Why 2K…When Less Can be More. Or, Am I Getting a Bit Serious?

 Kudos to those of you looking to elevate your game to the highest levels of the sport. Guys like Tom Lodziak and Matt Hetherington have tremendous sites to help you in your quest. It’s a lot of dedicated work and play, especially if you are an older individual. It takes many tournaments to climb that ratings bell curve and grind over to the rarified right side, where the magic 2000 level resides. That’s where less players and tougher competition dwell. Finding local players good enough to test your game becomes more difficult, especially if you aren’t in a large metro area. Players are serious, and egos can be large for some attempting to climb the mountain. Watching those at the far right of the curve…amazing.

RATING ➡️

                                                

But take an old guy like me with nothing ever better than an intermediate game. I’ve been stuck on the purgatorial plateau of pong for many years, and it really is heavenly… like listening to Jimmy Cliff’s Sitting in Limbo. (Okay, maybe I’ve picked up a couple hundred points in a decade, a pure guess). There’s an abundance of decent players available all over the ‘burbs. Laughs and banter bookend the awesome points. Egos are checked at the door. Doubles are the norm, no finger pointing, it’s the no-fault insurance zone. Then, it’s out for a group lunch.

In one predominately Asian venue where I’ll play, it’s very communal. Community balls, snacks, all singles but no score keeping. No fancy serves. Just get the ball in play, rally and then maybe play it like a point. Switch players. Awesome.

This heavenly phase of Table Tennis may await those who strove, and were lucky enough to never ascend beyond the crest of the bell curve. 

Why 2K I ask…less can be more.

A Novel Approach or We Created the INTER(im)NET! Or, A Table of (Different) Contents, and a Pub Snub.

 With an abundance of players at our Friday park district location, we asked if the dilapidated third table could be brought out. After a long wait, and a second request by a female player, the reluctant employee relayed back that it wasn’t usable because it didn’t have a net.

‘No problem, bring it out.’

The ever resourceful Jeff, turned his attention to a large bookcase along the wall in this multi-purpose room. By George, in no time he had found a suitable stack of books and aligned them very close to regulation height.

A Cat and Mouse Game…Tom and Jerry

The playability far exceeded our not so Great Expectations. We hit the Dickens out of the ball, and even got some spine shots (aka ‘nets’). A low shot into the book cover gave a definitive solid ‘whomp’, a resounding confirmation that your shot had been rejected.

This rejection however, gave me a bit of PTSD (Post Traumatic Submission Disorder). You see, an excellent literary agent from a top notch Literary Agency in NYC had pulled my query from the ‘slush pile’ and requested my complete book manuscript for consideration. 

 Ninety-nine percent of submissions are rejected, and I was on an anticipatory high as a one-percenter.  Getting this far, I read the odds of getting a book deal was now about ten percent.  So the total theoretical probability of being published is about 1/1000! Well, one month elapsed and the bad news came. ‘Pacing,’ a commonly used term for rejections arrived in my email. Dreams of a healthy advance faded. But, the big positive takeaway was that the premise of the book had real credibility. From there I took the self-publishing path.

A final note. Here’s some ‘dressed up’ tables combining function and fashion. Simon, along with his wife, collaborated to make four of these table ‘skirts’. The disruption of play has been greatly reduced. A real game changer.