Ping Pong Buying Guide

Ping Pong Buying Guide (aka Table Tennis)

If you’re reading this, it’s because you’re interested in adding a ping pong table to your house.  As an owner of a ping pong table myself, you’re probably making a good decision.  🙂  Finding the right one though isn’t as easy as you might think.  

For a lot of people, buying a ping pong requires one thing more than money, space.  Ping pong tables require a lot of open space and a lot of them aren’t easily stored.  They may fold up, but even in the folded position, they take up quite a bit of room.  Most of the nice tables at local stores are of the folding type.  I actually owned a folding type back when I was in college, and ran into some of the same issues I’m mentioning now.  I could fold it up but it was still kind of big pain to work around.  Eventually, instead of wheeling it around and folding it up, I removed the stand and just used the tops on a pool table we also had in the basement.  From my standpoint, that’s the perfect use of a ping pong table, to provide an alternate use of a pool table.

Later when I moved and no longer had a pool table, I inherited my grandma’s ping pong table.  Unlike most tables for sale now though, it had legs and folded up like card table.  This made it way more usable than your average ping pong table, I could bring it out for parties, and then put it away when we need more space.

Not much to look at with it being 50 years old, but you can’t beat the functionality.  Also my mother at some point decided to iron some clothes on it and made some nice marks on the top.  🙂   If I was a more serious player, I might look into a better folding table option, though there aren’t many available.  One of the other issues with newer tables is that a lot of them are super heavy to move.  I can pick up my ping pong and fold it by myself, however my old ping pong table top for the pool table was so heavy that it was difficult to move around.

In summary so far, what you need to know is:

  1. Do I have space to have it set up all the time?
  2. If I don’t have the space for it to be permanent, are you able to store a rolling table?
  3. If a and b don’t work, do you have somewhere to store large folding tables?

On of the disadvantages of ping pong over something like pinball is that it requires two or more players unless you get a machine to play against, which is what a lot of the more serious players do.  An advantage of the rolling table is that on most of them allow you to place one side of the table vertically so you can play against yourself, Forrest Gump style.  Of course, you could just put a folding table against a wall and get the same effect, so it’s not much of an advantage.

What brand of ping pong table to buy?

What brand of ping pong table should you buy?  If you’re a serious player, there a lot of options but I’m not really going to cover that here at this time, you’ll have to visit a dedicated ping pong site where they discuss table thickness, padel sizes, high end manufacturers, etc.  Probably the most important thing to remember is that thicker tables can play better, so keep that in mind when looking for a table.  If I was going to buy one today, I would probably look at a Joola or Stiga, they’re available locally and are recognized as being good quality tables.  Of course, I’m not a professional, just an average player, so take that into consideration (but I’m also guessing that 99% of the people reading this are average players as well).