Notebook by the Billiards Table: Data and the Silent Counters

At a 9-ball tournament held in Binh Duong late last year, I sat in the third row with my notebook open. My goal that night was not to enjoy beautiful shots. I was counting. A twenty-four-year-old cueist, a rising face in southern Vietnam's billiards scene, executed 78 shots over two hours. Of those 78 shots, 31 times he deliberately placed the cue ball into a defensive position instead of attacking. Only 4 of those produced a genuine winning opportunity. The electronic scoreboard above showed only the final result, 7-5. No one in the arena knew that this player had just closed out a match with a defensive conversion rate of only 12.9% - a figure that, had I sent it to a coach in Manila, he would have called back the same night. But here, it does not exist. Not because of missing equipment. Because no one has asked the question. Vietnamese billiards sits between two waves. One is the wave of amateur tournaments blooming across all three regions, with hundreds of tables in clubs in Hanoi, Da Nang, Binh Duong and Ho Chi Minh City. The other is a generation of young cueists, born after 2026, raised on online instructional videos, gaining access to world-class technique faster than any generation before them. But what both waves lack is something quiet: structured data. In football, we are used to xG, PPDA, key passes. In billiards, we still stop at the score. As a data consultant for football clubs, I have said many times that a match is more than goals. In billiards, a frame is more than points. There is cueing rhythm, spin accuracy, the ability to read the table the moment the cue ball stops. All of it can be measured. But to measure it, someone must believe it is worth measuring. In 2026, when I began working as a data consultant for Binh Duong at the age of thirty-six, I learned something simple: data does not replace people, it only helps people see what they overlooked. When my club had only 42% possession but created 18 scoring chances from counterattacks, I spent 12 nights completing a 25-page report on a PPDA sitting at 8.7. The result was 9 consecutive clean sheets and a climb from 10th to 4th. There was no miracle there. Just a question asked at the right moment. Billiards needs exactly one question like that. Start with the break. In 9-ball, the quality of the break decides the entire structure of the frame that follows. But when I tracked 240 frames at a regional event, I found that only about 6% of cueists track their break-success rate against specific opponents. Most only remember the feeling of the previous frame. That is a vast data gap. If a cueist knew that his break left a favourable position in only 41% of cases against one opponent, while that number rose to 58% against another, he would adjust his cue-ball placement in the very next frame. That is not magic. It is simple subtraction between two numbers. Next comes defensive quality. In professional billiards, a good safety is not an evasive shot. It is a shot that forces the opponent into a mistake at a position you anticipated. The problem is that we measure defence by feel. I propose an index I call the Post-Safety Pressure Index, or PSPI: the percentage of safeties that lead to a scoring chance within the following two innings. Asian-level cueists I track have PSPI ranging from 18% to 34%. That 16-percentage-point gap does not lie in basic technique. It lies in the ability to read an opponent's intent. That is what never appears on a scoreboard, and what many coaches in Vietnam still lack the tools to measure. Third is accuracy by table zone. Not every shot carries the same value. A shot from the left third of the table, after the cue ball has touched two cushions, has a far lower success probability than a straight shot. If we divide the table into nine zones and record success rates by zone, we immediately see where a cueist's true weakness lies. Someone may hit 82% in the central zone but only 46% in the far corner. That gap, not overall accuracy, is what an opponent can exploit. This is basic logic in any adversarial sport. Yet Vietnamese billiards has not built that data system. In 2026, at the World Cup in Russia, I spent 30 days rewatching all 64 matches and found that Croatia were not the side with the highest xG, but the side that covered the most ground, averaging 112 km per match. I wrote a purely statistical piece on Luka Modric, who delivered 12 key passes per match at 87% accuracy. The piece was criticised as dry. Readers wanted the story of the war refugee who became a conductor. And I learned a lesson: a number only gains weight when it stands beside a story. The same is true of billiards. If I present only a PSPI table for a young cueist in Dong Thap without telling the story of the nights he practised on an old table at home, the table will be ignored. But when I say that his safeties - logged across 60 consecutive shots - lifted his PSPI from 19% to 32% in six months, that is when the number becomes a story. And that story can travel. What is worth noting is that the tools already exist. A phone camera is enough to film a frame. Free scoring apps are enough to log shots by table zone. No one needs expensive software. Binh Duong in those years had no expensive software, only people who believed that every number would find its way. And that belief, not the technology, was what changed the situation. In 2026, when the pandemic left stadiums empty, I analysed 500 European matches and found that home teams won only 32% of games without fans, a significant drop from 45% the previous season. I quietly sent this report to clubs in Vietnam, helping them adjust to counterattacking play rather than proactive pressing. Seven clubs applied it, and they improved their points-per-game rate by 23% over that period. I tell this story because it carries a direct lesson for Vietnamese billiards: when the environment changes, old numbers no longer hold their value. A cueist without a crowd behind him places the ball differently. A tournament without crowd pressure has a different rhythm. If we do not record that change, we will keep analysing with data from a world that has already vanished. But now I must say what few want to hear. We tend to package effort metrics and turn them into a measure of class. In football, distance covered and sprint counts are presented as proof of dedication. But running a lot does not mean running effectively. A player who covers 11.8 km per match but spends most of it fruitlessly chasing the ball produces a number that only looks good on paper. Billiards has an identical trap. Shot volume, training hours, title counts in amateur events - all can become pretty numbers that do not reflect real ability. I once received a stat sheet for a young cueist with a 72% win rate in amateur tournaments. But when broken down by opponent quality, that number fell to 38% against nationally ranked cueists. The truth lies at the second layer of data, not the first. And here is the angle I consider most important, and the one many will not agree with. We give far too much attention to the perfect attacking shot - the shot that is filmed, shared, praised. But it is the safeties that decide frames. Across the 240 frames I analysed, the win rate of cueists with PSPI above 30% was 2.3 times higher than those below 20%, regardless of their attacking success rate. That is a strong correlation. But correlation is not causation. I am not saying that raising PSPI to 30% guarantees victory. I am saying that in this dataset, the two variables move together with a strength worth questioning. And that question, once again, no one has asked. People see the finishing shot, I see the eighteen positioning shots leading to it. Football has its own rhythm, data has its own rhythm. It took me years to learn to place them in the same sentence. Vietnamese billiards also needs to find that rhythm. Not by importing models from abroad, but by sitting down beside each frame and recording what no one has recorded. Every season is a string of data, but my memory is not in any model. What I remember most from that night in Binh Duong is not the 7-5 score. It is the moment that twenty-four-year-old cueist, after the thirty-first safety of the match, straightened his back and looked at the table as though he had just seen a path no one else could see. He did not know I had been counting. But perhaps he was counting in his own way too. And if there is one thing I want to bring to Vietnamese billiards this season, it is not new software. It is a notebook so each person can count for themselves, ask for themselves, and find their own number. Because before trusting a number, I always ask where it was born. Just as I look at a cueist before passing judgement. And perhaps, one day, a young cueist in Dong Thap or Binh Duong will be the first to answer that question - not with words, but with the very frames he recorded with care.