Posted on Saturday, 21st November 2009 by admin
Table tennis is not our exclusive competition. My cousin and I were always competitive… maybe excessively competitive. It could be as trivial as whom might eat quicker or just plain consume a higher quantity… whom could eat slower or less. It didn’t matter. If there was a means one person could trump the other in anything, we’d compete.
Unfortunately, the tiny abode my wife and I bought does not have a ton of space for the many means my cousin and I wish to compete. After much deliberation, my wife and I finally settled on a pool table with a Stiga table tennis conversion top. Basically this provides us the ability to play either pool or ping pong on the same table in the same room.
Thus now our infamous competition continues. Of course, he invariably kvetches that it isn’t the true thing. Even though he normally bests me in pool, every single instance we set the table tennis conversion top on the pool table, it seems his game drifts.
To put it plainly, I think it is because I am just plain the better table tennis player. But unfortunately, he makes too numerous rationalizations. The height is not correct. The dimensions are off. The list proceeds on. Thus I procured the measuring tape. The height and proportions were spot on to the official table tennis proportions. Then he postulated the table had the incorrect bounce; that in some manner the pool table below affected the speed and elevation of the ball bounce.
So we investigated the official bounce measurement (indeed, there is an official bounce measurement). It’s for every 30 centimeters of drop, there should be a 23 cm bounce. We tested the bounce in over a dozen positions on the conversion top. In every last spot the ball bounced almost perfectly straight up and nearly exactly 23 cm high. So you realize, ping pong conversion tops do a perfectly good job replicating a good game of table tennis. And my first cousin has no excuses. I’m just the better table tennis player.
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