Fair handicap for men and women?

Originally Posted by cfagyal

Tropical: The match before that one she beat someone rated over 200 points higher than her, a chinese provincial male player. I linked the video in a previous comment I made. She was 14 at the time also...

That guy didn't play like a 2700 player. He was around 2500 at most at the time. That is why I posted a closer match when she almost beat the other person whose rating is ~2500. Recently at Topspin in Intercollegiate table tennis tournament, she beat a Chinese coach who was close to 2600 in the final. It was amazing to see how a less powerful girl can beat a much stronger man with higher rating based on her skills, deception, tactics, positioning the balls, mental game, etc.


The OP was so sexist (so is the guy) and I do not like it or him.

Originally Posted by WorkerBee

For men and women to play against each other in the same tournament, what should the standard handicap be? My guess is 5.

Per game?
That is a huge handicap worth about 339 rating points. That isn't a guess.
There should not be handicaps for any rated play. Only just for fun type tournaments.

Originally Posted by Xylit

I mean their rating, like I have said. 1900 TTR against each other, woman won't stand a chance.


Even women playing in Bundesliga with a TTR of 2200 can struggle against men with a TTR below 2000. Maybe the difference between men and women gets bigger the higher the level gets as table tennis gets more physical there. But even in amateur classes you can't compare the two sexes. If there are tournaments with both in one draw the women usually will participate in the class with men one or two leagues below them. And they still can't win.

I am from Baden-Württemberg, women are now allowed to participate in men teams additionally (still in women teams as well). They are seeded according to their TTR. Not a single woman from my club has won a game so far, they lost against men with 100 TTR points less and even worse.



I was talking about men and women with equal ratings against each other. Not woman vs man with a few hundred points less. It only makes sense to compare the best female player to one of the best male players and not to a random pips player. Moreover, rumors say that the male players there had to imitate styles of female players to prepare the female CNT players for OG.

Comparing male and female players with equal rating does not make sense at all!

I am not going to dispute the FACTS that XYLit is showing, they are facts. I can also understand the immediate conclusions he draws, but they can also be accounted for if the ratings for the women were inaccurate. They would also be accounted for if the men in his area are especially stronger vs the gals than men form other areas where the ladies got their rating.

Either way, if a TTR 1900 lady loses to a 1900 TTR guy, then the lady's rating drops, and if they lose enough to the men who constantly defeat her, her rating would drop so much that the rating isn't in the same class.

More playing history will "Play it out" pun intended.

Der_Echte has ZERO inclination to give handicap points to a lady who plays his level. It is big boy big girl TT world, you step to the table with a certain level, you are expected to play it.

I have had many matches vs 2400ish Korean female players and received handicap points. It is simple there, the higher level player as defined by what division you play will give away a defined amount of points per game.

They have 2 systems, mostly the "2+1" where the higher level player gives away 2 points for the first level of difference, then one additional point for any further level of difference. Then there is the 2+2+1 system, where the first two levels of difference result in 2 points for each of those levels, then one for further differences.

it works more or less over there, even though I really hate being the one who gives 4-5 points to an opponent... too much bad shyt can happen in a match. A few nets and a mistake or two from me and it is game over dude.

Some of it can also be accounted for by playing style matchups.

Personally, I am USATT rated low 1800s (California) to low/mid 1900s USATT (East coast DC area) and have better than 50/50 win ration vs 2100 level OX or thin sponged LP players... I have a years or more of data vs two of these players and some vs others in other places. In Korea, I give away the standard handicap vs the pips players, as long as I do not give away 4 points, I win almost 100 percent of the time.

That is a personal example of playing style matchups where the odds do not happen according to the rating points of opponents.

Perhaps the men in his region, or in all of Germany play very well vs the style or styles the ladies play in rated events there. Maybe XYLit's conclusions are not wrong, but I would need some better firsthand knowledge before I declare one thing or another.

Originally Posted by Xylit

I mean their rating, like I have said. 1900 TTR against each other, woman won't stand a chance.


Even women playing in Bundesliga with a TTR of 2200 can struggle against men with a TTR below 2000. Maybe the difference between men and women gets bigger the higher the level gets as table tennis gets more physical there. But even in amateur classes you can't compare the two sexes. If there are tournaments with both in one draw the women usually will participate in the class with men one or two leagues below them. And they still can't win.

I am from Baden-Württemberg, women are now allowed to participate in men teams additionally (still in women teams as well). They are seeded according to their TTR. Not a single woman from my club has won a game so far, they lost against men with 100 TTR points less and even worse.



I was talking about men and women with equal ratings against each other. Not woman vs man with a few hundred points less. It only makes sense to compare the best female player to one of the best male players and not to a random pips player. Moreover, rumors say that the male players there had to imitate styles of female players to prepare the female CNT players for OG.

Comparing male and female players with equal rating does not make sense at all!

This really might be your personal view based on your experience, but i think Gangarth's post got burried a little.
Maybe because of language barrier, so maybe i can explain others what it's about.

It is about the stereotype male sexist remark that men that don't even play on a very high level themselves are bragging how they could have an easy time playing in the “Damen-Bundesliga“ the highest women's class in Germany.
One guy from Bad Driburg got so tired of the same old 60+ vets bragging how they would make ladies have a hard time against sharp backspin balls that he set up two teams with players of nearly equal ratings.
When setting up the teams he thought that the men should be rated hundred points lower to get some close and exciting matches.
Afterwards he didn't think so anymore

and said the ratings are pretty equal!

The men's team's rating was about 90pts lower than Bad Driburg's women and now guess what happened.

Yap, the women won 9:4 (!!!) over the men!!

Originally Posted by Gangarth

https://www.mytischtennis.de/public/...chlechterkampf

Originally Posted by Thomas Jeffcott

I would imagine that at the highest level, top 20 in the world men vs women it wouldn't even be close. However someone like Ding Ning i'm sure would fancy her chances against men all the way up to top 100. I don't think that there are many other sports were this would be the case.

I don't understand where this is coming from. There are ways of rating players based on results. Let's stop the hypotheticals and rate the results. I have seen very high level men get shocked by the kinds of balls that women can block off the bounce. I don't doubt that the top men can beat top women but individual matchups, who knows? And even the top men get upsets against people outside the top 10 as well.

Originally Posted by Andy44

Just interesting speculation. Can't rate results we don't have. But pro men and women probably have a good idea about how well a player like Ding Ning could compete on the men's tour. It wouldn't shock me if the answer was anywhere from 'not at all' to 'she could pull off a few upsets until they figured out her game' to 'top 100.' I'd be a little surprised if it was the latter, but table tennis is one of the few sports where it doesn't seem like pure fantasy to imagine a woman in the top 100 overall.

That's the thing - it's one thing to definitely say it and another thing to speculate. We should all say first and foremost that we don't know. But the thing is that off the bounce blocking and good serving can take you a long way in TT. When the NA Teams in Baltimore featured more high level women's teams/players from China, some of the results were fairly surprising. Even 3 years ago or so, Zhang Chao went undefeated at the Teams, including beating Aruna 3-0, but the only person that took him 5 games was a woman (lefty Chinese penholder and former provincial player who had essentially become a coaching housewife for many years).

Originally Posted by Xylit

Comparing Ding Ning with a random top 100 male player hundreds of points below her just approves my point.

To what I have said earlier, it is true that in South Germany there were not many possibilities for women to play ranked matches against men, therefore their ratings might not be really comparable. But everytime there was a possibility and I could watch that (and I am participating in a lot of tournaments) the result was the same. Additionally, we have a lot of pretty good girls in our club. If you wanted to put them in men's league you had to substract 100-200 points and then seed them accordingly to make it fair.

This has nothing to do with being sexist or anything. It is a fact that men vs women comparisons don't make sense in a lot of sports. Establishing a handicap therefore is a bad and needless idea in my opinion.

Let's try again. No one is saying that Ding Ning's 3300 and Ma Long's 3300 are the same since the ratings are in different systems.

Everyone has said that women are generally weaker than men in sports, but that if the men and women play each other in the same system and get wins and losses in the same system, like we do in the USA, the results speak for themselves and the 2200 woman and the 2200 man are the same level. In systems where they play separately like the ITTF, it is a matter of speculation, but while we know the best men will be stronger, you can't be sure what level the woman will be at unless she actually plays because there are blocking and countering advantages in table tennis that you cannot find in some other physical sports that women can use to give men trouble. In fact, I would argue (this is speculation) that the hardest style that woman would hate to face would probably be someone like Joo Se Hyuk, not someone like Fan Zhendong.

When Zhang Yining played, here is an example of what she could do:



In the end, this is something that we should speculate carefully about but just like Chess, if people compete in mixed environments, you can get an idea of how the levels translate.