24th of August 2013.

Wrong pong 5th world championship at Quad arts centre Derby (the big one) ok so after the fantastic report on the BBC by Mr Mike Bushell (right), we had to, simply had to run a bigger tournament, and Quad arts centre offered us the use of there main gallery space for a day, on the 24th of August 2013. Just before Doug Fishbone and friends adventure land golf. This one was big, this one had thirteen tables, an electronic scoring system, live feed action replays, and a match report on the day presented live on BBC radio Derby.

The day started of with a few tentative people walking into Quad thinking …...is this real?
Do we really get to play this game or is it some kind of massive joke, then as radio Derby turned up ( and people finally woke up it was a saturday morning after all. ) It became apparent we had a real tournament on our hands, we certainly had no trouble filling the space with players, over all we had over 200 people come through the doors to play wrong pong in the tournament either as a knock about, with other family members, or seriously as some of the older more serious veterans of ping pong came down to give us a schooling. Here I have to mention a serious point, it was great to see people of all age groups playing wrong pong, and I was nearly taken out several times by people who were so good at ping pong my only advantage was being the one of the people who had actually built the tables!

In the end all three of the referees ( Joe Kelly, Nicholas Wright, and Joseph Masterton ) were absolutely worn out from both the referee work and from challenge matches. We also have to thank the fantastic live report from BBC radio Derby as well as the derby local newpapers for coming down to report on the tournament. The media coverage helped us to make the day even more fun for the competitors, and really added an edge to the 5th world championships. We did crown a new world champion congratulations to Nathaniel (Zippy) Zimmermann who was so fast he was impossible to play, even his own family had trouble, he has the reactions of a cat! In the end he won out collecting his prize of custom t-shirt wrong pong wrist bands and the honour of being the undisputed 5th Wrong Pong World Champion! Along with his younger brother who won the runners up prize.

There are rumours of another world championships to be held in Derby next year but Ill save that one until I have the details finalised. 

To the English Table Tennis Association website!

To the Derby Quad website!

Thanks to:

Quad art centre (especially Peter Bonnell)
All the amazing people in Derby who came to the event and got into the spirit of Wrong Pong
BBC  Radio Derby for their live match report
and to James Sinclair And Joseph Masterton for both there behind the scenes and in front of the camera technical help.