Machines | Hand Signals for Illegal Services
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Comments
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lol, is this satire from the onion?!?!?!?!...illegal serving will NEVER be consistently enforced in competitive table tennis, at any level. the reason is that the umpires have to judge from a perspective that is not that of the receiver, and thus they cannot really tell if the serve was bad, and they don't want to insert themselves into the outcome of a match (see ding ning vs. li xiaoxia at 2012 olympics). exacerbating the problem of umpire hesitancy of enforcement, is that there is inherent advantage to pushing the envelope of the service rules, totally not related to attempting to cheat: a lower toss allows shorter spinnier serve; ball tossed closer to the body allows for more stroke control; keeping the off arm in longer during serve allows for the use of arm movement momentum at withdrawal to generate spin at contact. everyone who is trying to serve really short and spinny will eventually break the rules, intentionally, or not. thus, rules like this will never work. a systems-thinking approach would be to examine what the real problem is with hiding the serve: the problem is that the receiver cannot read spin without seeing contact because the ball is almost uniformly white. the REAL solution to the problem of hidden serves is to allow any kind of service desired, but put many spots on the ball so that spin is easily read. :p
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I think some of the illegal serves are hard to see form the judge's vantage point, like the one hidden serves from the head or shoulder (with the right handed server serving the side serve) unless the judge is sitting directly opposite of the server behind the opponent. it will be tough for the judge to catch those in an instance.
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this video is perfect
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I see pros concealing their balls all day, why do they not get faulted?