Played a teams tournament (duo teams) yesterday. Play level was OK, the tourney was affected by Corona with a few late cancellations but still very crowded. Lots of youngsters. It was played in a very large sports hall. Tables near the wall were poorly lit, table halves remarkably different in play. The balls were abysmal, very soft, with not much of a bounce. In conjunction with the linoleum flooring, a very slow venue that takes a bit to adapt to for those accustomed to quicker playing conditions.
I played my level, winning most and losing a few. My partner not so much. I grazed the table my R53 so very thinly when trying to recover a net ball that I was very surprised to see a large piece of the top sheet grazed off. That soft topsheet wears well under normal play, but as it turns out, it is quite easily damaged. End of R53 for me for now!
Yet the worst part was unexpected hospitalisation in my partner's family (entirely non-Corona related; ‘more die of heartbreak’, Saul Bellow wrote once), so we had to leave after playing the preliminaries. There have been better days.
(Edit: after initially judging there to be no corona likeliness because no exposition to known sources Covid-19 is tested for. So much for “we can exclude this for now”.)
(Edit 2: not Corona, but in this case and under current circumstances that just means it's something equally bad if not worse.)
