I saw that match and she was the aggressor. There was no difference in strength and speed! Both played well with Hazin being slightly the better. Jiaqi Zheng was always on the front foot against male opponents and quicker than most of them. The physical differences were irrelevant much as they are when the Chinese men and women compete with each other in training.
Chinese Women's Team vs USA Men's Team 2019
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This is not my experience at all. Hazin is not a player on the level.of Liu when you compare men and women. Hazin is not top 100 as a man and Liu is likely top 50 or better as a woman. The rating levels matter. But other than maybe when chopping with pips (in which case there is weaker counterattack and often a weaker close to the table push/chop), the differences are real. Many male players who are semi pro sometimes find the lack of physicality in the women's game offputting.
Walther, who is closer to what Liu is ranked as a top woman, while he lost a game to Liu, played her like a gentleman.
Walther was very competitive in that match but comfortably outplayed. He certainly didn't hold back. You're right of course, that rankings do matter. Juan Liu, even at 33, is still a hell of a player. She's beaten Lily Zhang (ranked 26 in ITTF), 4 times in 4 and won comfortably each time so who knows where she could be ranked. Certainly top 20. It is also significant that Liu, 2018 U.S. womens singles champion, destroyed Yijun Feng, twice runner up in the mens (2016 and 2018).
The point I'm making is that the physical differences between men and women are a negligible factor in determining outcomes of matches between the two. Table tennis simply isn't that sort of sport. It's a great leveler between the genders.
Many female players such as lui, Zha Wenting, Jiaqi Zheng, Amy Wang, Ariel Hrsing, Ruini Li and many others have regularly beaten guys who have similar USATT rankings to them. Sometimes the guys outrank them. These women are never overpowered!
When the top Chinese female and male players train together, competition between the two is fierce. And the females do handle male "power"!
OK, the males are better but the gap is extremely narrow. It's something that makes table tennis such a great sport!
The point I'm making is that the physical differences between men and women are a negligible factor in determining outcomes of matches between the two. Table tennis simply isn't that sort of sport. It's a great leveler between the genders.
Many female players such as lui, Zha Wenting, Jiaqi Zheng, Amy Wang, Ariel Hrsing, Ruini Li and many others have regularly beaten guys who have similar USATT rankings to them. Sometimes the guys outrank them. These women are never overpowered!
When the top Chinese female and male players train together, competition between the two is fierce. And the females do handle male "power"!
OK, the males are better but the gap is extremely narrow. It's something that makes table tennis such a great sport!
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We can agree to disagree. When you say the women are never overpowered you probably have a very narrow definition of overpowered. You can be overpowered and still win a match. In any case my experience is different from yours. Yijun Feng is not a particularly powerful player and his ranking was lower than Juan.
The thing is that having a similar rating is having a similar rating in the same open competitive environment. But Juan Li was overpowered by Ricardo Walther. We can define the words however we want but I know what I mean and you know what you mean. Juan Liu is left handed and Jiaqi was SP forehand. Both were penhold. You needed to get past elements of those games to compete against them. But at the top levels, physical things begin to matter. I gave the example of Ricardo to show that when you compare men and women at similar levels, the physical difference is clear.
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Neither of you have enough data points to draw meaningful conclusions so agreeing to disagree is a very reasonable plan. Are there any stats on worldwide how many men play competitive TT vs how many women? Because if the pool for one gender is 80 million and the other is 20 million, the population with four times the base is going to produce superior players at the top, imo. If it's closer to 50:50 then comparing the top players is a more valid exercise. Bottom line is the top men are as good *as they need to be* and no better. Same for the women. Same for everyone.
The fastest marathoner doesn't win by a mile he wins by ten seconds. Put him in the same race 25 years ago and he wins by a mile. It takes competition to push anyone above a given level.
The fastest marathoner doesn't win by a mile he wins by ten seconds. Put him in the same race 25 years ago and he wins by a mile. It takes competition to push anyone above a given level.
There is a dramatic difference in the level of abilities of the men and women on the CNT. How do I know? Because I have personally asked members and ex-members of the CNT the question "What happens when the men play the women in practice?" The men have to spot the women points to make it fair. If they start from 0-0 the women have no chance, even against the CNT B-level men.
This doesn't mean that men and women cannot compete against each other. The CNT women would annihilate the USA men's team as well as a bunch of other men's team from across the globe. However if you take groups of people who have had similar training backgrounds, the men still have an advantage over women for a variety of reasons.
I think more important than gender is when does a player forget about school and start playing full time. A woman in the Chinese system has a better chance of attaining a high level than a man in the US system. However, if both men and women are in the same system the men will come out on top.
This doesn't mean that men and women cannot compete against each other. The CNT women would annihilate the USA men's team as well as a bunch of other men's team from across the globe. However if you take groups of people who have had similar training backgrounds, the men still have an advantage over women for a variety of reasons.
I think more important than gender is when does a player forget about school and start playing full time. A woman in the Chinese system has a better chance of attaining a high level than a man in the US system. However, if both men and women are in the same system the men will come out on top.
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Also, the CNT women only care about one thing: beating other women. I have practiced with many province team players and a few women on the national team. It is pretty standard that they prefer to play with women because the spin, speed and rhythm of the game between the genders is different. If they have a choice, they would prefer to train against other women. One of my practice partners plays about 2400 when playing men and women but can beat women rated 2500 because she hates playing against men and is simply a better player when she competes against the kind of player she was trained to beat.
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Somewhere recently (this site?) I read that CNT men give 1-3 points to CNT women. If accurate that's impressive. Very much closer than men vs women in tennis or any sport with more of a premium on power and foot speed.
I partially agree with you. Where we disagree is in how big the difference is. I think it's much less significant than you do.
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Yes in a sense it all depends on what you are comparing to what and what you use to justify it. There are possibly women who can beat some men in the top 100 in table tennis. This is virtually impossible in tennis. There is a chess dimension to TT.
Ironically,there isn't a female player ranked in the top 100 in chess at the moment! Hou Yifan probably could make top 50 if she was more active but apart from that, Ju Wenjun is the only other female player close (chess and table tennis are my passions!).
You can only guess but I believe that the CNT women would all make the top 30/40 if table tennis was entirely mixed gender and rankings combined. Juan Liu would have a great chance of winning the U.S. Nationals if it was mixed gender. She's beaten twice runner up, Yijun Feng 3 times out of 3 and comfortably each time. It's impressive that she can still run through 2700 males, aged 33, after a 6 year absence from competition and having had children in that time! Still a great player, an exciting player and one of my favourites to watch.
The gap between the genders is much narrower than many people believe. This makes table tennis such a great sport!
A male Chinese National B team member who played the joola teams a few weeks ago comfortably ran the tables against almost everyone in the tournament, including some world class men’s players like pistej and Wang xi. He was apparently handed his only loss of the tournament against a Chinese woman player.
It was He Ai Ge who beat Yinchi Fang. Fang outranks her by over a 100 points. She does look a hell of a player though and it wouldn't surprise me if her ranking improved over the next year.
I saw her play in 2018. It might have been against a Japanese player in a women's U21 Final. She played a great match so this victory over Fang probably wasn't as much of an upset as it sounds.
It's back to what we're talking about. Women compete extremely well with men in table tennis. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluded!
I saw her play in 2018. It might have been against a Japanese player in a women's U21 Final. She played a great match so this victory over Fang probably wasn't as much of an upset as it sounds.
It's back to what we're talking about. Women compete extremely well with men in table tennis. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluded!
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Women compete extremely well with men in everything in life. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluded - after all, the fastest woman in the world would put you to shame. It is really about the levels of competition and women don't compete at every level the same way men do in table tennis and neither do men when up against women in some activities.
Er ....... I'm not sure we're you going with this?? Lol.
The point here is that the gap between men and women in table tennis is significantly narrower than in most other sports.
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Of course you know where I am going with this - you started introducing delusion and I am point out that you should stop trying to accuse people who disagree with you of being delusional and deal with the facts.
I am not sure how you are measuring this. Men and women don't compete with each other on a regular basis and in cases where they do, while men and women of similar rating levels tend to be equivalent, men still dominate the top of the heirarchy as they do in other sports. How many women have ever been over 2700 in the history of USATT ratings? How many men? Maybe in Germany or China, they can have similar ratings measurements. Ratings central hasn't been updated in a while unfortunately, but if you trust the data there, the gap is ridiculous.
If we want to point at single matches as evidence, that is the alternative. But single matches are not comprehensive statistical data. And I pointed out that one of the top women in the world, who you even ranked higher than I did, could not beat a lower national team member of Germany (many good male players couldn't either). She also lost to a player outside the top 100 in this year's NA Teams, though she has beaten very good players at Westchester Table Tennis Open all year long.
Then someone pointed out that a former CNT B player got beaten by a former junior Chinese national female player in one match, and then you used that data to call people who think that women are not competitive with men (nebulously defined by yourself) "delusional". One match? If you had said "women seem to be more competitive with men in table tennis than in other sports", then of course, even if someone has issue with that statement, it is more interesting worth discussing. One can then argue whether the data actually reflects that.
Unfortunately, Ratings Central is no long updated. But if we look at USATT ratings, we don't get quite the measure of competitiveness you get if we look at it purely on a statistical basis. But maybe you have some data that I am not privy to. Feel free to share.
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Even 5 years ago, Zhang Chao while winning every match he played, only went 5 games against one player, a left-handed female Chinese penholder.
The funny thing is that before the NA Teams, if you look at the USATT ratings of Fang Yichi and He Aige, they are only 2 points apart. After he went on to beat everyone and she didn't (she still had a pretty strong tournament), one can easily use him as evidence. But one match is part of data, if we want to be objective, we can look at the bigger data. But there is no need for anyone (not talking about you) to start calling others delusional because he is making debatable statements that others do not agree with.
Sometimes, you have to learn how to play against a certain style to play against it well.
I was just throwing out a fun little tidbit related to the discussion but didn’t know that someone was going to run away with it and come to a crazy conclusion. Obviously women and men still have a huge disparity at the top. But that’s at the top, in general, and of course there will always be exceptions to the rule. It levels out as you work your way down to lower tiers of play too. Fang being rated that low prior is pretty comical but that’s neither here nor there.
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You've gone off on a rant and missed the point again (no surprises!). I wasn't using one match as an example. You even made my point for me by referring to Juan Liu who ran through everyone at Westchester 3 months running (not one match). This is extremely unlikely to happen in any other sport.
Women regularly win matches against men in table tennis but on average, men win more against women (satisfied now?).
The point is (hopefully, it sinks in this time but I doubt it!), that the gap between men and women in table tennis is significantly narrower than in most other sports!
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