Recently, Vietnam’s star player Dương Quốc Hoàng shared a poignant post on social media about the weight of expectations, the sting of criticism, and his unwavering resolve to keep playing despite it all.
Billiards, unlike any other sport, has one of the highest variances in performance. You can go deep in a tournament, rack up impressive wins, and then get eliminated with just one or two losses. The margin for error is razor-thin. Unfortunately, for many fans, only the ultimate victories matter—winning the championship. Anything less? It’s as if it never happened.
Billiards is also a game where moral victories are rare. In other sports, an underdog making a deep run or a veteran showing resilience despite falling short still earns admiration. In pool, it’s different. The moment you lose, the moment the trophy slips away, the narrative shifts. The scrutiny is immediate, the criticism unforgiving.
As sports media covering the game, we’ve always advocated for letting fans be fans—passionate, opinionated, and fully engaged in the highs and lows of competition. As long as the discourse stays within bounds—no personal attacks on players or their families—any discussion about performance is fair game. In fact, we encourage it. That’s what makes fandom compelling. It fuels debates, drives narratives, and ultimately keeps the sport relevant.
That brings us to Dương Quốc Hoàng’s post. You can feel the weight of expectations in his words. As arguably the best player in Vietnam, he carries the hopes of a nation that has rallied behind him. But support can be a double-edged sword. When he wins, the praise is deafening. When he loses, the backlash is even louder.
“I’m going through days where just opening my phone means seeing comments like ‘He should quit,’ ‘Disgrace to the country,’ ‘He should just go home.’”
Hoàng isn’t just a competitor—he’s human. No one wants to wake up every morning to a barrage of negativity dissecting their every mistake, every loss. But if anyone thinks those words will make him stop, as he puts it, “they’re even more wrong.”
He doesn’t ask for forgiveness for his losses. He doesn’t seek validation from the noise. He simply states: “I know exactly where I stand. And I will not walk away just because of a few losses.”
He plays for something deeper than results—he plays to conquer his own fears, to push himself until there’s nothing left to prove to anyone but himself. “Somewhere within all the disappointment, there’s still something unfinished: Playing until my heart no longer fears.”
His response isn’t a plea for sympathy—it’s a statement of resilience. He listens. He adjusts. But, in his own words, “I won’t let other people’s harshness define my worth.”
This isn’t an attempt to tell fans how to react or approach their fandom. Everyone experiences and expresses passion for the sport in their own way. But for players, the reality is different. They are placed on a pedestal, measured on levels most of us will never understand, scrutinized under an unforgiving lens. And the higher they climb, the more intense that scrutiny becomes.
But that is the burden of greatness.
And yet, for those who endure it—who take every loss, every criticism, every doubt and use it as fuel—greatness is exactly what awaits.