Ping Pong and Pool: One Table

Ping pong isn’t our only contention. My first cousin and me are always combative… perhaps excessively combative. It might be as little as whom could consume food speedier or just plain consume a higher quantity… who could eat slower or in smaller amounts. It did not matter. If there was a means one mortal could best the other in anything, we’d contend.

Regrettably, the small abode my wife and I bought doesn’t have a ton of space for the various means my cousin and I desire to compete. After much deliberation, my wife and I finally settled on a billiard table with a Stiga table tennis conversion top. Fundamentally this provides us the capacity to play either billiards or ping-pong on a single table in the same space.

Thus now our infamous competition proceeds. Naturally, he constantly kvetches that it is not the true thing. Even though he normally trumps me in pocket billiards, every single time we place the table tennis conversion top along the billiard table, it seems his game errs.

To put it plainly, I think it is because I am just plain the better table tennis player. But unfortunately, he makes too many rationalizations. The elevation is not correct. The proportions are off. The list proceeds on. So I procured the measuring tape. The height and proportions were right on to the official table tennis dimensions. Then he postulated the table caused the incorrect bounce; that somehow the billiard table below affected the speed and height of the ball bounce.

So we researched the official bounce measurement (indeed, there’s an official bounce measurement). It is for each 30 cm of drop, there should be a 23 centimeters bounce. We tested the bounce in over a dozen placements on the conversion top. In each spot the ball bounced virtually perfectly straight up and nearly exactly 23 cm high. So you realize, table tennis conversion tops do a perfectly respectable job duplicating a strong game of ping pong. And my cousin has no excuses. I am simply the greater ping pong player.