This why I don't complain illegal serves

[JustANoob]

Rules need to be changed.

 

[Tony's Table Tennis]

The above video posted by the popular table tennis net personality EmRatThich captures a match in the latest Europe Championship between two female players.

ert video didn't capture, he stole other people's video to use it as his own.
if you do know ert, you should ask him to come out and record some videos, that would help his cause and reputation

 

[Tony's Table Tennis]

it is very easy to serve legally, no excuse whatsoever for a pro to serve like this. it as actually quite hard to do a lot of the shielded illegal serves and takes a lot of practice

semi pros can do it, as practice hours are norm for them.
i can also serve illegal and get the ball to dip boarder line with my body in the movement shielding the ball for a moment or two.

The toss angle, height, and body rotation is quite easy to master

 

[Tony's Table Tennis]

Usually in serious sports, umpires at every level are trained, validated and reviewed. Most of the people who commented on this match on YouTube cannot see the consistency in the refs approach to both players serves. Of course, you are free to find the people who have claimed this umpire as a hero as you purport since you like making unsubstantiated claims on behalf of other people to make yourself feel good.

The Ding Ning issue is different. She rarely ever tossed the ball high enough on her reverse tomahawk, mostly letting it drop from a height and using her descent to mask the lack of toss. The referee/umpire that faulted her for it was one of the most highly regarded and polished refs on the tour at the time and was doing her job during a final. People can complain about that all they want. In fact maybe if this ref that faulted Zaharis is willing to explain himself publicly and why he felt Zaharis was worse than Kaufmann, it will only advance the sport.

PS. Looking at it all again, the issue is that the toss is backwards into the paddle and this is easiest to see from where the umpire sits. In fact horizontal tosses are not as easy to fault as this one. Hopefully Elena will fix her serve but since Bernie often does something similar, the real issue is still making the umpires call these things consistently.

I don't believe umpires are trained properly.
they sure don't have vision tests done monthly or before tournaments, especially high profile tournaments.
no disrespect to umpires, but I have a friend who is retired airforce pilot and the vision tests they go through is proper "validation" to the ability of said individual

TT umpires are mere theory passers and maybe some don't really have enough man hours experience on the matter.

secondly, the rules are near impossible to enforce.
the degree allowed on the toss angle,
the height (measurement) of the toss
and then the coverage of body, netpost and netpost, and free arm, and with that the angle of the umpire

without the aid of technology, I would like to test all umpires on how many cm I am doing 20 different toss, and match that with technology and see how good the umpires visions are.
next is angle of toss

I am sure, most umpires will fail my Tony's TT test and then with such trained, validated and reviewed coming out - we really think they will do the sport justice? Most time they don't call it, I think is because they not sure.

It is like a traffic cop calling a speedster with no technology. And I'm vouching for technology to help the cause.
We can't be doing 1900 stuff in 2024 any more

 

[rpb23]

ert video didn't capture, he stole other people's video to use it as his own.
if you do know ert, you should ask him to come out and record some videos, that would help his cause and reputation

I don't know him at all. Quoting his video was just for convenience and content as YouTube dumped lots of his video to me.

 

[rpb23]

I don't believe umpires are trained properly.
they sure don't have vision tests done monthly or before tournaments, especially high profile tournaments.
no disrespect to umpires, but I have a friend who is retired airforce pilot and the vision tests they go through is proper "validation" to the ability of said individual

TT umpires are mere theory passers and maybe some don't really have enough man hours experience on the matter.

secondly, the rules are near impossible to enforce.
the degree allowed on the toss angle,
the height (measurement) of the toss
and then the coverage of body, netpost and netpost, and free arm, and with that the angle of the umpire

without the aid of technology, I would like to test all umpires on how many cm I am doing 20 different toss, and match that with technology and see how good the umpires visions are.
next is angle of toss

I am sure, most umpires will fail my Tony's TT test and then with such trained, validated and reviewed coming out - we really think they will do the sport justice? Most time they don't call it, I think is because they not sure.

It is like a traffic cop calling a speedster with no technology. And I'm vouching for technology to help the cause.
We can't be doing 1900 stuff in 2024 any more

You have some very good points. The complex of the rule itself makes the ref work very difficult. Tossing angle and height are visually challenging to be precise. But clean exposure of ball contact without blockage of any body parts is almost impossible to call in a flip moment when a violent serve motion is occurred, especially for most pros who typically serve with quick body movement.

Like I said earlier, using video with AI (I even proposed the CNN nets as it is currently quite available and mature) is the ultimate solution to the issue, eliminating most human factors from judging service calls. If the AI approach is implemented, it will face huge resistance from most pros as it will force them to relearn and retrain all their current serves which they spent years to develop.