Introduction
Ping Pong is a fairly popular sport in Belgium, especially since one of its legends, Jean-Michel Saive, is one of the most successful Belgian athletes of all time. Ping Pong is a sport mainly played at the amateur level but that doesn't mean players are less motivated to excel or that their duels are any less interesting to analyse.
The Belgium Table Tennis Federation (KBTTB) has a website containing all the table tennis results of the past 10 years. The website is designed by Gaetan Frenoy, a sympathetic computer scientist of Brussels, and can be found at: competitie.vttl.be.
This website is in fact a magnificent database from a data scientist's perspective:
- It covers 10 seasons of data
- It has data of 10 different leagues
- Only taking into account the regional leagues we have 20 subdivisions per region
- One division has 12 teams and 22 competition days
- There are 11 team games per competition day in a division
- A single game consists of 16 individual encounters, where a game is decided as a Best of 5.
So we have a database with roughly 7,744,000 games, all free for us to explore!
The Final Frontier
Reaching for the Stars
As we got further and further away, it [the Earth] diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man.
To go places and do things that have never been done before – that’s what living is all about.
Picture Saive from: http://generaciokcsataja.hu.