Billiards in 2026: Three Disciplines on One Green Baize

November 2026 Three cushions. One cue ball. A dry click as two balls meet, loud in a room where the only other sounds are a ceiling fan and chalk scraping a tip. The player straightens up before the last ball has stopped. He is not watching the ball that has just run its course. He is watching the space the cue ball will leave for the shot after this one. That scene repeats every evening in the surviving billiard clubs of Ho Chi Minh City, and here and there in a few small rooms in the north. And it is precisely that moment — a player reading the cue ball's path instead of the ball he has just potted — that is most widely misread whenever people talk about billiards this year. In April 2026, at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England, Ray Reardon of Wales beat Perrie Mans of South Africa 25–18 to win the world snooker championship for the sixth time. It was the second consecutive year the game's most prestigious event was staged at the Crucible, and the year most British viewers first saw the green of the cloth through a colour television set. On another part of the map, Raymond Ceulemans of Belgium remained the most frequently named figure in three-cushion carom — a discipline with no pockets, only cushions. In the same period, across many Asian cities, American pool was spreading into new clubs with smaller tables, smaller balls, wider pockets and a far quicker rhythm. Three disciplines. Three rule books. Three scoring systems. Three different definitions of a good player. In Vietnam, all of them still sit under one word: bi-a. THREE DISCIPLINES, THREE SCALES THAT CANNOT BE CONVERTED More than ten years spent beside the cloth tables from Hanoi down to Ho Chi Minh City have taught me one simple thing: two players cannot be compared unless you first say which discipline they play. A three-cushion table under international standard measures 2.84 metres by 1.42 metres, with no pockets, and balls roughly 61 millimetres across. The rules require the cue ball to strike at least three cushions before it touches the third ball. The whole technique of the discipline lies in spin: the player forces the cue ball along a curve the eye cannot follow, sends it off three cushions and stops it exactly where it must be. The snooker table is larger: a playing area of 3.57 metres by 1.78 metres, six pockets, fifteen reds and six colours. The balls are smaller, roughly 52 millimetres. In this discipline a player's worth is measured by consecutive points in a single visit — the English call it a break — and by the ability to force an opponent into a position where he must gamble. The American table is the smallest of the three, usually 2.54 metres long, with balls around 57 millimetres and wide pockets. The opening break decides almost the whole frame. Three different scales. Three different units. A player who makes 100 consecutive points on a pocket table is not thereby capable of the equivalent on a three-cushion table, and a carom player who runs 15 says nothing about his ability on an American table. The result is a system with no hierarchy. No ranking list. No way for a player in Hanoi to know where he stands against a player in Ho Chi Minh City, let alone against Ceulemans. And when nobody can measure, all that is left is word of mouth that some player plays well. THE CLOTH AND THE DEAD CUSHIONS There is something else rarely mentioned when Vietnamese billiards is discussed: the condition of the tables. Most tables in use are old carom tables built decades ago. The cloth is worn down to exposed threads, which makes the cue ball roll slower and the spin die earlier. More serious is the rubber of the cushions. Dead rubber absorbs force instead of returning it, narrowing the rebound angle of the ball. A player who practises on dead cushions learns a completely false sense of speed. Put another way: the biggest problem for Vietnamese billiards in 2026 is the table, not the player. A skilled player on a broken table is still a player who has never truly been tested. The chain that runs the game is skewed accordingly. Clubs sustain players; players sustain tournaments; tournaments sustain sponsors and newspapers; newspapers and sponsorship money flow back into tables, cues and the next generation. In our country the first three links barely exist, and the last two have hardly formed. One more point deserves to be said plainly: betting. More than a few games in the clubs are played for money. When a sport has no official referees, no published scores and no clear hierarchy, its credibility is settled by rumour. That is a poor foundation for anything that wants to grow. THE PARADOX: THE HARDEST DISCIPLINE IS THE ONE LEAST SEEN The most common thing said about billiards here is that it is a pastime. The second most common is that Vietnamese billiards lacks good players. Both put the problem in the wrong place. What is missing is not players. What is missing is an accurate name for each discipline, and a way of measuring that goes with the name. A name of its own brings its own rules; rules bring their own tournaments; tournaments bring spectators; and only spectators bring the money to cover tables for the next generation. A second paradox is worth thinking about. People often assume American pool is the modern discipline and will replace the old three-cushion game. Look at the table and the opposite appears. A carom table has no pockets, which means there is nowhere for luck to fall in. Every point must pass through three cushions and a curve the player creates himself. American pool is faster, easier to approach, and easier to settle with a lucky break. And one more thing. In England this year, snooker grew not because it is harder or better than carom. It grew because colour television had become cheap enough to carry images of red, blue and yellow balls into every home, and because the Crucible has seats for paying spectators. Whether a discipline grows or shrinks depends on whether it is named correctly and measured correctly; technique only decides who wins, not whether the game survives. THREE THINGS WORTH WATCHING First, whether someone builds or imports a table to proper standard, with live cushion rubber, and puts players on it regularly. Second, whether someone starts keeping records. No machinery needed. A notebook listing every visit, every point, every miss, kept separately per discipline, would be enough for people to know where they stand within two years. Third, whether someone separates the three disciplines into three separate tournaments, even at the scale of a single city. I do not watch billiards from the stands. I count the space between two cushions. And by the end of 2026 the largest space still lies outside the table: the space between a sport that genuinely exists and a name nobody has bothered to define. Do not ask who Vietnam's number one player is. Ask which discipline he plays, how many metres long his table is, and whether the cushions are alive or dead.