The Money Behind the Medal: How Vietnam's Three-Cushion Contracts Are Written

At the Nguyen Du Sports Hall in District 1, Ho Chi Minh City, on an afternoon of three-cushion World Cup group play, the man sitting next to me never looked down at the table. He looked into a notebook and wrote three lines: the number of games won by the young player in the right-hand seat, the number of times that player let his opponent run more than five points, and the sponsor name printed on the chest of each of the six men on the floor. The match ended on a three-cushion shot off the long rail, the stands applauded, and he closed the notebook, stood up, and walked out before the referee announced the score. I asked him what he did for a living. He said he bought rights. Those words followed me for years, because they open up a reality Vietnamese spectators rarely notice: in the three-cushion world, the thing most actively bought and sold never sits on the table. Vietnam belongs to the strongest group of nations in carom three-cushion. Tran Quyet Chien has held the number one position in the World Billiards Union UMB ranking. Ngo Dinh Nai, Ma Minh Cam, Nguyen Quoc Nguyen and Bao Phuong Vinh have all gone deep at World Cup stops. But reading the honours list alone means losing half the story, because the money in this discipline runs through two entirely different channels. The first is the UMB system, organised as a series of World Cup stops across Europe, Asia and North Africa, where the winner's prize for a single stop sits in the low tens of thousands of euros, plus ranking points. The second is the PBA, a professional circuit founded in South Korea in 2026, run on a team model, with pay television and sponsorship deals from credit card and telecom companies. According to figures published on the PBA website, the winner's purse at one of its stops is many times larger than at a UMB World Cup stop. That gap creates a transfer market. For years I have tracked Vietnamese players moving between the two systems: registering with UMB to hold their ranking and their reputation, negotiating with PBA to earn money. In between sit agents, private billiard teams inside Vietnam, and domestic events such as the VTV Cup or the national championship, where prize money is counted in tens of millions of dong but the stands are always full of foreigners taking notes. I do not hunt news. I hunt the silence between two answers in an interview. A professional player's contract in Vietnam usually has four layers. The first is a fixed monthly fee. The second is performance bonuses: per game won, per match, per medal. The third is image rights. The fourth is the binding clauses: term, exclusivity and release. For a young player the fixed fee is often only a few million dong a month, in exchange for the club covering table rental, a coach, and air tickets to tournaments. For a top-tier player the figure can reach tens to hundreds of millions of dong a month if a private team or an individual sponsor stands behind him. But the layer that matters most is the third, because it is the layer most often skimmed. Many contracts in Vietnam contain one sentence only: image rights belong to the club. No term, no territorial scope, no statement on whether those images may be used for betting advertising. An invisible contract only becomes visible when you count numbers instead of listening to promises. The release clause comes next. It is the sum another team must pay to take the player away. In carefully drafted contracts that figure is tied to timing: the closer to expiry, the lower the release price. In hastily drafted ones the figure either does not exist or is written in a vague sentence along the lines of the parties will negotiate in good faith. Once it is vague, the decision sits with whoever has the money. Last year a young player I had followed since the national junior championship faced two options: stay with his old team on a modest raise, or move to a Korean team on an offer several times larger. Three numbers of mine broke a deal that was just beginning to take shape. The release figure in his old contract was unreasonably low against his results. His net income after tax and after deducting living and travel costs abroad came to roughly two thirds of the figure written in the headline. And the minimum number of matches he would have to win for the offer to actually turn a profit was higher than the number of matches he had won in an entire season. Add the three together, and the deal was not as attractive as the press in both countries had written. At a national championship semi-final in Hanoi, I sat counting how many times a young player chose the long rail instead of the short rail when the object ball was in the corner. He chose the long rail eleven times and succeeded seven. His coach sat behind him, taking notes exactly like the man at Nguyen Du years earlier. That match was not decided by the prettiest shot, but by whether the player dared to hold a slow rhythm across four consecutive games. Something should be said about the statistic I consider the most deceptive in billiards: the average per innings. A player can hold a very high average thanks to a few explosive visits while losing rhythm for most of the match. I once watched a match in which the winner's average was nearly two points lower than the loser's, simply because the winner never allowed his opponent a second visit in the same game. Most young Vietnamese billiards talent does not grow up in a federation academy, but in private clubs and small training groups in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang and Binh Duong. There, the table owner pays the electricity, the table time, and the players' food and training. In return, the players sign what I still call satellite contracts: no tuition, no fixed salary, only an agreement to split a percentage of prize money. That model lets many families without means keep a child in the sport. But it also turns a fifteen-year-old into an asset recorded in someone else's ledger before the child understands what a contract is. When he wins the national junior title, his value rises, while the release clause stays exactly where it was. Injuries in billiards are rarely discussed because there is no contact. But wrist, shoulder and lower back injuries are common among professionals, and the hard part is not the wound. I once watched a player return after four months out with a shoulder problem, win three matches with safety shots, then lose the fourth when he had to play a three-cushion shot with his right hand. The fear in his head does not heal with the wound, and no doctor treats that part. Empty stands, money still moving, and vague clauses turned out to be an umbrella for the stubborn. In 2026, when tournaments were suspended and the number of deals in the billiards market fell sharply, a domestic club asked me to re-read the contract of a Brazilian import who was refusing a pay cut. In that document the force majeure clause was written in two sentences with no clear subject, enough for the club to read it in its own favour and the player to read it the opposite way. I translated those two sentences into plain Vietnamese, printed them, and handed them to both sides. The meeting ended in forty minutes. The counterintuitive point sits here: results on the table do not create leverage at the negotiating table. Vietnam has many players in the world's strongest group, but most of the commercial value of this discipline still sits at the other end: Korean television money, international brand sponsorship, and tournaments staged where audiences pay to watch. Vietnamese players win more matches, but sign shorter contracts, with fewer protective clauses, and often take a smaller share of image rights. That is why contracts that get skimmed matter more than three-cushion shots that get replayed. The question I leave behind is not who wins the next stop. It is this: when a fifteen-year-old in Binh Duong signs his first contract, who will sit beside him to read every line, count every number, and tell him what he will be worth two years from now? A billiards nation strong in shot-making but weak in clauses will keep feeding other people with its own talent.