The Invisible Contract of Vietnamese Billiards: Who Actually Pays a Cueist?

The score stopped at 40-37.

It was the final of an open three-cushion billiards tournament, held at a club in Nam Tu Liem District, Hanoi, ending at 11:40 p.m. The hall held fewer than a hundred people. The applause was short — the kind of applause from people who had been sitting for four hours and still had to drive home. The winner, 24 years old, from a coastal district in central Vietnam, bowed to the organisers and walked straight out to the parking lot. I followed him not because of the 31st inning, but because of the A4 sheet a man in a white shirt handed him while everyone else was still taking souvenir photos.

That sheet contained three numbers: the monthly fee, the minimum number of matches he had to play for a billiards team named after a soft-drink brand, and the compensation owed if he moved to another team within 18 months.

Those three numbers added up to less than the price of a mid-range scooter. But they tied him down for nearly two years, at exactly the age when a three-cushion player enters the prime of his career.

The invisible contract only becomes visible when we count each number instead of listening to each promise.

And I counted. That is my job: reading contracts, cross-checking reports, tracing the money. But it was only after leaving that billiards hall that I realised something more than twenty years of watching Vietnamese sport had never shown me so clearly: billiards is the only sport here whose entire labour market operates without a single public price list.

Football has transfer fees, leaked wage bills, an international transfer log. Basketball publishes contracts before the season. Volleyball has remuneration mentioned in press conferences. Billiards has nothing. No player registry. No body publishing remuneration. Nobody confirms that a cueist moved from one team to another for how much — or even whether he moved for anything at all.

That makes billiards simultaneously the most transparent and the most secret transfer market in Vietnam.

No registry, only relationships

Start with a simple fact anyone who has sat in an amateur billiards club in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City knows: there are more billiards tables in Vietnam than artificial football pitches. A single street in Cau Giay District can hold four billiards clubs within a three-hundred-metre radius. Each club is a business, and each business can end up paying a cueist without anyone calling it a wage.

Since the amateur billiards boom, a semi-professional class of cueists has formed. They do not live on prize money. They live on three sources: coaching fees from amateur players, "mercenary" fees from club teams, and image contracts with brands. All three share one trait: none leaves a public paper trail.

In football, when a player moves club, the federation holds a file, the new club issues a statement, and sometimes both sides want the figure known to burnish their brand. In Vietnamese billiards, all three parties want the figure hidden, for entirely rational reasons.

The payer hides it because he does not want rivals to know his budget. The receiver hides it because he does not want his real income to become the ceiling in the next negotiation. And the broker hides it because the information gap itself is his asset.

I used to call it a grey zone. After many years, I call it by its proper name: a labour market with no registry.

The three income tiers of a cueist

To understand why that A4 sheet mattered, you have to split a professional Vietnamese three-cushion player's income into three separate tiers.

The first tier is match money. It is the most visible tier and the most misunderstood. Under the format published by the world billiards federation, three-cushion matches at World Cup level are played to 40 points, while most national and domestic open events are played to 30 or 40 depending on the round. Prize money at a domestic open usually only covers travel, accommodation and cue maintenance — provided the cueist reaches the semi-finals. Going out in the last 16 means most cueists lose money.

In other words, most of a cueist's money does not come from winning.

The second tier is team money. This is the tier that A4 sheet belonged to. Billiards teams carrying brand names — soft drinks, beer, sporting goods, club chains — pay a fixed monthly or seasonal sum to a group of cueists in exchange for those cueists wearing a logo, appearing at team events, and, more importantly, playing at sponsor-owned clubs during peak hours.

That is why the most important clause in a billiards team contract is not the salary. The most important clause is the number of appearance sessions.

The third tier is image money and coaching money. For a well-known cueist, private coaching can produce steadier income than competition. But it is also the most easily squeezed tier, because the image-exclusivity clause in a team contract is typically written so that the cueist cannot sign his own sponsorship deal, while the team has no obligation to find him one.

Three numbers of mine broke a deal that was just taking shape.

Specifically: a team in southern Vietnam wanted to sign a young cueist whose file I was tracking. The offer sounded excellent — double his current income. But reading the annex, I counted three numbers that did not match: a 36-month contract term, a 48-month image-exclusivity term, and a termination compensation equal to 12 months of income. The image term was longer than the contract term. That means after the contract ended, the cueist would still be locked out of his own image rights for another year, without being paid a single extra dong.

I sent him those three numbers in a four-line message. The deal collapsed. He still plays for his old team.

Translating contracts from legal language into human language

There is a line I have used over and over in more than twenty years of writing about sports contracts: the words of a contract are the only infidelity evidence billiards has.

What I mean is this. Interviews are always noble. Statements are always pretty. Only the clauses cannot lie, because clauses are written to protect one side in case the other changes its mind. And whichever side drafts the contract sets the trap.

Four clauses appear most often in the billiards contracts I have read.

The crossed-term clause. A 24-month playing contract with a 36-month image-exclusivity term. It sounds like an administrative detail. In practice, the cueist is held for an extra unpaid year.

The open minimum-match clause. The contract says "minimum 10 matches per year" but never says who decides the match list. If the team never enters the cueist in any event, the cueist has not breached anything — but he also earns no match bonuses, and the fixed salary is usually set very low precisely because match bonuses are expected to make up the difference.

The vaguely worded force-majeure clause. This is the clause I encountered most during the period when the market froze. It allows the team to cut remuneration when an "event beyond its control" occurs, while the definition of that event depends on the team's own decision. A postponed tournament can be used as a pretext to cut pay, while the cueist's training and appearance obligations remain unchanged.

The silent transfer clause. The contract does not forbid the cueist from leaving, but sets compensation higher than a full year's income. On paper, the cueist is free. In practice, no team will pay that sum for a cueist without an international ranking.

My job, sitting with a cueist and a contract, is not to read the clauses aloud. My job is to translate them into one Vietnamese sentence that a 24-year-old from a coastal district can grasp immediately: "If you play well, you still can't leave. If you play badly, they lose nothing."

The invisible heroes who never make the photo

In football, I once devoted an entire column series to data analysts and scouts. In billiards, the invisible heroes are far more invisible.

The first is the ball-setting referee. In three-cushion, balls are not racked by machine. The referee places them by hand, in the prescribed position, after every inning. A referee who sets the balls a few millimetres off in a match played to 40 points can change the outcome of an entire round. Nobody writes his name on the results sheet. Nobody pays him a fee proportionate to his influence.

The second is the teacher at the club. Most young Vietnamese cueists do not grow up in academies. They grow up in a billiards club, under the eye of an owner who has played for twenty years but has never been called a coach. That man teaches grip, cushion reading, and how to choose a safe position when you are behind on points. And he is usually the first person to guarantee a cueist who has to travel far from home to compete.

The third is the logistics person — the one who books tickets, rents rooms, carries the spare cue, and knows whose cue tip is warped. A cue that cannot be repaired during a trip can cost a cueist an entire tournament.

I do not hunt for news. I hunt for the silence between two rounds of interviews.

And in that silence, I always find the same structure: the person who decides a cueist's career is never the person on the scoreboard.

Where the money goes, and why

At this point, we should speak plainly about the paying side.

A billiards team carrying a brand name does not exist for purely sporting goals. It exists for two other goals: sales and relationships.

The sales goal is easy to grasp. A famous cueist sitting in a club on Saturday night pulls customers. Customers come, they drink, they rent tables by the hour. One appearance session by a name cueist can generate revenue many times the monthly fee the brand pays him.

The relationship goal is discussed far less. In the billiards industry, club owners, equipment distributors, tournament sponsors and organisers often sit inside the same personal network. A billiards team is sometimes founded not to win a title, but so that a name is present in the right place.

When I read a billiards team plan, I always ask three questions in order. Does this team pay a monthly salary or only match bonuses? If it is match bonuses only, who controls the schedule? And if the team dissolves, what obligations remain to the cueist?

In most cases I have reviewed, the answer to the third question is: none. The cueist loses his team, loses his stable income, and returns to the starting point with a few tens of millions in prize money already spent on travel.

That is why I always tell young cueists: do not ask how much the team pays you. Ask how much longer the team will keep paying you.

The counterintuitive angle: the most deceptive number in billiards

Here I have to say something that irritates many people in the game.

In football, the most deceptive statistic is possession. In three-cushion billiards, the most deceptive statistic is the average per inning.

That sounds absurd. The average is the basic measure of this sport. But look at how it is used. A cueist with a high average is usually described as a good attacker. Meanwhile, in matches played to 40 points, most of the match is not decided by big scoring innings, but by the innings that score nothing — innings where both players push the balls into difficult positions, forcing the opponent into low-probability shots.

A cueist with a 1.4 average who knows how to end an inning with a trapping position will beat a cueist with a 1.8 average who always leaves his opponent an easy position. The 1.8 looks better on the stat sheet. The 1.4 advances through the knockout rounds.

The hall was empty, the money still flowed, and the average turned out to be an umbrella shielding the stubborn habits of those who play beautifully.

I tested this by cross-checking my own records across several domestic seasons: in matches to 40 points between two cueists separated by less than 0.3 in average, the player with the higher number of innings ended with a safe position won the majority. The average predicted very poorly within this group. It only predicts well when the skill gap is wide enough that the match stops being a match.

What does that mean for the transfer market? A great deal. If you evaluate a cueist by his average — as most sponsors currently do, because it is the only number they have — you will pay for the beautiful scorer, not the title winner. And you will sign a long-term contract with someone you have never actually measured correctly.

Paperwork is the only thing that cannot lie

Back to the A4 sheet in the parking lot.

That 24-year-old cueist signed. I did not advise him not to, because in his situation a fixed income for 18 months is a real guarantee, not a trap. He needs money to keep competing. That is rational.

What I did was send him a simple spreadsheet: if he reaches a ranking sufficient to enter an international event within the next 18 months, what percentage of his future income would the transfer compensation consume? The figure was larger than he thought. He read it, went quiet, and asked me a question I have heard hundreds of times: "So what do I do now?"

My answer has not changed in more than twenty years: stop trying to change the payer. Start recording everything. Every appearance, every match, every bonus, every verbal promise. The day they change their mind — and they will — a complete notebook is worth more than every complaint posted online.

This is the part Vietnamese billiards lacks most, and also the easiest part to fix. You do not need a powerful federation. You do not need a national data system. You need one person, at each club, writing down exactly what happened.

I once wrote that in football, nobody protects a player except the player himself. In billiards, that is doubly true, because here not even the numbers are recorded.

What to watch next

Someone will say transparency is the solution. I do not believe it.

If every billiards contract were made public tomorrow, the first thing to happen would not be cueists getting paid more, but teams switching to verbal agreements. Money in billiards does not disappear when it is forced into the open. It simply changes route, usually into harder-to-trace channels — cash bonuses, family support, unnamed payments.

The real problem is not disclosure. The real problem is that cueists have no negotiating position, because they have no alternative. A footballer being squeezed on price can look for another club. A three-cushion cueist in Vietnam has only a handful of teams that actually pay, and they all know each other.

So what is worth watching over the next few seasons is not whether a transfer registry appears. What is worth watching is whether a second class of cueist emerges — players good enough to fund their own international travel, but not famous enough to be bound by image-exclusivity clauses.

If that class forms, the Vietnamese billiards market will have a price list for the first time in its history. Not because anyone published it, but because enough people finally have the power to say no.

Until then, everything runs the way it has always run: a cueist signs a sheet in a parking lot close to midnight, after just winning a match 40-37, with the next eighteen months of his life settled before he has even taken off his gloves.

The invisible contract is not far away. It is in the pocket of the man in the white shirt, and there is only one way to see it: count.