Four Cue Sports, Four Reference Frames: Why I Refuse to Merge the Data Into One Table

In June 2026, after the British professional billiards governing body published sanctions against ten Chinese players — two of them life bans — I received seventeen messages in a single evening. Sixteen asked the same question: is billiards the sport most prone to match-fixing? The seventeenth asked something else: "Do you have a data table I can compare against?"

I opened my hard drive, opened a four-year-old spreadsheet, and realised I had been keeping four different sports inside one file. One sheet had a century break column. One sheet had a break-and-run column. One sheet had an average-per-inning column. They sat side by side, in the same cell format, under the same header row. In a client report in 2026, I added them together.

Billiards is not one sport. It is four parallel competition systems run by different bodies, with four different economies.

Snooker is played on a 12-foot table with fifteen reds, governed by the WPBSA and WST, both headquartered in Britain. Success here is measured in century breaks — a single visit of 100 points or more — with the 147 maximum as the pinnacle. The flagship event is the World Championship at the Crucible in Sheffield, running seventeen days.

American pool, both eight-ball and nine-ball, is played on seven- or nine-foot tables with far larger pockets. The pace is quicker, visits are shorter, and the signature metric is the break-and-run: a legal break followed by clearing the table in the same visit. The tour is run by the WPA alongside private operators such as Matchroom, with the Mosconi Cup as its recognisable brand event.

Three-cushion carom has no pockets. Bare table, three cushions, scored by inning, governed by the UMB. The metrics are average points per inning and the number of innings needed to reach forty or fifty. This is the discipline Vietnam is strongest in.

Chinese eight-ball is a hybrid product: table and rules sitting between snooker and pool, prize money denominated in renminbi, and a domestic tour that runs year-round.

Four disciplines, four rulebooks, four scoring systems, four prize structures, four levels of risk exposure. Merging them into one spreadsheet is not simplification — it is getting the sport wrong.

Based on my own experience tracking matches over the past four seasons, the most common mistake among amateur analysts in Vietnam is using snooker metrics to talk about carom, and using pool's tempo to pronounce on snooker.

The clearest evidence sits in prize structure. The snooker World Championship has a total prize fund of roughly 2.4 million pounds; the winner takes 500,000 pounds, a second-round participant takes 30,000, and even a first-round loser walks away with 20,000.

A UMB three-cushion World Cup stop has a total prize fund many times smaller, usually a few tens of thousands of euros, split across a large field. A domestic Chinese eight-ball event can pay its champion anything from several hundred thousand to millions of renminbi.

That gap determines motive. In snooker, a player inside the top 32 lives on prize money and can lose tour status by dropping outside the top 64 at the end of a two-year cycle. In carom, many leading players still teach or coach to make ends meet. Two income levels produce two kinds of pressure, and pressure is the variable every risk model has to measure.

Ranking systems do not share a logic either. Snooker uses the WPBSA's rolling two-year ranking, meaning a tournament's points expire after exactly 24 months. Carom uses UMB points accumulated stop by stop on the World Cup circuit. Pool runs on several different lists depending on the tour.

For a data person, that difference matters more than it looks: the same word, "ranking", but one is a sliding window and the other a cumulative total. Mixing those two kinds of time series into one chart manufactures a false trend. I once built a chart like that and spent two weeks working out why the regression line was meaningless.

Technical metrics are not interchangeable either. Snooker's century break measures sustained scoring on a large table with small balls and tight pockets. Nine-ball's break-and-run measures position control and the ability to hold the visit across a short rack. Carom's average measures consistency across dozens of consecutive innings, where a single small error ends the visit.

Ronnie O'Sullivan holds the record of fifteen maximum 147s and has passed 1,200 career centuries. None of those numbers says anything about his nine-ball ability, and nothing about holding an average of 1.8 points per inning on a carom table. Each discipline has its own reference frame, and a player who excels in one may be merely average in another.

Vietnam occupies a very specific position in this picture. In three-cushion carom, Vietnam has a world champion: Bao Phuong Vinh, crowned in 2026 after an all-Vietnamese final against Tran Quyet Chien, himself a multiple World Cup winner. In nine-ball pool, Duong Quoc Hoang and the next generation keep appearing at Asian events. In snooker, Vietnam is almost absent from the professional circuit.

That means my carom data is thick, my pool data is thin, and my snooker data is remote observation through a screen. Recognising that limit matters more than hiding it.

Governance shows most clearly why the disciplines cannot be merged. In May 2026, John Higgins was suspended after a British newspaper published footage of a conversation involving betting. In September 2026 he was cleared of match-fixing, but fined 75,000 pounds and banned for six months for failing to report the approach.

Thirteen years later, in June 2026, the WPBSA announced sanctions against ten Chinese players, two of whom received life bans. The entire case file belongs to snooker's jurisdiction. It says nothing about Chinese eight-ball, a system run by a different body, with different money and different betting liquidity.

The counter-intuitive point sits here. Assuming that ten snooker sanctions reflect the risk level of Chinese eight-ball is a correlation read as causation. The correlation is the players' nationality. The cause lies in structure: snooker has a high-liquidity international betting market, a dense calendar, and a centralised governing body with real investigative resources. Those three factors generate both the cases that occur and the cases that get caught.

The opposite direction deserves consideration too. Snooker's long formats — a 35-frame final, 19-frame qualifiers — make manipulating a match more expensive and harder to hide than a race-to-five in pool, where each rack lasts a few minutes and a single small error can flip the result without anyone suspecting. Here, short-format variance is both the risk and the camouflage.

So why do detected cases cluster in the long formats? Because that is where the monitoring exists. The data does not measure how much cheating happens; it measures how much is seen. I have to remind myself of that every time I open the sanctions summary.

The crowd laughed. The numbers did not. A year later, I re-marked that paper.

The signal for the next round of tracking lies somewhere else entirely: the value of a billiards dataset is not in how many rows it has, but in which discipline each row belongs to. If I had to pick one thing to do over the next six months, I would split my spreadsheet into four separate files, each annotated with its data source and measurement conditions.

I do not write to convince anyone. I write so that the data has a witness.

Data never lies, but I have misheard it before. This time I misheard it because I let four sports speak at once.