The Sediment of Vietnamese Three-Cushion Billiards: The Spreadsheet Existed Before the Dream

At the end of May 2026, I sat in row three in Section C2 of the Nguyen Du Arena in Ho Chi Minh City. The national three-cushion final ended 40-37, but the name the crowd talked about most was a young player born in 2026, who produced four consecutive scoring runs in three innings, pulled the match level, and then missed the final shot because his elbow was trembling. No one mentioned him on television. I opened my spreadsheet and marked the 214th match I had tracked among players under 23 since the 2026 season. The sediment of a tournament is not in the trophy; it is in the players forgotten when the lights go out.

I do not do this work as a spectator. I am a player development adviser, focused on young players in three-cushion billiards. Across five consecutive seasons, I built a private spreadsheet for 68 players, recording three main groups of indicators: average points per inning, average points per match, and win rate when an opponent reaches 25 points first. I also noted non-technical factors such as training frequency, elbow condition, funding sources, and the number of official matches each year. The spreadsheet existed before the dream. I do not draw the future; I only measure the dust of time covering each indicator.

The context of Vietnamese three-cushion billiards is completely different from football. There is no central academy, no standard boarding system, no sponsor covering the path from youth level to the national team. Training runs on a family model: parents rent tables, pay coaches, and young players manage their own schedules. The pandemic in 2026 closed many halls, and it was in that gap that I saw which players could maintain discipline and which ones disappeared from the map because they had no resources. A scout cannot judge talent properly by looking only at match results; he must look at how that talent survives the months without competitions.

To understand why the retention rate is low, I had to look at infrastructure. A young player needs at least 12 hours of practice per week and 6 hours of competitive play per month. Among the 68 players I tracked, only 19 had access to a certified coach. The rest practiced by watching videos, corrected their elbow problems on their own, and built their own lesson plans. Players who trained alone often showed beautiful technique in clips but lacked a foundation under competitive pressure. They did not know how to handle balls near the cushion when tired, and they did not know how to choose a safe position while leading. Without a coach, talent is just a good seed planted in poor soil.

In the 214 matches I recorded, players aged 18 to 22 averaged 0.62 to 0.85 points per inning. Players aged 23 to 27 averaged 0.78 to 1.05. Players over 35, including several familiar names, maintained 0.95 to 1.18. Nothing surprising there. But when I divided the data by variance, the picture reversed. Young players blew leads of three points or more 31 percent of the time, much higher than the older group. They scored brilliantly in open situations but collapsed when opponents slowed the game down. Their rail calculation and cue-ball control were not deep enough to sustain high performance in a long match.

I found 47 profiles of promising young players over five seasons, not because my eyes were sharp, but because I was too lazy to trust existing reports. Those 47 profiles included outstanding names from northern and southern youth tournaments. By the 2026 season, however, only 18 still played professionally. Eleven had become coaches or moved to other jobs. The rest disappeared because they could not afford to compete. The retention rate was below 38 percent. This map is not a verdict. It shows that billiards does not lack talent; it lacks a supporting structure to carry talent through the fragile years of the early twenties.

Tran Quyet Chien, Nguyen Quoc Nguyen and Bao Phuong Vinh represent the older generation that grew up in that self-made system. They had almost no standard academy, no long trial period, and grew up on tables in residential neighborhoods. The data shows that all three averaged more than 1.00 points per inning in domestic events, but their age has already moved to the far side of the development curve. The points gap between the older generation and the next group is wide enough that we cannot call the young generation ready to take over. Internationally, striking moments have appeared, but I do not use titles to measure the strength of a foundation. The sediment of a World Cup is not in the trophy; it is in the players forgotten when the lights go out.

The most important part of the spreadsheet is the 92 matches in which I placed young players against older players. In those matches, the young group’s average points dropped by 0.13, while their loss rate after leading by 25 points or more doubled. Fourteen young players lost from a significant lead. A 40-point match usually lasts 10 to 14 innings. From the eighth inning onward, young players lost an average of 12 percent of their efficiency, while the older group lost only 5 percent. The difference is not in the beautiful shot. It is in breathing control, soft shot selection, and the ability to hold the table during difficult innings.

From a psychological angle, the young group hesitated clearly. In 214 matches, I recorded the moment when a player stepped to the table from the tenth inning onward. Players under 23 took an average of 3.2 seconds before each stroke in tight matches, compared to 2.1 seconds for the older group. They hesitated more in key situations, and the data showed that when preparation time exceeded four seconds, the success rate dropped by 18 percent. This is not technical weakness; it is a weakness in maintaining rhythm. The fewer official matches a young player has, the harder it is to keep that rhythm. The harder it is to keep rhythm, the more likely he will stand over the table too long and lose his natural flow.

One blind spot in the current system is that the formats are too short. Youth tournaments and national tournaments mainly use 30 or 40 points and finish in one evening. Meanwhile, European tournaments often use 50 or 60 points. Young Vietnamese players are used to attacking early, so when they enter a long match, they do not know how to pace themselves. This explains why a player can win three domestic matches in a row and then fail at an international qualifier. The issue is not shot quality. The issue is the capacity of playing habits.

I compared domestic data with a small international scouting network to which I had access. In Turkey and South Korea, young players start playing 40-point matches at age 15. In Vietnam, most players have to wait until age 18 to meet that format at a regional event. As a result, during the most important period for building match-management habits, Vietnamese players only practice in a low-risk environment. When they go on the international stage, they have to learn quickly what their peers have learned over five years. This gap cannot be closed by adding one short training camp.

The contrarian view I hold is that funding for young players is inefficient not because there is too little money, but because money is placed on the right people at the wrong time. Many families spend 300 million dong on the first three years of focused training, expecting their child to enter the youth national team after one season. When results do not come quickly, they withdraw support. Meanwhile, a player only enters the best technical absorption phase in the fourth and fifth years. I recommend that clubs sign a commitment to follow a young talent for at least three seasons before making any judgement. An archaeologist does not conclude after the first digging season; he digs deeper to find the relationship between the sediment layers. Vietnamese football has learned lessons from patient academies, and three-cushion billiards needs a similar process.

In practice, I once witnessed a trial case in Hai Phong in 2026. A young player from the Mekong Delta was highly rated for his scoring ability. My spreadsheet noted that he had the narrowest variance in the group of 68 players, but also noted that he had never played two consecutive matches in a long format on the same day. The management wanted to decide after one week. I asked to extend the trial by two more weeks so that he could play four 40-point matches in ten days. He won the first two matches, lost the last two, and clearly revealed his physical limits. Nobody called it a failure; it was a measurement. Every selection process is a form of reverse archaeology: we dig through the past to find a piece for the future.

Financially, a young player needs about 60 million dong per year for table fees, cue costs, chalk, travel, and entry fees. That amount is a small investment for a business but is huge for an average-income family in Hai Phong or Can Tho. Without scholarship funds, scouts can only select players who have already paid for their own training. That creates an unintentional geographic bias: big cities produce more names in scouting reports, while provinces in the Mekong Delta almost disappear from the map even though they do not lack raw talent. My spreadsheet has a separate column for hometown and economic background. That column reveals something highlights do not show.

The media tournaments and the national cup system also need to look at how rounds are scheduled. Many young players only face real competition in the final three months of the year, then fall into nine months without official matches. A player cannot develop if his schedule is crowded in October and then silent until March. I proposed that clubs in Hai Phong organize a mid-season friendly tournament with a 50-point format, spread over four evenings. After two years, the players in that group showed variance 8 percent narrower than those who did not join. This market needs such tournaments to keep the sediment layers from drying out.

Some people ask me why I do not write about champions, why I spend time on players who finish fourth, seventh, or get eliminated in the group stage. The answer is in how I see the sport. A generation cannot be judged by three names on the medal podium. It is judged by roughly thirty players who can break into the top 16, keep their form for three seasons, and put pressure on the national team. If only one name improves every year, the system is failing, no matter how many inspiring stories the media tells. I do not write to praise players. I write to preserve the cultural sediment they leave on the billiard table, before the glossy layer of titles covers it.

My data also shows a modest optimistic signal. Players born between 2026 and 2026 have a much denser approach to the cushion than earlier generations. They know how to use cue-ball position to hold the table, instead of only hunting for the explosive shot. Across the last three seasons, the share of young players averaging above 0.80 points per inning has risen from 6 to 14 percent. That is not enough to change the landscape, but enough to show the direction is right. If those players get more long-format matches in the next two seasons, their variance will narrow and the gap with the older group will fall below 0.10 points per inning. Then the transition will begin.

I am still following the 18 players who remained in the 2026 list. At the end of the 2026 season, I plan to publish a full update, comparing their three-year curve with the standard that older players reached at the same age. That will be the first time Vietnamese billiards has a long-term development map instead of an end-of-season praise list. The final answer does not exist yet. I only know one thing for sure: the early twenties of a player are like a young geological layer, beautiful on the surface but prone to landslides if the foundation is not checked. Whoever digs deep before rushing to praise a highlight will find the sediment that others leave behind.