Written by Ping pong is not our exclusive contention. My first cousin and I are always competitive… perhaps excessively competitive. It could be as slight as whom might consume food speedier or eat a higher quantity… whom could eat slower or less. It didn’t matter. If there was a way one mortal could trump the other in something, we’d compete.
Regrettably, the tiny abode my wife and I bought doesn’t have a lot of space for the various means my cousin and I desire to compete. After much deliberation, we finally set on a pool table with a Stiga table tennis conversion top. Basically this gives us the ability to enjoy either pool or ping-pong on one table in the same room.
Thus now my cousin and my notorious competition proceeds. Naturally, he incessantly kvetches that it isn’t the true thing. Even though he normally bests me in pool, every single time we place the table tennis conversion top on the pool table, it appears his game drifts.
To put it plainly, I think it is because I am just plain the better ping-pong player. But unfortunately, he possesses too numerous rationalizations. The height is not right. The dimensions are incorrect. The list goes on. Thus I procured the measuring tape. The height and proportions are spot on to the official table tennis proportions. Then he postulated the table caused the wrong bounce; that in some manner 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 centimeters of drop, there must be a 23 cm bounce. We tested the bounce in over a dozen locations on the conversion top. In every last spot the ball bounced almost perfectly straight up and almost precisely 23 centimeters high. So you realize, table tennis conversion tops do a perfectly respectable job duplicating a good game of ping pong. And my cousin has no excuses. I am just the superior table tennis player.
