a blog.

Its been around 8 months since my last table tennis update so its time for another one!!! I did a tournament in Walnut Creek the beginning of March this year (my second USATT tournament) and achieved a rating of 1716.  Although this is a significant improvement from my previous USATT rating of 1446, which I got from a tournament in May of last year, I still feel like I under performed at the tournament, and my true level is closer to 1800 or 1900.  There were 2-3 close matches in the tournament that I ended up losing due to lack of preparation.  Had I won those, my rating would have been closer to 1900.  Oh well.... Here is a nice graph that I created, which tracks my improvement over time.  The blue line is my rating, averaged from my USATT and club ratings, and the red line is a rating projection that I need to keep up with if I want to reach a rating of 2000 by beginning of year 2020.  So far I am exceeding expectations!! Main things that I improved on over the last 6 mo

As I mentioned in my previous blog post from a few months ago, I've been taking table tennis seriously and trying to reach a rating of 2000. As of this writing, I've been playing seriously for about 8 months (since 10/2018), and you can see my progress below. month end club 1 club 2 club 3 USATT rating (avg) 10/1/2017 670 850 760 11/8/2017 900 900 12/3/2017 1059 1059 1/17/2018 1058 1058 2/18/2018 1128 1128 3/21/2018 1231 1250 1241 5/9/2018 1304 1280 1292 5/10/2018 1296 6/1/2018 1399 1446 1480 1446 1444 I have been making steady progress and improved my rating from 800 to ~1450 in 8 months, which is pretty good by most standards.  I played my first USATT tournament in Sacremento back in May.  I did pretty well, including upsetting a 1600 rated player, and achieved a USATT rating of 1446. Some observations: There are some key skills that I had to learn at each level / rating tier in order to reach the next.  I will try to summarize them below. 800 -

My first drone video! I've been meaning to do this for a long time, but I've finally create a drone montage video of all my travels.   It was fun making this video. I learned how to use Adobe Premiere and I hope to make even more content to post on Youtube in the future.  Some of the things that I plan to create include: - data science learning videos - travel videos - life vlogs - funny videos

One of my goals over the next few years is to reach a rating of 2000.  My specific goals are the following: Reach 1600 by end of 2018 Reach 1800 by end of 2019 Reach 2000 by end of 2020 I built a simple model to forecast what my rating should be over time in order to hit these goals.  The blue line represents my progress so far and the red line represents the progress that I expect if I want to reach the benchmarks that I set above. My progress has been pretty good so far.  I started playing seriously around 10/1/2017 with a rating of 800 and as of today (March 21, 2018), I am rated around 1250.  If I can keep up the pace I can definitely reach my goals! I've been trying to stick to a consistent training process.  This process includes the following: Playing round robin at different clubs 2-3 times a week Taking a private lesson once a month (I haven't really been doing this) Watching Youtube videos of professional players and analyzing them Keepi