Is it the glasses or the big balls?
Ever since Ray brought his ping-pong table to work, our goof-off activity was transformed from playing Delta Force to playing table-tennis. We even have a tournament ladder in which I languish on a lower rung. It's actually a lot of fun, especially since everyone is improving at a more or less equal pace.
When I was in Houston a couple of weeks ago, I managed to tear my last pair of contacts and since I had not ordered replacements (it's a common theme with me) I was stuck wearing glasses for the following week. It brought back memories of when I first got glasses as a child and how it messed up my playing back then, too. It takes a couple of days to get use to the periferal vision shift that is caused by the refraction in the glasses.
Today my new contacts arrived and I promptly put them in, ready to be back in my game. Sadly, I had quite a few missed balls since I now have to get used to the lack of the distortion that was caused by the glasses. Plus we're trying to follow "rules" which completely ruins my server. That's my excuse, anyway.
It doesn't help that I went out and bought some "real" ping-pong balls. Apparently today's balls are bigger and heavier at 40mm while the older ones we played with (and which are probably half a decade old) were the 38mm kind. I hope that as soon as I get used to my big balls, I'll suck a little less.
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Too bad you didn't know us 30 to 35 yrs. ago. Most, if not all of us became quite proficient in table tennis since we grew up with a ping-pong table. I hadn't even realized there were two sizes of balls now. I would think there would be an advantage playing with the bigger balls.
Which is more important? the size of the balls? or the shape of the paddle? ;)
Interestingly enough, the shape of the paddle isn't all that important. Now the type of rubber you use makes a huge difference. Not to mention whether you use a sponge or not.