Ping pong is not our exclusive contention. My first cousin and I were always competitive… maybe excessively combative. It might be as slight as whom might eat swifter or just plain consume a higher quantity… who could eat slower or in smaller amounts. It didn’t matter. If there was a way one mortal could outperform the other in anything, we’d contend.
Unfortunately, the small abode my wife and I purchased doesn’t have a lot of space for the various manners my first cousin and I like to compete. After much deliberation, my wife and I finally settled on a pool table with a Stiga Duo table tennis conversion top. Fundamentally this gives us the ability to enjoy either billiards or table tennis on one table in the same space.
Thus now our notorious rivalry continues. Naturally, he constantly kvetches that it isn’t the real thing. Even though he normally bests me in pocket billiards, every single instance we set the table tennis conversion top along the pool table, it appears his game errs.
To put it simply, I think it’s because I’m just simply the better table tennis player. But unfortunately, he has too many excuses. The height is not right. The dimensions are off. The list goes on. So I got out the measuring tape. The height and proportions were spot on to the official table tennis dimensions. Then he claimed the table caused the wrong bounce; that in some way the billiard table below affected the speed and height of the bounce.
So we researched the official bounce measurement (indeed, there is an official bounce measurement). It is for every 30 cm of drop, there ought to be a 23 centimeters bounce. We tested the bounce in over a dozen positions on the conversion top. In every spot the ball bounced almost perfectly straight up and almost precisely 23 cm high. So you see, ping pong conversion tops do a perfectly respectable job replicating a strong game of ping pong. And my cousin has no excuses. I’m simply the better ping pong player.
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