One Rivalry, One Table

Ping-pong is not our exclusive contention. My cousin and me are always combative… maybe excessively combative. It could be as trivial as whom could consume food faster or just plain consume more… whom could eat slower or in smaller amounts. It did not matter. If there was a means one person could outperform the other in anything, we would compete.

Unfortunately, the tiny home my wife and I bought doesn’t have a ton of space for the various ways my first cousin and I desire to compete. After much calculation, my wife and I finally set on a billiard table with a Stiga Fusion table tennis conversion top. Basically this affords us the ability to play either billiards or ping pong on one table in the same space.

Thus now my cousin and my infamous competition continues. Naturally, he incessantly complains that it is not the real thing. Even though he usually trumps me in pocket billiards, every single instance we place the table tennis conversion top on the billiard table, it appears his game drifts.

To put it simply, I think it’s because I am just simply the greater ping pong player. But regrettably, he has too many excuses. The elevation isn’t right. The dimensions are incorrect. The list goes on. Thus I procured the measuring tape. The dimensions and elevation were right on to the official table tennis dimensions. Then he postulated the table caused the incorrect bounce; that in some manner the billiard table beneath affected the speed and elevation of the ball bounce.

So we investigated the official bounce measurement (indeed, there is an official bounce measurement). It is for each 30 cm of drop, there must be a 23 centimeters bounce. We tested the bounce in over a dozen locations on the conversion top. In each place the ball bounced almost perfectly straight up and nearly precisely 23 cm high. So you realize, ping pong conversion tops do a perfectly respectable job duplicating a good game of ping pong. And my cousin has no excuses. I’m simply the greater ping pong player.