(by Steve Hopkins) Kanak Jha and Benedikt Duda were the top ranked players in this week’s Dusseldorf Masters event.  Each advanced to the Final where Duda outlasted Jha for a 3-2 win with the players traded games and momentum. Sunday’s event was the fifth of seven events.  Like the other events in the series, there was […]

(by Steve Hopkins) China announced their Olympics squad today. The team includes World No. 1 Fan Zhendong, World No. 2 Xu Xin, and World No. 3 Ma Long.   There are no surprises here as the event seeding will be based upon World Ranking and Chinese players hold the top three spots in those Rankings. Interesting, […]

(by Steve Hopkins) The Boston Table Tennis Center is in Medford, just North of Cambridge and Somerville and only four miles from  Boston’s city center.  The club is just off I-93 (Northern Expressway), and near the Orange and Blue Lines, providing easy access to the greater Boston metropolitan area. The BTTC is a 3000 square foot […]

(by Steve Hopkins, photos by ITTFworld) Often there is a changing of the guard after an Olympics – a time when top players retire and move on to their next challenge.  In a normal cycle the Olympics would have occurred a year ago and the landscape of our sport would already have changed – but this […]

(by Steve Hopkins, photo by ITTFworld) If this event were a true Olympic Trials, the table tennis world might have just been turned on its collective ears. As each of the Chinese Olympic Team members fell to much lower ranked opponents – and if the winner made the team, a relatively unknown Zhou Qihao would […]

(by Steve Hopkins, photo by ITTFworld) The teams are already set, so the 5-day event is more of a warm-up than a true Olympic Trial.  That said, the goal of the Chinese was to have a competitive internal event that simulated the format of the Tokyo Olympics and prepared their top players for July.  What […]