2024 ITTF World Cup

Ma Long was amazing, needless to say. It was interesting seeing him use backhand and reverse pendulum serves that I hadn't seen him use much before.

Fantastic women's final and comeback by SYS too.

Great job by his sister too, in making it that far as well at just 15 years old.

Mima Ito may have been a victim of the format. Good job by Amy Wang in winning 2 games off her (and almost eliminating Ito in the 3rd game and having a chance to advance with a 3-1 win) though.

Gauzy and Moregardh fooled around after falling out of contention to advance but that could still happen with best-of-5 matches in a round-robin in some scenarios.

I think that because most of us are hardcore TT players, watching exhibition table tennis may bore us.  But as long as the professional attitude is maintained, such things tend to amuse casual observers and new fans even more than high level table tennis which is often too fast for them to track and enjoy and whose spin subtleties are harder to grasp.

I also get the hate for the 4 game format, but a couple of things that people should remember while noting all the reasons not to like it:

1) They held a tournament with 48 players on 1 table, 96 players on two tables.  Everything mostly on time.  This is partly a testament to the 4 game format.

2) As you pointed, the falling out of contention is common in round robin formats in all major sports.  Even with a 5 game format, it would still be an issue, just maybe traditionalists would not have hated it as much.   I remember in 2012 for example that CCY had win or to lose by at least 4-2 to keep ML in the World Cup.  Had he lost 4-1 or 4-0, all within his power to lose by, ML could have been eliminated (I think he lost 0-4 to CCY because he was Jet lagged but beat Crisan 4-1 or something like that, can't remember all the details).  CCY played it honorably, ML advanced and got his first World Cup title.

3) The miseducation on all the nuances of how to score the matches was probably the largest failure of the ITTF.  It isn't that hard to realize that when you implement a new system like this, you need to think of all the scenarios and publish examples of what would happen so that people can see and understand the results so there is no guess work involved.

That said, the players knew what the scoring system was before they played.  The issue was how many people working in some capacity for the ITTF didn't understand it.  I as a casual fan understood some of the basics, but expected that with something new like this, there was something I wouldn't understand and would learn only after the results were done because new stuff tends to create such problems.

Of course, the problem with doing such things without getting player buy in is that all the issues with the scoring changes are now compounded by the issues the WTT has had with paying players, respecting players rights etc.  Hopefully trust can be fixed and some of the corruption addressed sooner rather than later.

Ma Long was simply 25 yr old Ma Long after the mid point of game 4, though a SMART 25 yr old! The sidespin chop blocks to a lefty were unreturnable and slide / fish was so low and nasty it let him back into the rally. Dictator turned Maestro.