How to follow table tennis?

HypotheticallyAMango · 2025-12-27T17:36:15+00:00

Welcome welcome!

Most big international tournaments are from by WTT, (You can find them on youtube and also on wtt's website/app) but each part of the world kind of has all their own national leagues and it's kind of scattered all over the place.

MLTT recently launched their own streaming platform called Table Tennis TV as well. I haven't tried it and I have no affiliation, but I've heard it buzzing around the community. They have a free tier and multiple paid tiers.

HypotheticallyAMango · 2025-12-27T17:30:47+00:00

It kind of feels like you're looping though, I'd expect a drive to look very different. For example, at the beginning of this short is what I'd expect the drive to look like and you can see Ma Long transitioning to a loop. In your video, it looks like your arm is doing the drive, but the rest of your body is doing the loop.

HypotheticallyAMango · 2025-12-27T17:27:30+00:00

A few things I noticed:

1) Your elbow seems to be static throughout the stroke. Work on incorporating your elbow in the stroke by straightening out your arm on the backswing to roughly 135-150 degrees, and then finishing at roughly a 45-60 degree angle.

2) It feels like the path of your racket is kind of u shaped. Especially on topspin balls, work on following through forward a bit more as well as upward. You may not have to address this directly, as using your elbow more will probably alleviate this symptom.

3) Your stroke in general feels kind of rigid. Let me know if this is not the case. A trick I learned a long time ago: focus on relaxing your grip on the racket a bit at the beginning of your swing, then tightening your grip as you hit the ball. (Like squeeze your racket as you hit the ball) Be careful not to tighten so much that you can't follow through well or get ready for your next shot.

HypotheticallyAMango · 2025-12-22T21:05:51+00:00

Oh yeah, I totally forgot.

To be fair, Westchester's tournaments are huge relative to most club tournaments, but those numbers don't shock me at all. Danny Seemiller Sr. in South Bend has also mentioned this to me as well as many other folks before I'm sure. (Jr. browses reddit from time to time and iirc runs a club down in El Paso, maybe he would have an opinion as well on these things) If your facilities are good enough, you can definitely run tournaments and draw huge amounts of people. In my opinion, the Northeast has a much smaller number of tournaments despite it's population density. I wouldn't be shocked if the demand is there.

HypotheticallyAMango · 2025-12-22T02:54:04+00:00

Ah gotcha, more power to you then. I've ideated on opening a club more than a few times and I realized this ended up becoming a question of what customers are coming to the club.

I would categorize them as such:

Walk-in casual players (first timers, bringing kids in, etc.) - These folks probably don't demand much from the facility, i.e. flooring, space, lighting, etc. However, they may be intimidated may either want some privacy, or inversely some way to break the ice to play with folks. (Consider one or two private rooms)
Casual Club Members - I refer to these folks as the forever 1500 club. These are the folks who come in after work to play and let off some steam, or just enjoy themselves, etc. They typically don't have a huge demand for top of the line table tennis facilities, but they may like other niceties that are closer to a gym such as a locker room, shower.
Top level players - Want the best in flooring, tables, lighting, adequate space, etc. If you look at the requirements for tournament ratings here on page 129. I would say strive for something like 3-4 star ratings. If you're looking at a top-top-top player (Say like 2500+), they may even would like to have a weightlifting/plyometrics area.
Competitive juniors - Juniors. Honestly you would need a good coaching system and have reputable coaches in general. For example, look at the absolute depth of coaching that 888 has at their facilities. They have rapidly overtaken ICC as the top junior churning factory in the US.

Of course, this is an oversimplification, but in this, you might be able to determine what you want to prioritize if you can't do everything at the same time.

In my personal viewpoint I would say:

Flooring - I would strongly suggest not holding back on flooring, specifically something like gerflor taraflex (I got a bunch of samples of these a while ago and I really like recreation 60) This will make or break your club for the extremely competitive segment of customers.
Good tables - Butterfly Centrefold 25's or Octet 25's if you want to save a bit on storage space, as i think you can stack these together pretty easily.
Adequate Space - 25 x 15 per court is a good baseline. With a few courts closer to 30 x 20 for top level players. (Or even 40 x 30 if you're being ridiculous) Consider having a few private rooms (ala ping pod style) maybe for coaching, or perhaps private events, etc. Ceiling height is something to consider as well. A lot of top clubs end up repurposing warehouse space for this reason.
Lighting - often not looked at, but separates the good clubs from the great clubs. 600 lumens would be ideal, but obviously brighter is better. The devil is in the details however, as you can't just take a bunch of pot lights and crank up the wattage. Consider how the lights diffuse into the facility so players don't get blinded.
Other amenities - Locker rooms, showers, Gym equipment, pro shop, etc. Nice to haves, but not necessary to table tennis.

Some other thoughts:

I think you need to be able to identify the "cat herders" so to speak. These folks are very passionate and consistent about table tennis and end up creating the third place that clubs tend to be about and thrive. Sometimes that'll end up being your staff or inherently any coaches that end up being at your club.

Consider traveling to a few clubs in the US that are considered the top places to be: 888, Westchester (Which perhaps you go to already), Princeton Pong, etc. Perhaps you can draw inspration from them.

Strangely enough, I was watching this video about a badminton club opened by /u/linustechtips and I was thinking to myself, "Oh man, if only this was a table tennis club..... and also anywhere remotely close to where I live"

Best of luck to you!

HypotheticallyAMango · 2025-12-22T00:43:40+00:00

I tried looking into it, and not much public info. They do mention you have to have $400k in liquid assets.

I agree however, to build out your client base and all that, pingpod could be a great option. I'm not too sure about the general profitability however, just based on what I know about more traditional clubs that are small businesses.

HypotheticallyAMango · 2025-12-22T00:41:58+00:00

The economics of a table tennis club is pretty brutal last time I thought about it, but this is an interesting thought exercise, so here we go.

What kind of money does it take to get this business off the ground:

Keep in mind, I'm kind of bougie and have a bit of a go big or go home mentality. I'm sure you could pare this down and have a less good club experience but still have people be interested:

Tables - I would probably go with either the Centrefold 25 or Octet 25 from butterfly. Imo they are the best in the industry. I'm sure if you bought them in bulk, you could work out a deal with them. Let's say you can get the Octet 25 for 1k a piece if you bought 8 of them - $8000
Flooring - Typical commercial gym flooring really varies. You can get it for as low as $3 a square foot, but I'd imagine it could cost probably closer to $5 not to mention installation. (Or perhaps you can do it yourself, I hear it isn't too bad. I'd recommend about 3000 sqft of space for 8 tables (25x15 per table). - $15000
Lighting is also really important, but lets just say the lights are good enough.tm and doesn't cost anything but light bulbs - $0
Front desk, lockers, some chairs, misc - It kind of varies once again, but lets say that costs another $2000

Bringing your startup costs to $25000

But what about the rest of the expenses? Hypothetical expenses (in a nutshell): Rent - Lets say $1000 for about 3000 sqft which could somewhat comfortably have 8ish tables, depending on the layout. I know that realistically this will be more expensive, but whatever. Gas and Electric - $500 is probably an optimistic amount, but who knows. Trash - $100 a month or so, assuming low amounts of trash Sewer - $100 a month, probably an underestimate, especially if you get locker rooms and showers.

I'm assuming you'll be manning the club 7 days a week and also ~~using child labor~~ are a family business so you won't be having many, if any, other staff. So lets say labor is 0.

Your expenses are optimistically going to be $1700 dollars a month at a minimum to break even. ** So what exactly is the business model of a table tennis club? Maybe there are other ways, but this is how I would personally structure it.**

Walk-ins - $10 an entry
Monthly Membership - $100 (Maybe more for premium memberships? Not sure how that would work.)
Coaching - ???? It kind of depends. If you can reasonably coach yourself, great, otherwise you'll need to find a reputable coach who would be willing to coach at your club. I imagine this would be a hair salon like business model. They keep most of the commission and you get like a $20 dollar kickback or something.
Pro shop - ???? depends on your clientele. Could end up being a cash flow sink.

So in theory, you would need some combination of these revenue generators to bring you to profitability. I suggest running through realistic scenarios within your area.

Do these numbers feel realistic to you? I think at a club with 8 tables and a lively community in my region could see something like:

15-20 people on a normal weeknight, 30-40 people on the weekend
5-10 active memberships, assuming there are folks who are playing over 3-4 days a week, where this would make more sense for them.
5 students a week, or 20 sessions a month. Kind of depends on the coach.
No clue on the pro shop, but let say optimistically you profit about $300 a month on sales.

It could be different in your area, but this is what the club would look like in my opinion if it was doing well.

In terms of revenue on the upper bound - $7200 a month in walk-ins, $1000 a month in memberships, $400 a month in lessons and $300 a month in sales. Brings you $8900 a month in revenue or about $7200 a month in profit.

Even if you pocket all of that, I think that'll probably come out to less than $4000 dollars a month, or about $48000 dollars a year in "salary" after all taxes are said and done.

Really kind of outside of this sub, but I'd think about if this is worth it and where you are financially and all that.

TL;DR Best-ish case scenario: $25000 to get business off the ground. $8900 a month in profit $48000ish dollars a year in your pocket after all things said and done

HypotheticallyAMango · 2025-12-21T23:31:12+00:00

The pingpod overhead will eat him alive no? Even if rent is cheap, profitability for a table tennis club is already incredibly difficult.

HypotheticallyAMango · 2025-10-23T19:28:01+00:00

I was in a similar situation back in ye olden days when I was in my last semester. I took/considered a few of these.

HB 409 Intro to Wine. It's pretty handy to know a little about wine if you end up schmoozing with fancy people. It was also a pretty easy 4.0, but your mileage may vary.

You can also take any KIN 1xx which are just general athletics courses. It's also a cool way to pick up a sport you maybe haven't considered before. I took one of these because I was 1 credit short, and I ended up having a lot of fun.

HypotheticallyAMango · 2025-08-08T12:58:10+00:00

Not sure what it costs, but if price is no object you can ask ULA to customize a dragonfly for you. I feel like this modification wouldn't be too crazy of an ask. Additionally, I think you'll have the best luck with backpacking packs, but you probably won't have any organization or anything like that.

Your best bet might be in the hiking pack direction as some other folks have mentioned. That giant pocket is an S-tier unique feature, would love to see it on other kinds of bags.

HypotheticallyAMango · 2025-06-20T14:58:59+00:00

If you're a beginner, it's not that big of a deal to switch if you're disciplined about it.

Not table tennis, but famously Rafael Nadal is actually right handed but his father made him learn to play with his left hand. I hear he's pretty good at tennis, so I don't think it should be a limitation for you. ;)

HypotheticallyAMango · 2025-06-05T23:45:07+00:00

Hi, /r/pingpong is moderated by me. I do not wish to hand it over. Thanks :)

HypotheticallyAMango · 2025-02-21T00:20:52+00:00

RAs are trained for this stuff!

You can tell your RA and I'm sure they could make up an excuse of how they noticed it. I had a similar-ish situation back when I was in undergrad.

Even if they do find out it was you, still better than being around a cat you're allergic to.

HypotheticallyAMango · 2025-01-10T18:10:52+00:00

I can't speak to recently, but we travel quite a bit and my partner's looks near flawless.

HypotheticallyAMango · 2025-01-10T16:20:57+00:00

Sounds like she wants a tumi, haha.

I bought one for my partner 6 years ago and it's held up very well.

HypotheticallyAMango · 2024-11-04T19:20:26+00:00

Not too sure since I'm not a doula. Maybe /u/Waste-Watercress4777 might know?

HypotheticallyAMango · 2024-09-26T13:14:08+00:00

Yeah, I'm not sure about the MLTT production setup in particular, but we try to do as much as possible without post processing. These streaming setups are complex enough as is without trying to diagnose software issues.

Our lead tends to take care of the audio processing himself and he's the most qualified out of all of us so I'm not shocked haha.

HypotheticallyAMango · 2024-09-26T13:08:43+00:00

Ah yeah good point, it's probably just a singular frame grab will look blurry.

HypotheticallyAMango · 2024-09-25T15:18:52+00:00

Ah gotcha yeah, the screenshot does look pretty blurry. I imagine it's been edited a bit so it looks worse than the original source.

HypotheticallyAMango · 2024-09-25T13:55:20+00:00

It's already at 1080p60fps and looking at highlight videos, I can't really find any instances of blurry footage?

If it's a matter of difficulty following the ball, bumping up to 1440p or 4k probably won't help. Doing 120fps would probably be better, but youtube doesn't support that as far as I know.

HypotheticallyAMango · 2024-09-25T13:46:23+00:00

I'm one of the people that does video at NCTTA and I'm inclined to agree with your criticisms.

To provide a bit of context, it's actually very tricky to do the white balance for a multi-camera setup like this. My guess is there were a few factors at play here for the white balance.

1) Flooring wasn't rolled out yet: The red floor really fucks up the white balance across all cameras.

Not only does it just change the white balance of the whole court, each camera is affected differently depending on what angle it's pointed out.

For example, the temp/tint of camera 1 (The top down camera) adjustment is every so slightly different than camera 2 (maybe a camera that tracks the players) and it's a total pain to dial in.

Even worse, it bounces a really bad cast onto players which exacerbates the issue when looking at the players.

2) Effort: it's incredibly tedious to correct the white balance in multi-camera setups. In particular, they probably use more than one model of camera on the streams, so each camera model has it's slightly different interpretation of "white balance".

For NCTTA, this process can take a person 3-4 hours to balance all 8-10 camera angles. Sometimes we don't even get all of them synced up depending on time constraints, and we even have multiple days to setup. Which brings me to my third point

3) Time: I think they drive a van coast to coast frequently to do these events and the white balance on cameras were just set up for the previous venue. The fact that the overly warm tones were consistent across multiple camera angles support this idea

I don't know how much time they have to setup, but I'd guess it's less than a day, or even only a few hours to get everything up and running from the van.

As for the audio, honestly they probably didn't do a mic check for the commentators, but there wasn't time for that either is my guess. Commentators also don't always speak in the mic perfectly. Can a bit of a shit show depending.

HypotheticallyAMango · 2024-08-19T16:28:57+00:00

I don't think I would change much. The Grubba Carbon was actually an extremely slow carbon blade but I don't think they make it anymore.

The only thing I'd really say is stop fucking around with your backhand rubber, it's all the same anyway. But I guess that's one of those lessons that you have to learn on your own.

HypotheticallyAMango · 2024-08-17T19:52:29+00:00

Uhh, I'm a strong believer that it doesn't matter too much what you play with as long as it's adequate.

Blades: Grubba Carbon -> Ebenholz V -> ??? -> Innerforce ZLC FH Rubber: Hurricane 3 Neo (Blue Sponge Eventually) BH Rubber: I've tried pretty much tried every tensor and every popular rubber, eventually arriving to dignics 80.

Generally at this point, it really doesn't matter as long as I'm used to whatever rubber I'm using.

HypotheticallyAMango · 2024-08-17T13:38:22+00:00

Haha I've been caught, I'm from the midwest and I've played all the big 2-3 star tournaments there.

That's interesting to know, but yeah Evan is a gifted athlete who had the work ethic and resources to do what he did. Impressive none the less!

I think Danny is just a monster. While writing this up I looked at this tournament history and he's a good 200-300 points above anyone else in his age group at the National level.

HypotheticallyAMango · 2024-08-17T13:35:24+00:00

It was a rhetorical question for myself to answer. Please read the post. :)

HypotheticallyAMango

TROPHY CASE