After the April recess month, we were all eager to start on the final Block of this Year’s Championship. The numbers would have been far higher if the Championship Jinx had not struck again. This time, not by Covid, thankfully, but by a combination of the spectre of exams hanging over our Junior Members, a Veterans Tournament at the other end of the age spectrum, and many others taking advantage of the opening up of travel and the fine weather to take some holidays. So, thirty players turning out for each of the Friday and Saturday Rounds was quite a result.

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The numbers were well high enough to foster some extremely competitive groupings and we welcomed some fresh players too, quite a few from St Neots TTC and they took a few scalps! Out of interest we did a quick round-up, if this were an inter-Club tournament (and it certainly is not!), the result of the head-to-heads over the weekend would have been St Neots 12: BATTS 11!

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There were, as usual, some epic battles between players who ordinarily would not meet each other, including one knife-edged game that went right round the score counter, with Jason Lu finally beating Grigoris Ragavelas 23-21 – the whole hall stopped to watch with open mouths to see how that one would pan out!

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Thanks to everyone for playing their part in making this such a spirited competition. It was great that so many of you wanted to play more than the regulation three matches per Round – it does help the organisers to get play underway on a timely basis when we find ourselves with an odd number of players.

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And it is exciting to see how many players relish playing more than the regulation three games on a Saturday morning -- Matty Jones managed to fit in six games on Saturday. The new Challenge Board System seemed to work well. The Centre is open until approx 2 pm for table tennis so make the most of it for practice, knocking, or genuine rating games – take the risk of losing ranking points when testing yourselves against much higher placed opponents and of course, thanks in equal measure to those who graciously agree to take the challenges on! The experience and development opportunities are well worth the risk, as you will discover.

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Special mention must be made of those who played on both Friday evening and Saturday morning. So, we salute the Magnificent Dozen of Moe Farahat, Liam Williams, Kenneth Man, Alan Burnett, Peter Alexander, Ray Ong, Luke Merchant, Grigoris Ragavelas, Max Beresford, Sonny Green, Anamaya Sharma, and Adonis Duraku for the special contribution they made.

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It was especially difficult to nominate a Player of the Month this time and there were three strong contenders. In the final analysis, Kenneth Man was our deserved PotM, playing on both days, winning all his six games, and bagging a 52.0 points exchange. He was closely followed by Liam Williams, who won all his six matches with a points exchange of 50.4.

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The unlucky loser was Ray Ong who might well have had the honour if he had not narrowly lost a 5-ender extra challenge game to Matty Jones on Saturday morning. Playing both Rounds, he did in fact achieve the highest points exchange of the Rounds and that will propel him to bigger and better challenges up the ladder. That’s what it’s all about and the Challenge Board will continue now as it seems to do such a good job.

 

So, another weekend of Super Singles comes to an end, but we have another one to savour in June – do join us again!

Email us now if you have not registered your place already, tell your friends, and hopefully, we will get a lot more of our players back again – Jinx? What Jinx! We have already got around twenty players for each Round and the aim is to double that at least!

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Andrew and Declan

Tournament Organisers

23rd May 22