1. The table, the kit and the objective
Table tennis is gloriously simple to understand and endlessly hard to master. Two players (or four, in doubles) hit a lightweight ball back and forth over a net on a table; you win a point when your opponent can't return it legally. That's the whole game. The detail is in the serve, the bounce and the scoring — and that's where most club-night disputes start.
The table and equipment
A full-size table is 2.74m long, 1.525m wide and 76cm high, divided by a net that stands 15.25cm above the surface and overhangs the sides. The ball is a 40mm plastic (poly) ball, usually white or orange, weighing 2.7 grams — light enough that a draught from an open door genuinely affects play. Bats (or "rackets", or "paddles" if you're being American about it) have a wooden blade covered in rubber: one side is conventionally red, the other black, and the two surfaces can grip the ball very differently, which is half the strategy.
How a game works
You serve from behind your end of the table, the ball must bounce once on your side and once on your opponent's, and from then on each return must clear the net and bounce on the other side exactly once. You lose the point if you miss, hit it off the table, hit the net on a return (on the serve a net-clip is simply a "let" and replayed), or hit the ball before it bounces — there are no volleys in table tennis, unlike tennis. The ball is in play from the moment it leaves your hand on the serve. Win 11 points (by two clear) and you've won the game; win enough games and you've won the match.
2. Scoring, concretely
Table tennis uses simple points scoring. Forget the old 21-up format your parents played — the game moved to 11-up in 2001, and that's been standard ever since.
Games to 11, win by 2
A game is the first player to reach 11 points, and you must win by a clear margin of two. So 11–9 wins, but at 10–10 you play on — 11–10 isn't enough — until someone leads by two, making 12–10, 13–11 and so on. Crucially, you score on every single rally regardless of who served: there's no "you only score on your own serve" rule (that died with the 21-up era). If you win the rally, you win the point.
Matches: best of five or seven
A match is a stack of games, always an odd number so there's a decider. Social and league matches are usually best of five (first to win three games); the more serious end and most national events play best of seven (first to four). At a busy club night with people waiting, dropping to best of three keeps tables turning over.
Serving
Service alternates every two points — you serve twice, then your opponent serves twice — and you swap ends between games. The exception is the deuce situation: once the score reaches 10–10, service changes after every single point until the game is decided, which stops the server having a permanent edge in the tense closing exchanges. In doubles there's an added wrinkle — partners must alternate hitting the ball, and the serve must go diagonally from right half-court to right half-court.
The expedite rule
If a single game drags past 10 minutes without reaching 18 points combined, the "expedite" rule kicks in: from then on, if the receiver returns 13 shots in a rally, they win the point automatically. You'll almost never see it at club level — it exists to stop two defensive players pushing the ball back and forth until the heat death of the universe — but it's worth knowing exists.
3. The rules people get wrong
Almost every club-night dispute comes down to one of a handful of rules that "everyone knows" and half the room remembers wrongly. Settle these once and you'll save yourself a hundred arguments.
- The serve toss. You can't just flick the ball off your hand. It must rest on an open, flat palm and be thrown upward at least 6 inches (16cm), near-vertically, before you strike it. The hidden, no-toss "sneaky serve" is illegal — though you'll see it constantly in garages and student unions.
- Hiding the serve. The ball must be behind the end line and above the table at the moment of contact, and visible to your opponent the whole time — you can't screen it with your free arm or body. Most casual players have never been told this.
- The edge ball. A ball that clips the top edge of the table is in and counts. A ball that hits the vertical side of the table is out. The endless "edge or side?" row is a real rule, not a vibe.
- Touching the table. You may not touch the playing surface with your free hand during a rally, and you mustn't move the table. Leaning on it to reach a drop shot loses the point.
- The net on serve vs in play. A serve that clips the net and still lands legally is a let — replay it, no penalty, as many times as it happens. A net-clip on a normal return during a rally is fine and stays in play; you only lose the point if it then fails to land legally.
- Volleying. Worth repeating because it's the most common beginner error: you cannot hit the ball before it bounces on your side. Catching or batting it out of the air, even by accident, loses the point.
5. League formats for individuals
Once you've got regulars who want an edge, a structured competition turns "a thing I do on Wednesdays" into "my club". Table tennis is an individual sport, so its competitive formats are all about ranking people fairly against each other over time.
Box leagues
This is the format table tennis was practically invented for. Players are sorted into "boxes" (divisions) of four to six, ranked by ability. Within each box, everyone plays everyone over a fixed period — a month is typical — and at the end the top one or two are promoted to the box above while the bottom one or two drop down. Over a few months everyone settles at their true level, getting close, competitive matches every round. It's self-balancing, scales to any number of players, and needs almost no organising once the boxes are set.
Ladders
A single ranked list where you challenge someone a place or two above you; win, and you swap positions. Lightweight, continuous, and easy to run alongside open play — players issue challenges whenever they fancy. The downside is that inactive players clog the top and the keenest do all the climbing, so a "use it or lose it" rule (drop a place if you decline challenges) keeps it honest.
Knockouts
A straight single-elimination bracket — perfect for a one-off club championship or an end-of-season tournament. Quick and dramatic, but you're out after one bad day, so pair it with a plate (losers') draw or a group stage first so people aren't done after eight minutes.
Round robins
For a smaller field or a one-day event, a full round robin — everyone plays everyone, ranked by wins — is the fairest format there is. No luck of the draw, no early exit; your final position genuinely reflects how you played against the whole field. It's the gold standard when you have the time for it.
6. How ClubLono runs table tennis
Everything above is doable with a whiteboard and a patient volunteer. The point of software is that you stop being the volunteer and get to play instead.
ClubLono is sport-aware, so it already knows table tennis. Sessions default to the round-robin format with points scoring — first to 11, win by two — and you record results in a couple of taps. The app keeps the standings automatically: who's played whom, win-loss records, and a built-in rating (we call it HLR) that updates after every game so the next session's groups are balanced without you doing any maths. Players join the queue from their phones, get matched into fair games across your tables, and see their own results history.
The free tier covers the core club-night experience: roster, queue, round-robin matching, scoring, standings and chat, for a single club, with no time limit. Leagues — the box leagues and ladders above, with automatic promotion and relegation and a published table — are a Premium feature, alongside multi-club hosting, kiosk mode for a venue tablet, cross-club stats and DUPR export. Premium is £19.99/month or £199.99/year with a 14-day free trial, and it drops the platform fee on paid sessions from 5% to 1%. For a club that just runs a fair Wednesday-night round robin, the free tier is genuinely all you need; the league tooling is there for when the competitive itch arrives.
Set up your table tennis club in five minutes
Free for a single club, no card required. Roster, sessions, payments, chat and queue — all in one place.
Get started — it's free
4. Running a fair social session
For a turn-up-and-play club night, the goal is simple: everyone gets plenty of games, against a spread of opponents near their level, without anyone monopolising a table. With limited tables and more players than spaces, the format you choose decides whether people leave happy.
Round robin — the recommended default
A round robin is the natural fit for table tennis: every player in a group plays every other player. Split the room into groups of four or five by rough ability, and within each group everyone plays everyone — that's three or four short matches per player per group, easy to fit into an evening. It guarantees a fair spread of games rather than the luck of who happened to be waiting, and it's transparent: nobody can claim they were dodged. It's the format ClubLono uses by default for table tennis, generating the fixtures and tracking who's played whom.
Sensible alternatives
Fair matchmaking
Whatever the format, group people by ability. Table tennis is brutally honest about skill gaps — a one-sided game is over in three minutes and neither player enjoys it. Even loose tiers (Beginner / Improver / Intermediate / Advanced) transform a session. A rating that adjusts after each game does it automatically, nudging players up and down so the round-robin groups stay competitive week to week.