Charlotte Sometimes Blogs

Ping pong is not our only contention. My first cousin and I are always combative… maybe too competitive. It could be as trivial as whom could eat swifter or just plain consume a higher quantity… whom could consume food slower or in smaller amounts. It didn’t matter. If there was a means one person could best the other in something, we’d contend.

Unfortunately, the small house my wife and I bought doesn’t have a ton of space for the many ways my first cousin and I wish to compete. Following much deliberation, my wife and I finally set on a billiard table with a Stiga Deuce table tennis conversion top. Fundamentally this gives us the capacity to enjoy either billiards or table tennis on a single table in the same room.

So now our infamous competition proceeds. Naturally, he incessantly kvetches that it isn’t the true thing. Even though he normally trumps me in pool, each instance we place the table tennis conversion top on the billiard table, it seems his game drifts.

To put it plainly, I think it’s because I’m just simply the superior table tennis player. But regrettably, he possesses too many excuses. The height is not correct. The dimensions are off. The list proceeds on. Thus I got out the measuring tape. The dimensions and elevation are spot on to the official table tennis dimensions. Then he claimed the table caused the wrong bounce; that in some manner the pool table below affected the speed and height of the bounce.

So we investigated the official bounce measurement (indeed, there is an official bounce measurement). It is for each 30 centimeters of drop, there should be a 23 centimeters bounce. We tested the bounce in over a dozen locations on the conversion top. In every last place the ball bounced virtually perfectly straight up and almost exactly 23 cm high. So you realize, table tennis conversion tops do a perfectly good job duplicating a strong game of table tennis. And my cousin has no excuses. I am just the superior ping pong player.