(by Steve Hopkins) Twenty of the best players from USATT’s T2 Season 2 competed in the Season Finals this week.  After fighting through the group stage, there were four undefeated players: Jishan Liang, Xin Zhou, Jimmy Butler, and Kai Zhang.  Those top four players matched up against the next four highest qualifiers (each of whom […]

(by Steve Hopkins) The final weekend of the TTBL German League ended today and the result was as expected – with Borussia Dusseldorf winning 3-1.  The win is basically a Triple Crown for the stacked Dusseldorf squad.  The team won the mid-year title, won the regular season and won the final.  That isn’t all, they […]

(by Steve Hopkins) The USATT completed the 2021 National U19 and U15 Team Trials today at the ICC Table Tennis Center in Milpitas, California.  The top juniors from all over the country competed – with the largest event the U19 Boys event with 44 competitors. The U19 Boys winner was Sid Karesh.  Sid was followed […]

WAB Club Feature: Orange County Table Tennis Academy (by Steve Hopkins) The Orange County Table Tennis Academy (OCTTA) is located in Fountain Valley just off of the 405 in the center of Orange Country (with Santa Ana and Irvine to the East, and Huntington Beach to the South, and Anaheim to the North).  OCTTA describe […]

(by Steve Hopkins) After Ma Long was upset early (a 4-2 loss to Xu Chenhao), the other 2/3 of their Olympic Team finished China’s Olympic Simulation exactly as expected.  Fan Zhendong (World No.1) and Xu Xin (World No.2) advanced to the Final, where Fan topped Xu is a tight 4-3 victory. The more interesting result […]

(by Steve Hopkins) The final events in the Dussedorf Masters Series was held today.  It included Timo Boll as the top seed, the 2020 Duseldorf points champion (Dang Qiu), the young German points leader (Cedric Meissner), and a pair of Swedes (Anton Kallberg and Kristian Karlsson). Meissner fell early – his earliest loss of the whole […]

(by Steve Hopkins) Just three weeks after Ma Long was ousted early in the China Olympic Trials, he falls again – this time a 4-2 to Xu Chenhao.  Chenhao is a 24 second tier Chinese player who was briefly within the Top 100 in the rankings (No. 97) in 2014.   That said, he’s a dangerous free-swinging […]

(by Steve Hopkins) The ITTF Event Calendar has been pretty light in the first half of 2021 so as to not risk the Olympics in Tokyo.  There have been a few qualification events which needed to happen because they were cancelled in 2020, but for the most part players will be preparing for the Olympics […]

(by Steve Hopkins, photo ITTFWorld) Kay Stumper won the Youth Challenge Event in Tunis this week.  Stumper is a young German player (18 years old) who has been turning heads in Europe on the junior circuit – winning the European Youth Top 10 the last two years.  Stumper won the third Dusseldorf Masters Event (last […]

(by Steve Hopkins) The Junior Pan Am Games is an event for athletes between 18 and 21.  “Junior” is a misnomer for an American audience where we often use the term to refer to those 18 and under.  In this case, the event will feature the best young players of this hemisphere, and that includes […]