Beating Players better than you?

The Two approaches to amateur sport

I don’t know if anyone really cares so much about recreational table tennis, but here we are.

An interesting dilemma I’ve encountered this year is facing players with completely different levels of skill. You can largely categorize the games into three categories -

• Playing against players who are not as skilled as you

• Playing against players who have a similar skill level to you

• Players against players who are considerably better than you

Interestingly, I’ve realized that games need to be approached differently according to the skill level of the opponent.

Playing against players who are not as skilled as you

These games are usually boring so I won’t spend too much time discussing these.

Playing against players who are at a similar skill level

Simon Ramo in his brilliant book “Extraordinary Tennis for the Ordinary Player” beautifully breaks down tennis into two categories. He calls it “pro tennis and amateur tennis”. In amateur tennis, around 80 percent of points are lost, whereas in pro tennis 80% of points are won.

He writes “The amateur duffer seldom beats his opponent, but he beats himself all the time. The victor in this game of tennis gets a higher score than the opponent, but he gets that higher score because his opponent is losing even more points.”

Often the struggle in amateur tennis or table tennis is to keep the rally going. Instead of keeping it simple we try for the spectacular and fail more often than not. Keeping things simple and avoiding unforced errors should more often than not do the trick against players of a similar caliber.

As Charlie Munger famously said, “ It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent”.

Playing against players considerably better than you

When I know I am playing someone who is considerably better than me, I come back to what Michael Mauboussin touched on in his book Success Equation.

Outcome = Luck + Skill

If the skill level between both of us is too far apart, minimizing mistakes will not help. The only thing I can hope for is if he or she has bad luck or I have great luck. This may mean playing more aggressively and trying more stuff. After all, in normal rallies, he/she is bound to dominate due to the significant skill difference.

The simple goal is to try to introduce more randomness in the game rather than playing on pure skill.

We see this play out across different sports. Take cricket for instance. The odds of the Netherlands beating South Africa in a T20 are going to be far higher than the odds of them beating South Africa in a Test. The simple reason being luck plays a larger role in T20s as the sample of overs itself is much smaller. If you are the weaker player you would not want to prolong the game, as that gives more time for the luck to run out.

I elaborate more on this in an article I recently co-wrote titled “An Investor’s Guide to whining about cricket” which is out in Economic Times.

Anyways, my two cents on playing table tennis against players better than you -

• Restrict games to 11 instead of 21. Don’t even bother with a 3 game series.

• Be aggressive and go for more shots than you normally would. Don’t try prolonging rallies

• Hope they have a bad day

Don’t know how much this helped but I highly recommend you check out Success Equation by Michael Mauboussin. It’s a brilliant read.

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