(by Steve Hopkins) As COVID caused tournaments to be cancelled and clubs to close, many of the normal sources of content vanished.  Butterfly reacted with a series of weekly interviews called PongNow.  The tag line of the interview series is “talking table tennis with some of the best players and personalities in the sport”, and […]

(by Steve Hopkins) Timo Boll‘s many years of success have put the German at the peak of popularity in the US and abroad.  He has also been a Butterfly sponsored player for his whole career, so he has left his mark on Butterfly by developing and supporting a whole series of products with the TIMO […]

by Steve Hopkins From the classic VISCARIA and PRIMORAC blades, to the ALC and ZLC blades made popular by players on the ITTF Tour, to the Cellulose NanoFiber (CNF) blades, here are are the TOP 10 blades of 2020 – from the top table tennis company in North America. A quick overview of Butterfly blade […]

(by Steve Hopkins) Ma Long won both of his singles matches on Tuesday as Shandong Luneng defeated Shandong Weiqiao 3-1 the Super League Finals.  The other Shandong victory was the doubles win by Fang Bo and Wang Chuqin. Like many other accolades, Ma Long is setting records – he has now won five China Super […]

(by Steve Hopkins) A few weeks ago, PINGPOD held a launch party celebration at their facility in Manhattan.  The event was to help promote Dora Kurimay’s new table tennis book and video series, My Stories of Mental Toughness On and Off the Table. Max Kogler (co-founder of PINGPOD) was the moderator.  The whole event was […]

(by Steve Hopkins) PingPod was born as a pop up on Canal St. When the team saw the joy that a ping pong table in a garage brought to so many people, they knew they needed to find a way to make table tennis more accessible to many more people in NYC and beyond. Doors […]

(by Steve Hopkins) In January, we reported that Fan Zhendong won the Marvellous 2020.  In February Xu Xin topped the German Open, Timo Boll won the Euro Top 16, and Harimoto won the Hungarian Open. In March, the US Olympic Trials resulted in Zhou and Kumar joining Jha on the Men’s Team, and Liu and […]

(by Steve Hopkins) The Chinese Super League has a new team, the ITTF World Professionals, which includes USA’s Lily Zhang, Puerto Rico’s Adriana Diaz, Jeon Jihee, Doo Hoi Kem, and Cheng I-Ching.  They are three matches into a condensed bubble season (to run from December 21 through December 29) and are currently 2-1 after their […]

(by Steve Hopkins, photo by ETTU) Borussia Düsseldorf won the Table Tennis Champions League (TTCL) Final last week.  The TTCL is an international competition of European teams.  This year, they played the Final in a bubble with the Final Four teams invited.  Borussia Düsseldorf and FC Saarbrücken (both German teams) faced off against Fakel Gazprom […]