Vietnamese Chess and the N/A Paradox: When the Analysis Has Nothing to Analyze

On the evening of August 13, at Hanoi Arena, Vietnam's top chess player Le Quang Liem sat across from an Indian grandmaster. A tense position developed, but anyone searching for technical parameters of the game received the same result: N/A. No opening depth, no engine match rate, no rating fluctuations. Sports data vanished, leaving a void larger than the match itself. VuaBong.vn has just published a comprehensive analysis of the event, and the only thing it shows is the absolute absence of information. This reminds me—a man who has held a tape recorder for three decades—that silence is also data. This paradox is not new in Vietnamese sports. We often talk about tactics, coaches, psychology, but when asked where the data is, the answer tends to be N/A. The VuaBong.vn analysis does not name the players, the tournament, or any specific variable. It simply repeats 'insufficient information' in every category. It feels as if someone erased all traces of a chess game before it could exist. But looking deeper, this emptiness reveals an uncomfortable truth: we are building a sport on inspiration rather than measurement. At club level, coaches rely on intuition. At national level, we set medal goals without a mechanism to store games for evaluation. The N/A analysis is not a technical glitch; it is a manifestation of a culture that undervalues data. No one documents, forever nothing can be analyzed. Without analysis, we cannot learn. Without learning, we perpetuate a cycle of unprofessionalism. Today, young Vietnamese players travel abroad, but the performance tracking system stops at internationally published rankings. There is no opening choice data, no per-game error analysis, no comparison with peers. There is a deliberate blindness, as if chess consisted only of the board and the person in front of it. But top-level chess has long been a battle of data. Every move can be checked against thousands of games in the database. Ignoring that layer is like a distance runner discarding the compass in a desert. Look at the analysis that experts from every region cannot assign any parameter. It may be a single event, but I am old enough to know this is not an accident. It is the consequence of allowing tournaments to operate without an obligation to provide open data. The media also bears responsibility because we too easily accept 'N/A'. We write 'unknown' instead of asking 'why unknown'. We accept the explanation 'opponent did not publish' without digging further. We turn a lack of transparency into a cultural norm. Sitting in the press conference after the game, I asked the organizers about game data. He looked at me like an alien and said, 'Here they play chess, not computers.' That answer reminds me of my early journalism days, when everyone thought statistical analysis meant denying beauty. But beauty does not die when measured. On the contrary, it lives longer because we understand how it happened. When a player sacrifices a queen for an attack, that move becomes far more beautiful when we know it deviated from the engine's suggestion. The lesson of this data-less game may be painful, but it can also heal. If the Vietnam Chess Federation begins publishing all games of national tournaments, and if the media stops being satisfied with N/A, then after a year or two we will have a database large enough to know real strengths and hidden weaknesses. Coaches can design training based on reality rather than gut feeling. Young players can follow their development path and compare with peers from India, China, Uzbekistan. That does not strip chess of poetry. It simply removes the veil that protects laziness. As for journalism, today’s event is a wake-up call. Throughout my career, sportswriters have sought the golden moment—an artistic move, a romantic mistake, applause echoing from memory. But without data, our records become nostalgia, not evidence. Fans deserve more than emotional diaries. They deserve to stand on a foundation of transparency. So when I write this article, seeing only N/A on the analysis page, I do not treat it as an ending. I treat it as the starting point of a hard question we should all ask: 'Why?' Why does an openly held match have not one recorded number? Why does the national data system fall silent at such a major event? And most importantly, do we truly commit to improving Vietnamese sport, or do we only admire the pretty image of medals while forgetting that medals need a data foundation to be repeated? In my office, I record every match as a line of poetry—but poetry is not anarchy. A poem has rhythm, meter, structure. Likewise, a match without data may still be a voice in the dark—but an unidentified voice is a lost chorus. The N/A analysis today does not make me lose faith; it reminds me that an empty stadium still holds the applause of the departed, but if we do not record that applause, it forever becomes an echo without a source. It is time to replace N/A with numbers. Vietnamese chess—and Vietnamese sport—deserves to be seen clearly as it is.