The World Cup ended on Sunday (click here for the Butterfly article about the Semifinals and Finals) with Fan Zhendong securing the title in an All-Chinese Final. Some of the matches were amazing – a side effect of having a tournament filled with the best players in the world – but there was more to this tournament than the perfect playing conditions featured in the streaming itTV coverage.
These ITTF RESTART events are the culmination of planning and cooperation not just with the event organizers and the ITTF but also between continental groups, country contingents, and the players and their support staff. For the Men’s World Cup, Kanak Jha made the trip as a player and Jörg Bitzigeio traveled as his personal coach. We had the opportunity to touch base with both on the day before they traveled from Germany to China – those interviews can be found here: PongNow with Joerg Bitziegeio, PongNow with Kanak Jha.
Kanak and Joerg arrived in China on October 26th. They faced a strict quarantine for eight days where they were basically limited to their own hotel rooms. They they had another week where they had small training groups and very limited personal contacts. The total of these two quarantine periods was 14 days – after which they were officially in the bubble and allowed to interact with others who had been through the
same protocols.
As Joerg said on October 12th, “It’s well organized and since we have been able to leave quarantine yesterday, it’s much better. For the first week we had to stay in the rooms completely and for the second week we have been allowed to leave the rooms only twice a day for training sessions.”
Now that the event is over, Kanak and Joerg will be heading back to Germany. Interestingly, two of Kanak’s Ochsenhausen teammates traveled to China with him. One of those players, Hugo Calderano was scheduled to play both in the World Cup and in the Tour Grand Finals – so his time in the bubble is continuing. The other teammate is Simon Gauzy, who did not qualify to play in the World Cup but who remains in the bubble because he did qualify for the ITTF Finals (the third RESTART event which will be held next weekend). Gauzy is one of three players – along with Xu Xin and Lin Gaoyuan – who qualified for the Finals but not for the World Cup.
Below is the segment of the Joerg Bitzigeio interview providing his insights into the bubble and their upcoming travel to China.
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The Google Sheets image takes you to a spreadsheet that gives the settings for each drill. While these won’t be the exact settings for the Control Panel on your robot, they will give you an idea of where to start, and you’ll need to adjust from there. At the bottom, we’ve included the ranges and defaults for the setting on a Prime so you can compare these to the ranges and defaults on your own robot. In general, default settings should give you a similar ball regardless of what model you have. If a drill has a change of speed, spin, or trajectory, you will be unable to replicate that drill on a Basic or Start model.
Amicus Prime owners, save these drills to your device via the following steps:
Click the Drill image below to download the file to your tablet, cell phone or other device that has the Amicus app on it.
Open that file and a window will appear in the Amicus app to confirm you want to import those drills. Tap Import to add the drills to the Exercise List.
You can then play those drills just like any other drill in the Exercise List.
Tip – After importing the drills from a Fethomania Session, tap on the drill description to reveal Stefan’s technique pointers for that drill!
Amicus Prime owners, if you want a video of a Fethomania drill, you will need to manually link the video for a particular Fethomania drill with the following steps:
Download the video to the device that contains the Amicus app (probably to the Downloads folder).
Open the Amicus app on that device.
Select the matching drill in the Exercise List.
Tap on the Drill Description. The Set Exercise Properties popup window will appear.
Tap on Select Video button at the bottom of that window. Then navigate to where the video is located in the file directory and select that video.
Tap Save at bottom right of the popup window, Save at the top right of the main window, then Save in the resulting popup window.
Tap the Drill Description again and the title of the video should now appear in parentheses after Select Video.
To play the video, tap the Play Video button on the Play Exercise screen.