Billiards Is Not One Sport: The Real Power Map of Carom, Snooker and Pool in Vietnam

At a three-cushion carom World Cup final in Ho Chi Minh City, the stands were full and applause poured onto the table like a tide. Tran Quyet Chien bent over, placed his cue, and the arena held its breath for the decisive shot. Behind me, a group of young fans kept their eyes fixed on a phone, where an English snooker player was compiling a century break. Both sides called what they were watching "bida." I once thought it was just a colloquial habit. The longer I work in this field, the more I see that this way of naming things exposes a deep gap in how a sport is understood. Numbers never tell the whole story, but they know where the story begins.

In Vietnamese, "bida" is an umbrella wide enough to cover four sports with entirely different rules, techniques and commercial ecosystems. Three-cushion carom is played on a pocketless table, scoring by sending the cue ball off two cushions and into the other two balls. Snooker is played on a green baize table with fifteen reds and six colours, scored through breaks. Eight-ball and nine-ball pool belong to American and Philippine circuits. Chinese billiards, or Heyball, is a hybrid of snooker and pool pumping huge prize money into the Asian market.

Vietnam is a genuine power, but in only one of those four boxes. In three-cushion carom, Tran Quyet Chien and Bao Phuong Vinh are names inside the world's top group, regularly reaching the closing rounds of World Cups. Three-cushion World Cups held in Ho Chi Minh City and Binh Duong over the years have drawn legends such as Dick Jaspers, Torbjorn Blomdahl and Frederic Caudron. Packed home crowds, a fierce atmosphere, dense media coverage. That is a real achievement, impossible to deny.

Ask about snooker, though, and the picture changes colour entirely. Vietnam is almost absent from the professional snooker map, where the throne belongs to the United Kingdom and China. In nine-ball pool, a few Vietnamese players reach Asian events but have yet to make a mark on the world stage. In other words, the success of "Vietnamese billiards" is in truth the success of a single branch, while the rest of the umbrella stays empty.

What makes the story interesting is this: these four sports share one name but do not share one logic. Three-cushion carom is a sport of geometry and control. A good player must calculate the cue ball's path across two cushions, read spin, and control force to the millimetre. Snooker is a sport of long-term positional thinking: each shot both scores and places the cue ball in a favourable position for the next, sometimes planned ten shots ahead. Nine-ball pool leans on speed and psychology, where a single mistake can end a rack. Heyball combines pool's small table with snooker's difficulty, creating a stage where prize money is rising faster than in any other branch.

Differences in the commercial ecosystem are even larger than differences in technique. Snooker has the Triple Crown of the World Championship at the Crucible, the UK Championship and the Masters, with nearly half a century of television history and enormous broadcast value. Nine-ball pool has the Mosconi Cup, marketed as billiards' answer to the Ryder Cup, with Team Europe against Team USA. Three-cushion carom relies on the World Cup system and continental events run by the UMB, where prize money is modest but technical prestige is high. Heyball uses Chinese money to buy global attention, with prize pools far above the norm.

There is a lesson I learned after years of following the sport: sharing a name does not mean sharing a sport, and the way people name a thing often captures its true nature before any analysis does. Before you pick a team, read what people call them. When Vietnamese media lump everything under "bida," they unintentionally blur the line between a genuine national strength and the branches still in their infancy. The result is that investment, audience attention and youth development are spread out on instinct.

My tracking data across many seasons shows a paradox. Three-cushion carom events in Vietnam always draw crowds and sponsors, yet the money flowing into youth development is thin. Young players still have to fend for themselves, find coaches, find tables, and many quit because they cannot make a living from competition. Meanwhile, in another branch, international events with large prize money are waiting for anyone brave enough to switch course. The thicker the data file, the more the story must be told by a human ear, not a machine eye.

Seen through the industry value chain, Vietnamese billiards has a structural paradox. Upstream, billiard halls sprout across big cities, creating a broad base network and a large amateur playing generation. Midstream, professional events and media remain thin, lacking a national competition system strong enough to filter talent. Downstream, sponsorship, rights and the derivative market are almost untouched. We have a foundation but no bridge, passion but no path.

One point rarely mentioned is the depth of the pipeline. In carom, Vietnam has a golden generation but not yet a successor class thick enough to hold its position for the next decade. In snooker, the gap with England and China is too wide to close in the short term. In pool, we have only just touched the professional threshold. The power map of Vietnamese billiards is therefore a triangle standing on a single leg, and that is a beautiful but fragile stance.

A pandemic did not kill football; it exposed its tactical skeleton. For billiards, a similar shock came from another direction: match-fixing scandals. In 2026, the snooker world was shaken when a series of Chinese players were banned for betting and result-fixing, including lifetime bans. That event showed that a sport, however glamorous, can be eroded from within if monitoring systems and professional culture do not keep pace with the speed of money. For Vietnamese billiards, this is a preventive lesson, not someone else's story.

The most counter-intuitive thing, to me, is that pride in "Vietnamese billiards" is unintentionally holding back its own development. When the whole country merges four sports into one, we tend to compare wrongly, invest wrongly and expect wrongly. A carom fan may think success in carom will automatically translate into success in snooker or pool. But a pocketless carom table, a baize snooker table with six colours, and a small pool table with tight pockets are three different technical worlds. A top carom player can be lost at a snooker table, and vice versa.

Another paradox is that we hold an advantage few Southeast Asian nations have, yet do not exploit it as a brand of its own. Instead of building "Vietnamese three-cushion carom" as an independent identity, we let it dissolve into the shared umbrella of "bida." The World Cups in Ho Chi Minh City are a golden chance to position the nation on the global carom map, but their commercial and media potential has yet to be fully awakened.

People sell shirts, but what they are really selling is the return of a name. With billiards, the same holds: people buy a ticket, but what they are really buying is the feeling of standing in a space where skill and nerve are honoured. If we read the name of each branch correctly, we will know how to sell exactly what the audience truly wants to buy.

I do not wish for a day when Vietnamese people stop calling billiards "bida." I wish for a day when they understand that billiards is a family of children with different temperaments, and each child needs its own upbringing. If three-cushion carom is the grown child, snooker and pool are still waiting for a guiding hand. Naming a sport correctly is the first step toward giving it a future it deserves. A great event does not end when the whistle blows; it begins when the lights go out.