notebook. Across roughly forty matches at World Cup legs held in Binh Duong that I logged inning by inning myself, two players finished the group stage with the same 1.8 average but ended up worlds apart. The first built his 1.8 from alternating 0s and 4s. The second built his 1.8 from steady 1s and 3s. The second held his rhythm through the rounds and went deeper, and the A4 sheet recorded none of that difference. Before believing a number, I ask where it came from. The same applies to judging a player before commenting on him. The 1.8 averages of those two men came from two completely different kinds of match, and reading only the last column means picking the wrong man. People see the score; I see the innings where a player had his chance and let it drift. The break-shot innings are the first thing forgotten. In three-cushion, the player holding the cue ball to open an inning has a clear structural advantage, because the table opens up in front of him and the opponent must wait. Average when breaking differs sharply from average when receiving from an opponent, and a player can be strong in one situation and weak in the other. Then comes conversion: when an opponent misses and leaves a playable position, what percentage of those chances does the player convert? Then defence. A well-timed refusal forces the opponent into a difficult position, and its value appears in no column at all. Those three, plus point distribution across innings and scoring in the final innings, are enough to build a statistic sheet of eight columns instead of four. No smart cameras needed, no imported software. It needs one person sitting in the third row, logging each inning in order, patient enough for the data to speak. Pool has already taken a step here. In professional 9-ball and 10-ball events, a composite index measures overall performance, including break success, run-out rate and errors per match. One player is rated 0.850, another 0.720, and viewers instantly know who is playing better without rewatching the whole match. Three-cushion has no equivalent, even though the raw material is nearly identical. Snooker went through exactly this phase. Before metrics such as pot success, safety success and average shot time were widely published, people counted centuries and nothing else. Football spent a decade counting goals and shots before xG arrived. Every sport has a long stretch of misunderstanding itself, and Vietnamese three-cushion sits in the middle of that stretch. At home, pool is more popular than three-cushion among younger players, and amateur pool tournaments are multiplying fast. Duong Quoc Hoang is a familiar name on the regional 9-ball and 10-ball circuit. Yet even in pool, most domestic amateur events record only the match score, not the content of each rack. The data gap here is wider than the gap at professional level. The 2026 world final between two Vietnamese players is a good test case. Ten years from now, people will remember who won and what the score was, but nobody will remember how the eleventh inning of that match unfolded, who broke, and how the other player refused. Those details were logged at the referee's table, then thrown away when the match ended. A standard statistic sheet does not need to be complicated. It needs to be stable, so a district tournament today and a national tournament three years from now speak the same language. Once every domestic event uses the same form, players can be ranked by conversion rate, by break-shot scoring, by consistency across rounds. At that point, a player in Binh Duong will know exactly which part of his game is weak, instead of only knowing his average per inning. Sponsors benefit too. A tournament with clear metrics has stories to tell on television, data to build graphics with, and a basis for comparing one player with another across seasons. That is how football sells broadcast rights, and billiards can walk the same road at a smaller scale. Every season is a string of data, but my memories do not sit inside any model. I still remember a young player in Binh Duong who, after losing, sat for a long time in front of the four-column sheet, reading it over and over, as if the paper might say something more. The paper said nothing more. With three extra columns, he might have known what to fix. The counter-intuitive angle is that correlation gets read backwards as causation. In three-cushion, player and opponent share the same set of balls, so a high average is partly the opponent's product, because clean positions are usually left by the other man. A player averaging 2.0 against fast, straightforward opponents can drop to 1.2 against someone slow, meticulous, willing to refuse again and again rather than give anything away. A high average does not cause wins; sometimes it is the opponent's leaving that creates the high average. The same confusion repeats with distance covered in football. Running a lot produces a beautiful number, and running to no effect also produces a beautiful number. In billiards, a high innings count is not necessarily a sign of hard training; it can be a sign of long matches in which neither player could finish. In the empty arenas of 2026, I could hear the balls rolling and the sound of my note sheet dropping onto a stadium seat. That period taught me that when the competitive environment changes, old data loses value fast. A four-column statistic sheet will not notice what is shifting until the standings are already settled. For training centres and billiards teams in Vietnam, the risk sits in recruitment. Selecting on average means selecting exactly the players who shine against weak opponents and overlooking those with high conversion rates who landed in a hard side of the draw. Binh Duong back then had no expensive software, only people who believed every number would eventually find its way. The signal to watch next round sits right there on that taped-up sheet. If organisers print an extra column for per-inning scores, a column for break-shot scoring and a column for conversion rate, spectators will understand a match far more deeply than by reading one average. If a few people are willing to stay behind after the lights go out and log every inning, this sport will have what it lacks: a memory that can be verified. I am the one who stays with the numbers after the lights go out — you may call it a job, I call it my lot.