Nordhorn Classic Open 2024 at 01./02.06.2024

Preview

Dear table tennis friends! Meanwhile for the 21th time, the international open Nordhorn classic tournament will take place on the weekend of June 1 and 2, 2024. Then, the tournament for the eigth time will have two days because on Sunday for the first time four competitions with standard sandpaper (Ping Pong) bats are offered. After the boom this variant of table tennis has taken in the recent years (with World Championships first in London and now in Mexico-City, which was temporarily about $ 100,000 in prize money), we decided in 2014 to this expansion of our programme, with the Nordhorn Classic Open being since then the first open tournament in Germany with a sandpaper class. And since 2024 NBO also is the first and only German open tournament with four sandpaper classes. In the hardbat category we again offer four classes where all players are categorized according to their individual skill level just according to the Q-TTR-values of the andro ranking list. Thus all players from lower divisions and all young players have - especially in the hardbat classes III and IV - a real chance to win. And who does not qualify for the final round of its individual competition can still participate in the consolation round where all positions will be determined. This year we are once again playing with the previous TSP Picco blades, which were covered with Friendship 729 Dr Evil last year after the old TSP Miracle rubbers became unusable. After a two-year transition period, since 2018 we are back in a real sports hall - the gymnasium of the Anne Frank School, which is not only identical to our long-standing venue, the hall of the Frensdorf school, but also only one kilometer away from this and lies much more central in Nordhorn than the Vorwärts hall, the venue of 2016 and 2017. As there is no disturbing sunlight in the current hall and with four separate dressing rooms with separate showers, there are clearly better sanitary conditions than in the past. Altogether now the spatial conditions are even better than ever before. After the Corona pandemic prevented our tournament from being held three times in a row, in the last year we started again with our tournament anniversary. We hope that many former participants and some new ones will join us on the first weekend in June! With "Nordhorn Classic Open" these two different kinds of table tennis which offered really the same conditions for all players - in the USA and England well-known under the names hardbat and ping pong resp. sandpaper - shall be made more popular in Germany. So at Saturday just hardbat rackets with pimpled rubber coverings are to be used. In a general sense we play here with the materials which were used nearly by each table tennis player in the 1950's before the advent of sponge rackets. Even further back in table tennis history we go on Sunday: Sandpaper rackets were played throughout the world until about 1920 and then gradually ousted from the pimpled rubber rackets. Here none is to win only because his opponent did not get along with his long pimples, his anti, his trick services or his turbo-loops. Here all are to play with absolute same material (just hardbat or clickball) and at the end the best player is to win and not the best material. The hardbat tournaments held so far in our region were very much fun for all participants and showed how attractive this kind of the table tennis game is. We can promise long rallies, that really earn this name, matches worth seeing with attack against defense, services, which just open the rally and do not terminate it at the same moment, and points, which one must fight very hard for. We request everybody not to let pass this pleasure without participation!