OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Other sports have draws, wouldn't it be cool if we had them in table tennis? Why not wait for the rematch to see who wins. Don't have them in tournaments, but they would be nice in league or club play.

I don't see why. All the sports that have draws have some way to break them, such as penalty shootouts or sudden death periods or rounds. I can't think of any racket or court sport that has draws, the ones that do are field sports involving large teams, and for those they never just leave the game at a draw unless it's a league game or a friendly.

Iskandar

Hungary's Clubs National League. Club vs Club of 8 individual matches, outcome may be a draw, 4--4

That's not what he was talking about, of course..

Iskandar

An interesting example of an individual sport that has draws is chess - even in tournaments, even in the World Championship.
However, I don't know whether or not chess would be more exciting for spectators if it allowed no draws.

It'd probably end up the way Scientific Wrestling did, when they found that truly competitive matches often took over two hours to complete. Hence it's devolvement into WWF style "Pro Wrestling".

Iskandar

I don't know anything about wrestling but chess games can take hours even not having the no-draws rule. For example, the first game of the ongoing World Championship took 7 hours - and ended, you guessed it, with a draw.

So good to hear from you, .. a word is made of silver, and silence of gold.

Actually, funny enough the chess championship this year had 12 games of draws (source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/28/sports/magnus-carlsen-fabiano-caruana-world-chess-championship.html).

About table tennis draws, I view the 'win by 2' mechanism in the game as a draw breaking rule of sorts. It makes sure that there is a conclusive-indisputable victor for each game.

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about


Actually, even if the "win by 2" rule was removed, draws would still not become possible - because the player to score 11 points first would be a winner.
In order to allow draws, a new rule would have to be added. For example, a rule as silly as "both players must serve exactly 6 serves within a game" would have created a possibility of an 11-11 result.

The problem there is you'd go from hours to tens of hours, or days, or weeks... It's the nature of the game. You can reach an impasse, where it's nearly impossible for either player to win. Table Tennis (and other racket/court sports) isn't like that. What you have a limit of is player stamina - a game that takes several hours wouldn't be possible or desirable, so they introduced, for instance, the expedite rule. Come to think of it, in soccer, they have penalty shootouts (you don't want matches to last for hours, either). Chess? I can't imagine them introducing some kind of tie-breaker in Chess without it being totally un-chess-like.

Iskandar