Duong Quoc Hoang: Vietnam's Nine-Ball Pioneer Comes Home to Ho Chi Minh City
The world No. 21 once waited tables at a Ho Chi Minh City pool hall. This week a WNT ranking event — and a July final to avenge — comes to his home city.
In 2010, a 23-year-old Duong Quoc Hoang arrived in Ho Chi Minh City with two million dong — about $100 — and no plan beyond finding work. This week he walks into Sniper Billiards Club in the same city as the world No. 21 and Vietnam's first World Nineball Tour champion, headlining the home contingent at the Universal Open Ho Chi Minh (November 11-15) — the first WNT ranking event staged in his hometown.
From racking balls to 'The Martian'
Duong grew up in Quang Ninh province and played pool as a boy before stepping away through high school. The job he found after moving south — waiting tables and racking balls at a club called Sao Billiards — gave him practice time, a mentor in player-owner Luu Minh Phuc, and a nickname: Hoang Sao, "the star," rendered "The Martian" on the international tour, as he told Esquire Vietnam.
The rise was slow and costly. He became national champion and won SEA Games silver in 2017, beat Shane Van Boening 9-5 at the 2019 Beijing Open — and has said he nearly quit in 2022, when travel bills outran results.
The breakthrough
The turn came at the 2023 World Pool Championship in Poland, where Duong eliminated defending champion Van Boening in the last 16 and reached the quarterfinals — proof, he later said, that he belonged at that level.
Fourteen months later in Glasgow he made history: after losing his opener at the 2024 Jacoby Scottish Open, he won five matches on the losers' side and rallied from 8-4 down to beat Oscar Dominguez 10-8 in the final — the first WNT title by a Vietnamese player, with more than 100,000 watching live from home.
This February he went bigger again. At Premier League Pool in Florida — Matchroom's 16-man invitational — Duong topped the league standings through 24 matches over five days, survived a hill-hill playoff with Indonesian teenager Albert Januarta, and beat Spain's Francisco Sanchez Ruiz 7-4 in the final to become Vietnam's first major champion.
Three Reyes Cups — and a score to settle
Duong has been a Team Asia fixture at the Reyes Cup, part of the wins in 2024 and 2025 before returning last month in Manila, where Team Rest of the World ended Asia's reign 11-4.
And Sniper Billiards is not just any venue. In July, at the Universal Sniper 9-Ball Open on the same District 11 tables, Duong reached the final before Chinese Taipei's Chen Hsin Ting edged him 13-11. Four months on he returns to the same room — against a 128-man field topped by world No. 1 Aloysius Yapp and No. 2 Carlo Biado, chasing $15,000.
Vietnam's pool boom is behind him: the country fielded 68 players at last year's Hanoi Open, and his matches regularly draw six-figure live audiences back home. A deep run by Hoang Sao in his own city would be the loudest statement yet.