Vietnamese Billiards in 2026: Three Sports, One Name, and Not a Single Line of Records

In a small billiards hall on Cau Dat Street in Hai Phong, on a June afternoon in 2026, three men sat around a green-clothed table and argued for twenty minutes. Not about who won or lost. They argued over something far simpler: what the sport they had just watched was called.

The first called it “bi-a”. The second insisted on “bi da”. The third, wiping his cue, said flatly: “Snooker.” None of them was entirely wrong. And none was entirely right — because in 2026 Vietnam, three sports with completely different rules, table dimensions, ball sets and cueing technique were all called by a single word.

Thirty years later, reading back what little survives from that period, I realise the argument in the Cau Dat billiards hall was not a trivial anecdote. It was data. And it is the only data we have.

A pivotal year, an invisible sport

2026 was a pivotal year for Vietnam. On 11 July, diplomatic relations between Vietnam and the United States were normalised. Also in July, Vietnam formally joined ASEAN. In December, the Vietnamese sports delegation left for the SEA Games in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Vietnamese sport was then in transition. Football had a national championship, a national team, a stadium crowd. Athletics, swimming and shooting had federations, coaches and training centres. Billiards was different. In 2026, billiards had no national federation operating by discipline, no ranking system, no regularly organised official tournaments, and most importantly — nobody keeping systematic records.

That was the general picture. A sport popular in daily life yet almost invisible in the data system.

The French brought billiards to Vietnam from the late nineteenth century. The most common form then was carom billiards — a table with no pockets, where the player strikes the cue ball into two object balls to score. This style was cheap, easy to learn, required little equipment and suited small urban halls. By 2026, carom remained the most common form in the North.

At the same time, two other disciplines were creeping in. Snooker — a large table, 15 reds, 6 colours, small pockets — followed foreign workers and sailors into port cities such as Hai Phong and Saigon. Pool — numbered balls, wider pockets, a smaller table — arrived through tapes and televised Asian tournaments.

Three disciplines, three rule sets, three technical vocabularies, and one shared word: “bi-a”.

Three disciplines, three worlds

The first lesson of my profession is this: before asking “who is better,” you must ask “what are they playing.” That is a non-negotiable principle. You cannot compare a three-cushion carom player with a snooker player, any more than you can compare a breaststroke swimmer with a freestyle swimmer simply because both are in the water.

In 2026 Vietnam, the second question was almost never asked.

Carom billiards is the pocketless game. The player strikes the cue ball into the other two. In libre carom, merely touching both balls scores. In three-cushion, the cue ball must contact at least three cushions before touching the second ball — the hardest discipline in the carom family, demanding path calculation and stroke force accurate to the millimetre.

Snooker uses a large table, small pockets, 15 reds and 6 colours. Players score by potting balls in the order the rules prescribe. Snooker demands the highest level of positioning and safety play of any billiards discipline. One missed shot can hand an opponent the entire frame.

Pool uses a smaller table, wider pockets and balls numbered 1 to 15. The two common variants are 8-ball and 9-ball. Pool is faster, more accessible, and better suited to television.

These three differ in almost everything: table size, ball size, ball weight, pocket size, cue type, scoring method, and how victory is decided. A good carom player can lose to someone who has played snooker for three months, if the two swap tables. That is not a paradox. That is logic.

The number that does not exist

This is the hardest part of this piece, and I have to say it plainly.

I have no data for 2026. No match count, no player count, no tournament count, no ranking table, no figure at all that can be cross-checked.

And that is precisely the most important finding.

A lack of data is not the consequence of underdevelopment. It is the cause.

In my profession, people often assume that if something has no data, it has not yet become important enough to measure. Reality runs the other way: if something is not measured, it will never become important enough to have data. This is a closed loop, and Vietnamese billiards in 2026 sat neatly inside it.

Look at the structure: no data leads to no comparison; no comparison leads to no ranking; no ranking leads to no professionalisation; no professionalisation leads to no sponsorship; and without sponsorship there is no new data. This is a self-reinforcing spiral, and it explains why a sport present on almost every street corner in Vietnam produced no professional competition system through the whole of the 1990s.

The name is not the problem

Many will say: the problem is only the name. What difference does it make whether you call it “bi-a,” “bi da” or “snooker”?

The difference is this: when you cannot separate the disciplines, you cannot separate the records either. When a newspaper in 2026 wrote “Hai Phong cueist wins billiards championship,” the reader did not know whether it was carom, snooker or pool. Thirty years later, the analyst does not know either. That achievement becomes meaningless data — impossible to compare, impossible to rank, impossible to inherit.

I once thought this was only a matter of the past. But in this profession I met it again in another form. Once, I built a model on a tournament's data, and the model produced a completely wrong result. The cause was not the algorithm. The cause was that I had mixed the figures of two different competition formats into the same table. Data never lies. But I misheard it.

Talent was not the missing variable

There is a popular explanation I have heard many times: Vietnamese billiards failed to develop in the 1990s because of a lack of talent. I do not believe it.

The correlation is clear: the period without data coincides with the period without international results. But correlation is not causation. If a lack of talent were the real cause, then after 2026 — when Vietnamese billiards began appearing at regional events — we would not have seen a generation of cueists mature so quickly. But we did. Talent was never the missing variable. Structure was the missing variable.

And here is the truly counterintuitive point: the naming confusion of 2026 was not a language error. It was an infrastructure error. In the short term, that very ambiguity kept billiards alive at grassroots level — because an activity with no clear definition also has no barrier to entry. But the price was that nobody was ever recognised. No records, no rankings, no history. A sport can survive without data. It cannot grow without it.

That is why I do not take part in arguments of the kind “who was Vietnam's number one cueist back then.” There is no data to answer with, and every answer is sentimental. The majority may have laughed when I said so. The data did not.

Ten minutes a night

What I take from 2026 is not regret. It is a reminder.

If, in 2026, just one person in just one billiards hall had spent ten minutes each evening writing down — which discipline was played today, who won, what the score was — then today we would have thirty years of data. Thirty years is enough to build a ranking, enough to compare generations, enough to answer the question “who was best” with numbers rather than memory.

We do not have those thirty years. But we have today.

The question I leave behind is not “who was best in 2026.” The question is: thirty years from now, will anyone read back what we are recording today? And if they do, will they understand which sport we were talking about?

I do not write to convince anyone. I write so that the data has a witness.