So Saturday in Duesseldorf comes and i ride to the vehne with
@Tyce and
@just_one_more_chop . I warm up with
@Arkady briefly and then the event begins.
The scoring format is two games golden point format to 11. If a 1-1 tie results, a single point sudden death to take it all. There are 25 or 26 players in but some are iill, jet lagged or physically struggling in one way or another. But come one its table tennis, this is my drug, let's go!
The first good thing was that we were using the Andro ball which because it is a DHS clone, suits my game.much better than the Nittaku and Butterfly balls.
There were so many .matches i won't remember most of them well but i will try to paint my impressions.
My first match was against
@Datscleva. Since we later played in some matvhes on Sunday, I suspect i was lucky to catch him a bit cold before his full lobbing game came into effect. I was lucky that he struggled with my no spin backspin combo. That tends to predict my success reasonably well. I also tend to stay away from the forehand diagonal and later found out this was pretry smart. Got away with a 2-0 win.
Then I played
@Arkady I believe. I managed to win the first game but after that, I couldn't loop through his blocks and counters. It was 1-1 and came down to the golden point to win it all and he did a backhand down the line counter inside out to the wide. So I lost that one 1-2.
Then I get fuzzy on who I played and when. I know I lost one more match to one of the top two players, his game was in a completely class from mine, serves were consistently to the short forehand, he player out of a crouch and I struggled to win points. That said, I managed to beat the one of the guys who beat Tom the Frog, 2-1, it came down to the golden point, I popped up the serve sky high and the third ball clipped the net and went out.
The I played Tom the Frog. It was really weird, I had accepted my imminent defeat having played semi-pros at that level. But where i got a bit lucky was that Tom was relying heavily on the kick topspin serve. So I got my chances to attack. That said I struggled against Tom's slow backhand opener (slow and heavy). All that said I lost the first game on the golden point so 10-11. In the second game, I was able to successfully attack a lot of serves and that and my backspin no spin serve worked slightly better in game 2 and I managed to win at 8 or 7. So it went to the golden point and I had the serve so I called a timeout. I served a short backhand serve to the forehand and he pushed it off the table (more sidespin than backspin lol). So I won my matchup vs the Frog!
I played quite a few matches throughout the day and I think I was almost undefeated winning matches mostly 2-0. I think I beat most of the TTD members I played including if memory serves me right, backspacer, 50hz and Haito. The last match was vs KenSpin and unfortunately, despite Arkady giving me some good advice, I forgot all of it ans went down 0-6 in the first game. I then started playing smarter as I remembered what I had been told but it was not enough to save the first game. I won the second game 11-6 but it was now down the golden point and KenSpin jad the serve. So he served, I returned the serve, he pushed long and it got to the edge! So that was it for the day and i had lost three matches on day 1. Not bad.
Many other interesting things happened but i will skip those including meeting the-don. I had to catch up on school eork and other projects. But the next day was still upcoming and the Founder was recovering from migraines so....
