Vietnamese Billiards in 2026: Three Disciplines on One Table

On an evening in May 2026, at a billiards club in central Ho Chi Minh City, two players stopped their match mid-frame to argue for twenty minutes over a single ball. One insisted it was a wrongly placed ball under snooker rules. The other said the match was being played under American pool rules, and the ball was perfectly legal. Nobody in the room could name the discipline they were actually playing. That story was not an isolated case, and it exposed a gap far larger than one misplaced ball. By 2026, billiards in Vietnam had moved beyond being a mere pastime. Clubs sprang up across the major cities, from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City, and the number of regular players rose quickly year after year. Vietnam's billiard halls were not loud, but the stream of players never fell silent. Alongside that growth was a fact rarely discussed: players, coaches and even the organisers of amateur tournaments were blending three disciplines with completely different rules — snooker, American pocket billiards and carom. The three share the same green table and the same cue, but share very little in the way of rules. I open the rulebook before I open my mouth. And that rulebook, when three disciplines coexist, speaks three different languages. Snooker is built on sustained scoring: a good player must be able to clear the table in a single visit while leaving the cue ball where the opponent cannot reply. It is a discipline of long-term calculation and control of the frame. American pool, especially the nine-ball format, begins with the break shot — a single stroke that sets the tempo of the whole rack — then turns into a fast scoring race where one slip can cost the rack. Carom has no pockets at all; it demands precise control of the cue ball's path and a patience quite unlike the other two. Skills in one discipline do not transfer directly to another. A fine snooker player may be flummoxed by the nine-ball break; a master of carom may fail to play a safety on a snooker table. Lumping everything together as billiards may seem convenient, but it hides a truth: each discipline needs its own training path, its own tournament system and its own scoring method. What stands out is that while the number of players kept rising, the coaching structure barely moved. There were few centres teaching any discipline systematically. There was no clearly defined youth tournament system. And most importantly, no body stepped forward to draw the boundaries between the disciplines — from competition rules and table standards to how players are ranked. The result was a wide playground with no touchlines, where talent was scattered rather than nurtured. The common view holds that playing several disciplines is an advantage, that a versatile player will simply be better. But look closely at the structure and the opposite is true. Blending disciplines does not produce a complete player; it produces players who are not deep enough in any one of them. A billiards scene that wants to produce real stars must first choose a discipline, build a path for it, and only then expand. The flexibility so many praise is, in fact, a sign of missing structure. Moreover, when three disciplines coexist without boundaries, amateur tournaments tend to drift into a patchwork of local rules. Every match has two readings: one for the spectators, one for the referee. A player used to snooker rules today steps onto a nine-ball table tomorrow and loses on a foul he does not understand. The referee, if there is one, is put in a difficult position, forced to rule on situations where the rules are anything but consistent. The story of a ball argued over for twenty minutes at a Saigon club in 2026 did not end there. It raised a question Vietnamese billiards will have to answer for years: if the very name of the discipline being played cannot be called correctly, how can anyone talk about training a top-class player? To go far, one must first know which table one is standing at.