In July 2025 the Chinese team arrived in Las Vegas for the first US Smash, one of the Grand Smashes that sit at the top of the World Table Tennis (WTT) circuit, and within days the talk was about furniture. The table tennis tables, supplied by JOOLA, did not feel like the ones the players knew. Chinese media reported that Sun Yingsha, the women's world No 1, said after her match that they were different from the tables she had played on before, that Wang Manyu spoke of having to adapt and that Lin Shidong admitted he was not comfortable on them. One newspaper's headline put the complaint in two words: too slippery.
A month later, at WTT Champions Yokohama, Wang Chuqin met the opposite problem. The tables and balls there came from Nittaku, a Japanese maker, and during a week in which he beat Shunsuke Togami to reach the semi-finals he compared them with what he had faced in America. The US Smash table "had inertia", he said, quoted by the Shanghai paper Oriental Sports Daily, so that high-toss serves, the ones thrown metres into the air to load them with spin, shot through; in Yokohama the table was a little "stopping" and the ball "doesn't travel" (translated from Chinese). He added, fairly, that the table was not so different from others and that the bigger adjustment was a ball he had not played with for a long time.
What the rules say
To a newcomer this can sound like fuss. A table tennis table is 2.74 metres by 1.525 metres, its top 76cm off the floor, with a net across the middle; the sport's laws fix those numbers, and they have barely moved in a century. Yet the best players in the world talk about tables the way tennis players talk about grass and clay, and the people who build them agree. "Top players refer to tables as being 'slippery,' 'soft,' 'fast,' or 'hard,'" Shin Miura, the chief executive of the Japanese maker San-Ei, told nippon.com in 2023 (translated from Japanese).
The law leaves more room than those fixed dimensions suggest. It says the playing surface may be made of any material, as long as it gives a uniform bounce of about 23cm when a standard ball is dropped on to it from 30cm, and that it must be dark, matt and uniformly coloured, with white lines along its edges. That is all. Nothing in it mentions friction, the grip that lets a spinning ball bite into the surface, or how a table should behave when the hall is hot, damp or built on a springy floor. The word "about" does a great deal of work.
In practice the tolerance is set by the International Table Tennis Federation's approval process, and international events must use a brand and type of table on the ITTF's approved list. In the test as nippon.com described it, balls are dropped from 300mm on to 19 points across the surface and must come back up to between 230mm and 260mm; and the average rebound on one side of the net may differ from the other by no more than 1mm. A table at the bottom of that range and one at the top are both legal. The gap between them, 3cm on a 30cm drop, is less than the width of the ball.
- 1926 law, lowest allowed66.7%
- 1926 law, highest allowed83.3%
- Today's law, 'about 23cm' from 30cm76.7%
- Today's approval test, lowest76.7%
- Today's approval test, highest86.7%
Eleven divided each bounce limit by the height the ball is dropped from: 8in to 10in from 12in in the 1926 laws, about 23cm from 30cm in today's Law 2.1.3, and 230mm to 260mm from 300mm in the ITTF approval test as described by nippon.com.
Source: Laws of Table Tennis 2026-27 (Table Tennis England); AllAboutTableTennis: the original laws of 1926; nippon.com
The window used to be wider. When the ITTF was founded in 1926 and held its first World Championships in London the same year, its first laws asked for a table 9ft by 5ft and 2ft 6in high, of a dark colour, made of solid hard wood an inch thick or else giving a uniform bounce of between 8in and 10in from a 12in drop. Eleven converted both sets of limits into the share of the drop height that the ball must give back. In 1926 a table could return anything from two-thirds to five-sixths of it. Today's approval window runs from 77% to 87%: 40% narrower, and set higher. Over a century the sport has asked for tables that are livelier and more alike at the same time.
That the first laws began with wood was no accident. The game started on the dining tables of late-Victorian England in the 1880s, according to the ITTF's own history, as an indoor imitation of lawn tennis played with whatever came to hand. Slazenger's 1883 patent for nets described a version for a billiard or dining table; Foster's table game of 1890 put a wooden fence around the edge of the table and big side nets to keep the ball in; in 1891 Jaques of London launched Gossima, later sold as Gossima or Ping Pong. Hamley Brothers trademarked the name Ping Pong in 1900, and the celluloid ball that arrived around then turned the game into a craze. The table was household furniture long before it was sporting equipment, and the habit of treating it as a neutral stage on which the real contest takes place goes back that far.
It has rarely been neutral. At the 1936 World Championships in Prague, Tommy Sears, an English player who had travelled as an independent entry and lost in the last 32, wrote afterwards: "The tables we played on were so soft that one could press one's fingers in them." The exception, he added, was a single Jaques top that was kept almost entirely for the Czech players. Those championships are better remembered for the opening point of a team match between Poland's Alojzy Ehrlich and Romania's Farkas Paneth, which lasted two hours and 12 minutes. A time limit for games was drawn up within weeks, and in 1937 the net was lowered from 6¾in to 6in, close to the 15.25cm it is today.
Since then the sport has kept retuning the meeting of ball, racket and table: thick sponge rubber from 1952, when Japan's Hiroji Satoh won the world title with it; a larger 40mm ball from 2000, meant to slow rallies down; plastic balls in place of celluloid in the middle of the 2010s, a change whose physics Eleven has written about before. Through all of it the table's bounce rule has stayed close to where 1926 left it.
Why two tables differ
So why do two legal tables feel different? Start with the top. Competition tables are usually 25mm thick, built from layers of wood or wood composite and painted with a coating; Butterfly's Centrefold 25, for instance, has a 25mm top. A thinner or poorly supported top can have dead spots near the edges or above the frame, which is why the approval test checks 19 points rather than one.
The coating decides how much the surface grips the ball. A spinning ball touches the table for a tiny fraction of a second. The more grip, the more of its spin is turned into a change of speed and direction, so that topspin, the forward rotation behind most attacking shots, kicks on, and backspin checks. On a slick surface the ball skids and the spin has less effect, which is what the Chinese players were describing in Las Vegas. One Chinese newspaper claimed that the coating on the JOOLA tables gave less friction than the DHS tables the national team usually plays on. The laws set no friction standard to settle it, although ITTF inspectors did measure friction, as well as bounce, when they checked the table for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
Then there is the room. Wood moves with heat and moisture. When San-Ei shipped its tables to the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, only the second Games to include table tennis after Seoul in 1988, the heat and humidity in ordinary shipping containers warped them; some could not be used and staff repaired them on site. "Ever since then, we have exported our tables in refrigerated containers," Miura said.
- DHS2
- JOOLA2
- Tibhar2
- DONIC1
- Nittaku1
- Butterfly1
Eleven took the table supplier named by the organiser, the ITTF, the manufacturer or the press for nine events: World Championships Doha 2025 and London 2026 (DHS), US Smash 2025 and 2026 (JOOLA), WTT Champions Montpellier 2025 and 2026 (Tibhar, under its 2024 ITTF deal), WTT Champions Frankfurt 2025 (DONIC D25), WTT Champions Yokohama 2025 (Nittaku) and 2026 (Butterfly Trazox). Events whose table supplier Eleven could not confirm are left out.
Source: ITTF; JOOLA; Butterfly; tabletennis.tv; Oriental Sports Daily; AllAboutTableTennis
And there is what lies underneath. The ITTF's regulations require a floor that is not light-coloured, brightly reflecting or slippery and that is resilient; at world and Olympic title events it must be wood or an approved roll-out synthetic. Coaches have long argued that the surface a table stands on affects the bounce as well as the players' footwork. For the World Team Championships in London this spring, Neon Arena Services laid wooden subfloors at the venues before the playing surface went down, and the competition floor came from Tibhar, the ITTF's flooring partner for the World Championships until 2028.
Who makes the tables
What surprises most newcomers is that there is no single official table. Each event has its own supplier, usually a sponsor, and the choice changes from city to city. Eleven went through the supplier announcements for nine of the biggest events of 2025 and 2026 and found six different manufacturers. Only DHS, JOOLA and Tibhar appeared more than once, and the world's best players met at least four different makers' tables in a single season.
The Olympic table has a lineage of its own. San-Ei made the tables for Barcelona, the Infinity table for Rio 2016, with crossed legs of beech, and Motif for Tokyo 2020, whose top was made from birch plywood from the Tohoku region, chosen to support its recovery after the 2011 tsunami. Paris 2024 played on a black and pink table made by DHS, the Shanghai company also known as Double Happiness, which has supported international table tennis since 1961, the year Beijing staged the World Championships. It brought out its Rainbow table in 2005, and under a deal signed in April 2025 a Rainbow table in Qatar's national maroon, with a golden frame, was used at the World Championships in Doha.
Last week at WTT Champions Montpellier the players were on Tibhar tables; this week at WTT Champions Frankfurt they start again in another hall, another floor and, quite possibly, another table. Tennis made its peace with this long ago. The International Tennis Federation sorts courts into five categories, from slow to fast, by a measured Court Pace Rating, and nobody thinks less of a champion for winning on clay rather than grass; the surface is part of an event's character. Cricket goes further and treats the pitch almost as a participant, discussed before every Test.
Table tennis prefers to treat its tables as interchangeable, because the law and the approval test say they are. The players' complaints suggest otherwise, and so, read carefully, does the test itself. The 1mm limit on the difference between the two halves of one table shows a sport that cares a great deal about fairness between the two ends, and much less about consistency from one week to the next. Organisers already announce the table maker, the ball and the floor. Publishing the test results for the show-court tables would cost little and tell players and spectators whether a week is likely to play fast or slow.
Until then the information arrives the old way, in the practice hall, where Miura says top players quickly work out which parts of a table give more or less rebound and use it in their matches. Wang Chuqin's verdict in Yokohama was exact: one table pushed the ball on, the other held it back, and the job was to notice before his opponent did. Larry Hodges, the American coach, wrote on his website in 2015: "Tactical players adapt; non-tactical players complain." In table tennis, the first opponent a player has to read is the table.
