The Data Void in World Billiards: Notes from a Pool Table in Hai Phong

At three in the morning I opened my spreadsheet and found it empty. The tournament column was empty. The discipline column was empty. The columns for innings, points and frames won were empty. That sheet was supposed to describe an international billiards event that had just finished, and all that remained was its skeleton. I stared at the blank space longer than necessary, then did what four years of writing have taught me: I wrote down that I had nothing to analyse.

In Hai Phong I make a living turning billiards matches into strings of numbers. That trade only works when the raw data is thick enough. That night it was not. After a few hours of self-interrogation, I realised the blank space on my screen did not belong to me alone. It is the baseline condition of a sport with tens of millions of players and almost no shared record-keeping system.

Every piece of writing I do starts with a checklist of conditions to verify: which discipline, which tournament, how many matches in the sample, who measured, and how. That night, the first four lines were blank.

Billiards is a family of at least six disciplines with different rules: snooker, 9-ball, American 8-ball, Chinese 8-ball, three-cushion carom and Russian pyramid. Different tables, different balls, different scoring, and even a different name for the same shot. A break shot in 9-ball has nothing to do with a scoring run in snooker. Putting the two into the same data column is wrong from the headline onwards.

Tournament structures are just as clearly tiered. The title-contending group sits inside the world Top 16, the mid-tier backbone runs from 32 to 64, and below that lie qualifiers and amateurs. Prize money tilts hard towards the top: a ranking-event champion can earn dozens of times what a second-round loser takes home. That distribution produces a technical consequence few notice. High-quality data exists only where players compete often, while the 32-64 group and the qualifiers have almost no sample to compare.

The international calendar spans continents and lasts nearly the whole year. A leading player can fly from Asia to Europe and then to the Middle East inside six weeks. That travel rhythm directly affects form, yet it appears in almost no statistical table. To judge correctly I have to rebuild each player's schedule from flight tickets, departure times and organisers' notices — manual work, and easy to get wrong.

Vietnam sits in a peculiar position. In three-cushion carom we have world champions: Bao Phuong Vinh and Tran Quyet Chien carried Vietnam onto the gold board in consecutive years. At the recording level, however, most scoresheets are still written by hand beside the table, and nobody digitises them. A billiards nation strong in cueists but thin in data is a nation that is hard to price.

Discipline identification is the mandatory step, and it is routinely skipped. Without a confirmed discipline, every accompanying comparison is meaningless, no matter how rigorous the numbers look. Home-table win rate, average points per frame, safety-shot success rate — these metrics mean entirely different things in each discipline. I have seen form comparisons blending three different disciplines, and the conclusion was wrong not because the data was bad, but because the question was framed badly from the start.

The power map of billiards is drawn with three strokes. The United Kingdom still holds snooker's centre of gravity, where the 2026 generation of Ronnie O'Sullivan, John Higgins and Mark Williams is still marking the closing rounds after more than three decades. China took another road: Ding Junhui opened the door, and a following generation of Zhao Xintong and Yan Bingtao pulled an entire domestic 8-ball circuit with large prize funds behind it. Continental Europe and Vietnam hold their ground in three-cushion carom, where the world ranking is far more continuous than in snooker.

What deserves attention is the depth of the young talent pipeline, not the title count of the leading group. A country that places ten players in the main draw of a ranking event will have a firmer foundation than a country with exactly one lonely champion. That is the kind of index billiards barely measures, and the kind sponsors need most.

My rule is that every judgement must rest on at least two independent data sources. In football that is relatively easy. In billiards the second source usually does not exist, so I have to go back to video, counting each cue ball path by hand. The method is slow, sustainable for only a few dozen matches a season, and it is the reason I never conclude from a single metric.

Governance is where billiards data proves its value most clearly. In 2026, the John Higgins investigation forced the whole snooker world to rewrite its procedures. In 2026, ten Chinese cueists were banned after a lengthy investigation, several of them effectively for life. In both cases, what triggered the inquiry was not testimony but data: unusual betting patterns cross-checked against what happened on the table. In billiards, data has governance value before it has predictive value. A sport that cannot record its own results has no way to protect itself.

The industry chain runs from the bottom layer: practice rooms and pool halls, where thousands play every day. The middle layer is players, events and broadcast. The top layer is sponsorship, equipment and the collectibles market. In Vietnam the bottom layer is the thickest and the least documented. Nobody can measure how many cueists train each week in a city, or how many amateur events are held each month. A market you cannot count is a market you cannot price.

Then comes the counter-intuitive part. More data does not automatically produce better analysis. Billiards is a tiny-sample sport: a three-cushion final can last only a few dozen innings, and a short-format snooker match can end before a player finds rhythm. Inside such a narrow sample space, a lucky kiss, one damp cloth or one bad breath can decide the whole frame. I have been overconfident many times on a run of just seven or eight matches, and the match itself corrected me. Data never lies, but I have misheard it before.

Correlation also has to be separated from causation. The 2026 case was read as evidence that Chinese billiards had collapsed. The pipeline of young cueists there did not stop; what collapsed was public and market confidence, not the development system. The crowd laughed. The numbers did not. A year later, I re-filed that piece.

The human factor still sits outside every spreadsheet: pressure on the deciding shot, crowd noise, the feeling of being off by a millimetre after one bad path. In carom, home advantage actually lives in humidity, in the cloth, in the lighting — things no camera records. When home is no longer a fortress, I learn to listen to an empty stand.

The signal for the next cycle is not a title. It is who standardises data recording discipline by discipline first. If someone does, billiards will have what football has had for years: a run of numbers long enough to argue about. I do not write to persuade anyone. I write so that the data has a witness. And if nobody does it, we will keep debating billiards by feel, the way people have for twenty years.

Three thousand matches taught me that one match can teach more than all of them. The problem is that you need a match to watch in the first place.