I asked him to rate the tall guy after starting the video at around the 30s mark. He said around 1900-2000. I asked him why so low and he gave me a plethora of weaknesses - too upright, too brushy FH loop that has no power, slow / clumsy etc. He said that his opponent had good technique but was way too inconsistent.

Another good example of how it is difficult to get ratings from videos sometimes:

Where are you these days, man????

Oh, I think he took Pace seriously enough.  It's just the way Crisan plays. What would you guess Crisan's rating was in this video if you didn't know his opponent or the stage?

Thanks for the video, slevin.  Really inspirational.  I guess the argument could be made that it's harder to get good playing like Crisan than it is playing like Pace - at least, you know the path playing like Pace.  With Crisan, the skills are harder to teach.  But I think Crisan's ability to read and anticipate the point is so far ahead of Pace (something I am trying to study more closely these days after hearing a lot of comments from my coach and other players) that it shows up when you look more closely at the video.  Pace has good strokes, but he is often late to Crisan's ball and misreads the spin and the trajectory, especially on Crisan's serves.  You can see that Pace almost never puts the ball where Crisan doesn't anticipate it.  It's uncanny.

Case in point-

 If you knew what to look for you could see the level differences in the serve and  serve return, but other than that not very spectacular. If not for their ages it would just look like well coached 2k level Jrs playing. 

IMO, Crisan still had to attack Brian Pace here and there too as well.  Crisan plays a relaxed (some woud say lazy) style.  He backs off the table against Boll the same way he did vs. Brian and lobs.  He counterattacked balls in his strike zone vs. both players.  He made the same lazy returns but well placed to get a predictable third ball.  Brian was nothing close to as consistent as Boll is and Boll of course read the serves and serve returns better - that's the defining difference.  But the effort level wasn't radically different.  In fact, in some of the rallies Boll had, Brian's power to hit through Crisan would probably have been appreciated by Boll.

If that's the case, my fat ass must look a lot better than I thought! 

He may have watched parts of the first few points and not the whole match.

Crisan has tremendous ball feeling and placement but his footwork is just awful comparable to other pro players but then again he is definitely a very smart player. His BH is also one of the best out there (overall game, not only a bh powerloop), he and kreanga are the only ones that can BH loop a ball that is falling towards their right knee.

Overall just because of his  really poor footwork I think Crisan is totally overrated when it comes to world rankings. Boll loses to him often not because Crisan is some kind of genius but more likely that Timo hates to play against soft handed players like Adrian and lets not forget Oh sang eun who destroys easily timo's slow FH spinny topspins

Romania hasnt produced a really good player since Filimon, so they are left with Crisan competing in the pro tours and world competitions, in the past 7-8 you can clearly see that romania focused more on female table tennis, unless off course romanian boys are not interested enough so they dont have a decent pool of players to compete

All these 'guess the ratings' examples just show you that under at least some approximation of 'blind test' a lot of forum experts fail miserably. Just imagine what would happen if the same approach was applied to equipment reviews - "here is an unmarked blade with generic handle and some smooth rubbers, let us know what you think". Easy to sing praises to Viscaria when you know you are playing with one.

It seem like the question and guessing is at around the 30s mark of the video to a young guy, who may not even familiar with the US rating, so what do you expect?

 

I'm curious as to where a lot of the posters here would rank him under those circumstances. I would mis-rate him grossly to around 2250 - 2300. Of course, I'd be wrong.

Either ways, the main point of this post is that while developing footwork and strokes is the best, surest and most solid way to improve, there's more to that in the top players.

 

I think it said that he started to watch it from 30s mark (presumably so he could not see player names). OP knows better, I 'm sure.

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Many forumers here already know that Adrian Crisan is a world-class player (ranked around #30 when he played often).  That's why we know he is not a 1900-2000 player.

The top US players (around 2600 usatt) are outside world top 200.

So, the world #30 can not be between 1900-2000.