Asian Table Tennis Championships WR and Olympic Implications
There seems to be some confusion on the thread on whether or not points gained in the team event of the Asian Champs are added with points gained from the singles event. As seen in reply #500 made by Zeio, "3.9.2. Continental senior team championships matches count separately from the individual points and with a maximum of 8 match wins." Therefore, in the Asian Championships, you only get WR points from either your singles performance or team event performance, whichever is higher, but not both.
The Continental Table Tennis
Championships is different from the continental games. For Continental
Games, team and singles points count as a sum for the singles rankings. Continental games include the Asian Games, European Games and Pan Am Games where there are many different sports being played aside from table tennis (basically the regional Olympic games). In the continental games, you add your points gained from the singles event and from the team event. That's why Kanak Jha got such a big boost in WR this month after the Pan Am
Games. He only finished 3rd in singles for 685 points, but this is added to his team performance of 560pts (8 wins x 70pts) to get a total of 1245 points. If you notice, his 2018 Pan Am
Championships result is 1800 for winning the singles event last year, but his team event wins were not added to his total because again, that was a continental championship, where table tennis is the only sport being played and where team event performance and singles performance are not added together but count separately.
So, when trying to determine what performance Hirano or Ishikawa needs in the Asian Champs to gain WR points, it's safe to completely ignore team event wins and to focus solely on their singles performance since the Asian Table Tennis Championships is a continental
championship where team and singles results don't stack, and is not part of the continental
games, where team and singles results do stack.
Goals for individual players in singles:
- Hirano needs to reach at least the SF to get 1170 pts and knock off her lowest result of 900.
- Cheng I-Ching needs to reach at least the QF to get 900pts and overtake Hirano in seeding for next month's World Cup.
- Ishikawa needs to reach the final to get 1350 pts to better her Asian Cup result of 1170 because of the rule that only a "Maximum one continental event counts out of the singles continental championships, team continental championships and continental cup for seniors." Ishikawa can use her Asian Cup result or Asian Champs result from this year, whichever is higher for her top 8 results, but cannot use both because of this rule. Even if Ishikawa reaches the SF in the Asian Champs and gets 1170 pts, the rules won't allow that 1170 to be used to replace her lowest result of 900, so she needs to make the final at least to get any kind of gain in ranking.
Women's doubles- the performance of the Ishikawa/Hirano pairing in the next few events will have a great impact in determining the Olympic Team. They don't need to be on the same level as Ito/Hayata, but the pairing needs to be decent enough to beat pairings of lesser talent and be competitive with the established doubles pairings of other top teams in the world. If the pairing plays at the level of Mizutani/Niwa or Harimoto/Ishikawa in these events, it will raise serious doubts in the minds of JTTA as to the viability of a team composed of Ito, Hirano and Ishikawa since doubles will be a big issue to solve. Ishikawa and Hirano will likely take this pairing seriously as this will serve as a contingency to be selected as the third team member in case either doesn't make the Olympic singles event.