Himass and TanVuu: Two Names Beneath the Scoreboard of Vietnamese PUBG

Inside the arena at Phu Tho Stadium, the countdown clock on the big screen stopped at zero. The team had just closed out the qualifier in seventh place, two points short of a spot in the next round. The stands erupted for the top team. In the corner of the stage, a young man remained seated, headphones still on, eyes fixed on a screen that had already gone dark. No camera panned toward him. On the scoreboard, his name sat on the twelfth line. People call him Himass — La Phuong Tien Dat. A few seats away, TanVuu sat just as silent. Two names that most viewers only remember when their team wins, and forget the moment their team loses. But the seventh-place finisher also has a name on the track. And in a discipline where the safe zone shrinks by the minute, that name is sometimes more worth reading than the one at the top. PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS is a strange esport. It does not give you a single opponent to defeat. It gives you a hundred people, a closing circle, and a rule set in which the last survivor is not necessarily the strongest. KRAFTON — the publisher behind the title — built an entire global competitive system on that principle. And in Vietnam, where PUBG has a large competitive community but a path to the international stage as narrow as a door crack, the story of people like Himass and TanVuu becomes the central story. This is transfer season. The noise is at its peak. Every day, forums overflow with names, numbers, and unverified rumors. Big teams announce signings, part ways with players. Fans argue about who deserves what, who is undervalued, who is overhyped. Amid that noise, the real signal is often drowned out. And the writer's job, as I see it, is to filter the noise to find the structure underneath. Based on my experience following matches across many seasons, I have noticed one thing: in PUBG, individual statistics are the most misleading thing in all of esports. A player can have extremely high damage numbers and still be the weakest link on the team. Another player can have modest numbers and be the one holding the entire system together. The number in the stat sheet is the ash of the match. It tells you what burned, not where the flame came from. Himass is a textbook case of a player treated unfairly by the scoreboard. In his role, he frequently has to move into the most dangerous parts of the map — places where the probability of being knocked is many times higher than elsewhere. He does it to open space for his teammates. He accepts trading his own life for information, for position, for time. And when the match ends, the scoreboard records his death as a dry number, without recording why he died. That is why I always say you have to read the match, not just the scoreboard. Watching the replay, I counted that in one specific match, Himass made seventeen different angle-opening movements. Nine of them directly led to his teammates gaining favorable positions in the next circle. No official statistic records that. But without those nine movements, his team would never have reached the final circle. TanVuu sits on another side of the same story. He is the type of player I would call a rhythm keeper. On a PUBG team, there are those who create disruption, and those who keep disruption from becoming disaster. TanVuu belongs to the second group. He reads the opponent's movement rhythm, he knows when to push and when to fall back. He is the one calling the rhythm in the moments when the whole team is panicking. The track is measured in seconds, but the pain is measured in years. I borrow that line to speak of both of them. Both Himass and TanVuu have gone through seasons where results did not come. They trained, they competed, they failed, then they trained again. No glory was recorded, only late nights in the practice room, scrimmages without an audience, replay reviews until their eyes ached. Those years never appear on any achievement board. This transfer season, both names are on the list that teams are considering. And this is the moment to talk about the nature of the transfer market in esports. The transfer race among big teams is a brand arms race. They buy names to sell jerseys, to attract sponsors, to please fans. But the truly valuable contract, in my view, lies with the small teams — where people buy a player because he fills exactly one gap in the system, not because of how many followers he has. Based on my experience following matches, there is a paradox in how Vietnamese teams build rosters. They tend to prioritize players with standout statistics, those who can create moments. But PUBG is a discipline where a moment only has value when placed within a stable system. A disruptive player without a rhythm keeper behind him creates only beautiful moments that are meaningless in terms of points. That is why I believe names like TanVuu, though rarely highlighted by the media, are the most important part of any transfer deal. KRAFTON plays a special role in this story. As publisher, it not only operates the game but shapes the entire competitive ecosystem. Every time it adjusts the rules, changes the map, updates weapons, it rewrites the standings of every tournament at once. A small change in the circle mechanism can collapse a strategy a team has spent months building. This raises a question about the sustainability of a player's career. A player who is great in this version can become redundant in the next. Nothing guarantees that the skills you hone today will still hold value next season. And in that context, adaptable players — like TanVuu, who reads the rhythm of the match rather than chasing a fixed formula — become more valuable than those with the highest raw numbers. Looking at other major esports scenes, I see a familiar pattern. In Korea and China, where I have had the chance to observe directly, teams usually invest in coaching structure before investing in players. They build data analysis systems, youth development systems, and only then spend money on big contracts. In Vietnam, that order is sometimes reversed. Teams spend on the name first, then scramble to fit that name into a suitable system. This is the blind spot I want to point to. When the media focuses on the question of who is the best player, we inadvertently skip the bigger question: which system is producing good players. A brilliant individual can win a single tournament. But only a good system wins across multiple seasons. And when we celebrate only individuals, we celebrate the tip of the iceberg while the submerged part — where the real work happens — remains overlooked. There is a moment in a match I will never forget. Himass was knocked early, and most viewers assumed his team's chances were gone. In reality, his death drew the attention of two opposing teams, creating a gap on the right flank that his teammates immediately exploited. His team reached the final circle and finished third. On the scoreboard, he was the earliest elimination. In reality, he was the one who opened the door. Moments like this do not appear in highlight reels. People remember the kill, the bold play, the moment of brilliance. They do not remember the nameless rotations, the stalling moves unnecessary in technical terms but necessary in tactical ones. But a team built from ten moments of brilliance without a rhythm keeper will always lose to a team built from ten rhythm keepers without a single moment. If football were only numbers, we would not need the stands. That line holds true for PUBG in a different way. If esports were only a standings table, we would not need to sit for hours reviewing replays. The stands exist to witness what numbers cannot record. And the writer exists to tell the story of what is not written on the scoreboard. In Vietnam, the PUBG community has a feature I have observed over many years. Fans here are very loyal and very knowledgeable about the game. They can argue over the smallest tactical details. They remember plays from seasons ago. But the paradox is that this very knowledge sometimes turns into pressure. When fans expect too much from a name, that player carries a weight disproportionate to his actual role on the field. That is the burden both Himass and TanVuu carry. They must not only play well, but play in exactly the way fans expect. They must not only win, but win according to a script the public has already imagined. And when reality does not match that script, they are judged as failures, even when the result may still exceed expectations. This transfer season, I think the most important thing fans can do is learn to read the noise. Every rumor has a structure beneath it. Every contract has a logic that explains it. When you know what a team lacks, you understand why they buy one player and not another. When you understand a team's system, you can predict what type of player they need. A rumor is only useful when placed within the right structure. And when placing Himass and TanVuu within that structure, I see one thing clearly: their true value is not in what they have already done, but in what they could do in a better environment. Both are products of an incomplete system. They overcame that system through individual resilience. But individual resilience can only take a person so far. To go further, they need a better structure. And perhaps, a better structure also needs them. I often ask myself what makes a strong esports scene. It is not the number of tournaments. It is not the number of viewers. It is the ability to produce a continuous flow of good players, from one generation to the next. A strong scene does not depend on a few exceptional individuals. It depends on the ability to produce exceptional individuals steadily. And to do that, you need training systems, tournament structures, and an analytical culture. In this respect, KRAFTON could play a bigger role than simply organizing tournaments. The publisher holds data on every match at every level. It knows where tactical trends are shifting. It knows which players are improving faster than average. If that data were shared at an appropriate level, small teams in Vietnam would have a fairer chance to compete with the big teams of the world. But that is a story of policy, not of a single article. Back to the opening moment. The young man sitting still, screen off, headphones on. He has just finished a season in seventh place. In the coming days, there may be a new contract, or there may not. There may be an offer, or there may not. But regardless of what happens, one thing does not change: he ran his course, and on that road, his name exists. The seventh-place finisher also has a name on the track. And if a scene remembers only those who stand on the podium, it is losing most of its own story. The people in seventh, twelfth, twentieth place create the thickness of a scene. They are the reason victory means anything. Without them, victory is just a number standing alone, with nothing to compare to, nothing to overcome. For Himass and TanVuu, the story is not over. They are young. They still have time. And in a discipline where every update opens a new opportunity, time is the most valuable asset. What they need now is not pity, nor excessive praise. What they need is an environment that lets them express their true value, and a public knowledgeable enough to recognize that value. There is one thing I have learned after years of writing about sports, both traditional and esports. The most enduring stories are not stories of victory. They are stories of continuing after defeat. Everyone remembers victory. But only those who truly love a sport remember the ones who kept running after being left behind. And it is those people who make up the soul of the discipline. The stat sheet will be updated. The season will close. Names will be replaced by other names. But one thing will not change: there will always be someone, in some corner of the stage, sitting in silence after the match ends, waiting for the next chance. And if we are patient enough to look toward them, we will see not an ending, but a different beginning. Vietnamese PUBG is at a critical moment. This transfer season will shape team structures for many seasons to come. Decisions made in the coming weeks will have consequences lasting years. And among those decisions, how people evaluate a player like Himass or TanVuu will say a great deal about how far Vietnamese esports has matured. If people look only at the scoreboard, they will miss it. If people look at the match, they will see it. And if people look at the entire system that produced both the scoreboard and the match, they will understand. Those are three levels of reading sports. And perhaps, they are also three levels of loving a sport. I heard a match breathe in an empty stadium in 2026. I heard its rhythm, its tension, even with not a single spectator. I learned that a match exists independently of the stands. It has its own life. And the people who play it have their own stories, independent of whether anyone is watching. Himass and TanVuu have played matches like that. They existed in moments no one recorded. And it is those very moments that shaped who they are today. So when transfer season closes, when the new standings are published, remember to read the names in the lower half too. Read the ones not mentioned in the recaps. Read the ones who finished seventh. Because on the long track, every name has a story. And the story of the seventh-place finisher is sometimes the one most worth telling.