March 18, 2009
Year of the Ox 2009 Tournament in The Bay Area
Courtesy of The Top Spin
’s been a long tradition in San Jose to have a Table Tennis Tournament at the Lunar (aka Chinese/Vietnamese) New Year Festival. This year we at The Top Spin were fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to organize the Table Tennis event inside this New Year Celebration.
The Festival was held in a recently added 80,000 square-foot hall that looked like a
It can comfortably fit 6 tables for the tournament. Our section is right next to the main stage of the whole festival. This is both exciting and tough for the players. It’s exciting because the players get to listen to the music and get to see beauty pageant contestants watching them play. It’s tough because the music level is loud and can be a distraction. On top of that, there’s also drum beat from the dragon/lion dance going on a few times. This actually can force the player to improve their focus because it does take some good effort to focus with all the different sounds. We’ve received both positive and negative feedback about this.
We have a total of over 70 players in the Bay Area signed up to play the 6 different events. The skill set ranged from beginner of about 500 ratings to the top in the country with almost 2600 ratings. There were 11 players over 2200 and 22 players over 2000 participating. We had very high caliber players coming from far away to join us such as Steve Nguyen (~2400) from Southern California and Arthur Brenton (~2300) from France. It was definitely not an easy tournament to win no matter which event the player was in.
The tournament is a 2-day long event. The first day consisted of 2 Team events, U4500 and U3800 Team. The format is similar to the current BATTF League season format, which only needs 2 players to play. The U3800 event was extremely popular and was a little overbooked even though we’ve already turned down a few teams. This caused the event to run into overtime quite a bit. But everyone was excited to play no matter how long it took. The second day consisted of 4 Singles events, U1500, U1800, U2100, and Open. All events were maxed out except for the U1500, which might be due to the fact that it’s being held at 8AM and didn’t have a cash prize.
Some of the highlight matches of the tournament included, obviously, the Open Singles Semi-Finals and Final. In the first Semi-Final, Kevin Au went up against top seed Barney Reed. Even though he lost, it was not without a good fight. In game 2, he was able to beat Barney to tie at 1-1. His fans were cheering for him hoping he would be able to keep the momentum going. However, Barney came back and was able to win the next 2 matches. In the second Semi-Final between Steve Wang and ZheHao Wang, the score was also 3-1 with Steve Wang, number 2 seed, being the winner. It was also a very exciting match because the audience got to see two very talented young players who just came to the US recently from China. They both played fast and furious and delighted the audience.
It then came down to the Final match between the top and second seeds of the tournament. In the first game, Barney won over Steve Wang comfortably with 11-7. In the second game, Steve came back with an 11-7 win with loud cheers from the audience who like to cheer for the underdog. It alternated like that for the next 2 games. The match now came down to the deciding fifth game. Steve didn’t start out too good in game 5 with a 1-5 deficit. They now switched side. Steve started to come back. He was up 2-6, then 5-7, then 7-9. At 8-9, Barney’s team wanted to call a timeout but he didn’t take it. Then Steve tied it at 9-9. It now became very intense. The pressure is now on Barney to stop Steve’s momentum. He fought back and won the next 2 points to stop Steve from getting the New Year Red Envelope with the $600 cash prize in it.
After the final point of the entire tournament was complete, it was time to present the awards. Since it’s a New Year Event, it’s very fitting that the cash prize was presented in red envelopes. The awards were presented by Dennis Phung, a former legend in Table Tennis in Vietnam before the Fall of Saigon. He’s also currently the head coach of the adult table tennis training at The Top Spin.
Overall, the feedback has been very positive and supportive. Despite all the challenges with the loud music, the distraction from the beauty pageant, the lion dance, most players think it was very exciting. In fact, some players even made the comment that this is more challenging than The Top Spin points-handicap round-robin since it forced them to focus really hard to tune out all the distraction.
We like to thank all our players, our sponsors (Butterfly, Incentra Solutions, Blue Chip Tek), and the volunteers who helped make this tournament a memorable event. We wish everyone all the best of luck and joy in the Year of the Ox. We look forward to the next New Year.
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