We’re back from a fun three days in Las Vegas and I’m thinking about whether the approach taken by Budweiser (the big tournament sponsor) and Killerspin (equipment maker and I think the sponsor of the “All Star” competition)  is going to be good or bad for the wonderful game of Table Tennis.

My short take is yes, this is great for the game because it raises awareness and gets people playing more in bars and basements and therefore will bring more people into the serious side of the sport.    However I would recommend better social media  next year, tied initially to the bar tournaments and then to the big Las Vegas spectacular.  There was very little media buzz offline or online about this tournament despite hundreds of free trips to Las Vegas, celebrities, big money,  pretty athletes, and a two hour ESPN special coming in September!      Everybody loves this game in different ways and somehow this part was lost in the PR campaign leading up to and including the tournament.

In real Table Tennis the play is at a much higher level than we saw even among the best players at the Hardbat Classic because everybody was required to use one of two special  “hard bat”  paddles made just for this tournament.

$100,000 Winner Jack Baker, originally from London and now from Mobile Alabama, had won a local bar tournament.  He was an excellent player but would have been crushed by Trevor Runyan but for the point spread.  Runyan is a US Hardbat Champion who barely made it out of the All Star tournament to face Jack in the semifinals where he lost due to the point spread.  I think the spread was 17 but don’t know yet (I missed the final day’s matches).

Despite a lot of grumbling by the best players who faced the huge handicappings, I think the idea of spotting points is good because it forces everybody to play their very best.    Not so with these paddles, which basically forced many of us who know the game well to play far below our normal levels.     I had trouble even keeping the ball on the table – I think because I’d mostly practiced with the hardbat against a robot which did not give me a sense of what type of shot would be coming to me from these paddles.     Every player I saw from beginner to international class was struggling to get performance out of this blade, so if I had to make one recommendation for next year it would be to find better equipment that would showcase skills.     Old style hardbats, used in the heydey of the game as a spectator sport, shoud be reviewed by Bud and Killerspin.

The lower end paddle was much like the junkiest type of pips out paddles you’d buy for a few dollars at Wal- Mart, where the higher end paddle was a notch up in blade and rubber quality though still seemed light and hard to control.    Head was normal sized where a better hardbat head might have been larger.   The  pips rubber allowed a very modest level of spin but control was so weak that the rallies with these paddles tended to be very, very short.

This problem was significant as the whole idea is to get people excited about watching long rallies and I do not think this type of equipment is best for that.     Better would be to find a blade/rubber combination that slowed the speed and spin down but allowed longer rallies with more work and motion on the part of the players.  This is what might turn Table Tennis into a more popular spectator sport in the USA.

Another popularity strategy I’d love to see would be regular bar tournaments with money or prizes.   I think Bud’s done a lot of good in that direction with the Hardbat Classic, though  it was disappointing for me that the distributor held a small tournament locally but did not pony up the money to send the winner to Las Vegas .   Especially because the winner was … me.

Although I heard something about “4000 local tournaments” that number made no sense because there did not appear to even be a total of 1000 players at the tournament – more like about 300-400 would be my guess and that includes the “basement” players that had no rating, players like me who were rated by the US Table Tennis Assn, and the 8 all stars, mostly from Killerspin’s great team of amazing players.

The Table Tennis “All Stars” who were invited by Killerspin and Bud played against each other and this was the most exciting, high quality play even though they were handicapped with the low grade rackets.     Table Tennis Superstar and Olympic Silver Medalist  Ilya Lupulesku http://server2.usatt.org/magazine/08mar-apr/lupulesku%20.pdf was there but was having a lot of trouble with the hardbat and the fact that his ranking meant he had to give many points to his opponent.      He did not even make it out of his first round robin with other All Stars.    I understand that David Zhuang, another amazing player who has won the US national championships lost *every match* in his first round robin in the “pros” division – I assume because he had to give up to 17 points to the other players.

My initial reaction was that the handicap system was failing to be fair with points, but the idea was to make it very hard on the best players and in this they succeeded  – few “great” players made it out of the initial round.   My round robin opponent  Ashu Jain, a brilliant player with the HBC hardbat, managed to win a a lot but was finally defeated due to the large point handicaps.

…. more soon with pictures ….

Gotta love the internet.  I was trying to find the Wegman Report, a very interesting critique of how global warming advocacy too often masquerades as science, and stumbled into a recent discusson of Free Will with an expert in Neuroscience and philosphy featured in the  New York Times:

… the philosopher agreed with Dr. Haggard that free will has biological roots. In fact, that is something all the men seemed to agree on: that free will is not a spiritual or magical experience endowed supernaturally within us, but rather, that the conscious decision-making ability is a result of organic brain activity.

This report out of Copenhagen is the most important climate update statement since the IPCC report process that is now undergoing revision.    The tone is alarming though I remain very confused by this because I’m more familiar than ever with the metrics and remain convinced there are no catastrophes looming.

I’ll try to read through all of this report in the hopes of figuring out why it seems to me we now have a spectacular divergence of scientific data (which does not suggest to me we should be alarmed) with scientific opinion (which seems to suggest  all hell can be expected to break loose pretty soon unless we act in dramatic yet unclear ways to stem the tide of Greenhouse gas emissions).

This report is NOT to be confused with the Copenhagen Consensus, a group founded by Bjorn Lomborg and others to suggest more rational approaches to management of planetary concerns.

Update from Climate Audit, which demolishes the silly Electrical Grid Alarmism graph in this report which reflects (according to the guy who made the graph) better reporting and not more incidents.   It is incomprehensible to me that respectable scientists don’t immediately disavow this kind of graphic nonsense but they will not do that anymore than disavow the nonsense of the film “An Inconvenient Truth” which largely claimed among other absurd things that Katrina was primarily a Global Warming event (it was not this according to any responsible Hurricane researcher you can possible choose), that Lake Chad was mostly a global warming event (not supportable) and that sea level rise of 20 feet was not alarmist nonsense (it is).   Yes RealClimate guys, that means you!   Advocacy  blogs  like RealClimate and Climate Progress generally moderate valid critical points while leaving in attack dog nonsense from supporters). It is sad to see advocacy muscle in on  science as a respectable passion for climatologists.   This is not the 12th century and it is unacceptable if you want reason to prevail in the complex challenges we face on planet earth.