Table tennis isn’t our exclusive competition. My first cousin and me are always combative… maybe excessively competitive. It might be as slight as whom might eat speedier or just plain consume more… who could eat slower or less. It did not matter. If there was a means one mortal could best the other in anything, we’d contend.

Regrettably, the tiny abode my wife and I bought does not have a ton of space for the many means my first cousin and I desire to compete. Following much deliberation, my wife and I finally settled on a pool table with a Stiga Deuce table tennis conversion top. Essentially this gives us the ability to play either pool or ping pong on a single table in the same space.

So now my cousin and my infamous competition proceeds. Of course, he constantly complains that it is not the real thing. Even though he ordinarily trumps me in pocket billiards, each time we place the table tennis conversion top upon the pool table, it seems his game drifts.

To put it plainly, I think it is because I’m just plain the superior ping pong player. But unfortunately, he has too numerous rationalizations. The height is not correct. The dimensions are incorrect. The list goes on. Thus I got out the measuring tape. The dimensions and elevation are right on to the official table tennis proportions. Then he postulated the table caused the incorrect bounce; that somehow the billiard table below affected the velocity and elevation of the bounce.

So we investigated the official bounce measurement (yes, there’s an official bounce measurement). It’s for every 30 cm of drop, there should be a 23 cm bounce. We tested the bounce in over a dozen locations on the conversion top. In every last place the ball bounced almost perfectly straight up and almost exactly 23 cm high. So you see, table tennis conversion tops do a perfectly respectable job duplicating a strong game of ping pong. And my first cousin has no excuses. I am simply the better table tennis player.