A Point That Lasted 2 Hours 12 Minutes: Prague 1936, the Match That Rewrote the Rules
At the 1936 World Championships, a single rally ran 2 hours 12 minutes and more than 12,000 strokes, and the umpire asked to be replaced after injuring his neck from turning it so often. The absurd match produced the time limit and the expedite system still in force today.
First, that rally
In 1936 the 10th World Championships were held in Prague. In the men’s team competition, Poland faced Romania.
The players were Alojzy Ehrlich of Poland and Farkas Paneth of Romania.
Their single point took 2 hours 12 minutes.
(Some sources say “over two hours.” English records give the number of strokes as more than 12,000.)
Through all of it the two men barely left the table, pushing, chopping, and dinking, waiting for the other to err first. In the end it was the umpire who cracked first — from turning his head left and right for so long, he injured his neck and asked to be replaced.
The whole edition was out of control
If you think 2 hours 12 minutes was a freak event, you are wrong. At the same championships:
- The men’s team final (Swaythling Cup) lasted 11 hours;
- A men’s team match between Austria and Romania ran for two days and 11 hours;
- A men’s singles third-round match was still going after seven hours and had to be decided by a coin toss.
Best-of-three singles matches were capped at one hour and best-of-five at 1 hour 45 minutes — but in the long team ties these limits were meaningless.
Why it played out that way
The root cause was equipment.
Bats of the time lacked the ability they have today (the sponge bat did not appear until 1952), so they could not generate enough speed or spin. With nobody able to hit through anybody, not making a mistake became the rational tactic. The history books have a name for it: chiseling.
So both sides simply waited for the other to err. Between two evenly matched and endlessly patient players, the wait could be hours.
This was not a players’ problem. It was a rules problem.
The 1937/38 season: three emergency fixes
After Prague, the ITTF did three things in the 1937/38 season:
- A time limit per game: 20 minutes per game at the World Championships, with member associations also told to curb the “push only, never attack” style.
- The net was lowered from 6.75 inches to 6 inches. This was plainly a design in favor of attack — a lower net rewards those willing to hit hard.
- The finger-spin serve was banned. Players could add spin with their fingers, or rub the ball on the bat before serving, for a huge advantage. The practice was outlawed outright.
One of those three changes is still in force: the 6-inch (about 15.25 cm) net height has not changed since.
An amusing postscript: because the modern ball is so fast and defensive play has been squeezed so hard, there have been recurring calls in recent years to raise the net again — to reverse the 1937 decision. The idea has not been adopted, but it shows one thing clearly: net height has always been the outcome of the tug-of-war between attack and defense.
From “leader wins on time” to the expedite system
A 20-minute limit was a crude tool: when time ran out, whoever was behind had basically lost. It solved “the match will not finish” but not “the match is unwatchable.”
On December 9, 1961, the ITTF passed a resolution replacing the simple time limit with a more precise mechanism — the expedite system.
What the expedite system actually is
It is the most obscure and most ingenious rule in the sport. The current mechanism (11-point game) works like this:
| Element | Rule |
|---|---|
| Trigger | A game has run 10 minutes and the combined score is not yet 18 (that is, neither player has reached 9) |
| Serving change | After that, instead of two serves each, players alternate one serve each |
| Scoring change | If the receiver makes 13 legal returns in a rally, the server loses the point |
| Duration | Once started, it continues to the end of the match and is not switched off |
| Officiating change | Besides the umpire, a dedicated stroke counter is added and calls out the number of returns |
The design is clever: it does not decide who wins directly, but shifts the cost of stalling onto the staller — you dare not keep grinding, because at the 13th return you lose the point. The server is forced to end the rally actively.
(A note on the history: the 1993–1995 handbook set the trigger at 15 minutes / 19 points; the current version is 10 minutes / 18 points. Also note that some Chinese sources write “12 returns” rather than 13 — the current ITTF rule is 13.)
Why it has not been lost to history
The expedite system sounds like a relic, but it still appears in real matches. The reason is that defensive styles naturally produce long rallies — especially when two choppers meet.
A few modern records:
- At the 2017 Qatar Open, a rally between the Dutch chopper Li Jie and the Japanese chopper Hitomi Sato lasted about 10 minutes and 766 strokes, widely cited as the longest rally ever. (The counting standards vary, but “a rally measured in minutes” is not in dispute.) The rally was actually interrupted only when a ball rolled in from the next table — under the rules, expedite should already have been in force.
- On March 15, 2020, in the women’s singles final of the Oman Challenge, Sato and Miyu Kato played the longest match in modern table tennis — 1 hour 38 minutes. In the first three games both players were already past 9 points at the 10-minute mark, so expedite could not be triggered, and the games ran to 14:16, 12:14, 17:15. It began only from the fourth game, by which point the match had already run 1 hour 12 minutes.
- The final of the July 2022 WTT Budapest Feeder also saw expedite — in a final.
Why do choppers trigger it? Because chopping is a style that cannot kill the point outright: it relies on spin variation and consistency to force errors rather than ending the rally with one hit. More rallies means more time. That is why choppers are still the players most often subject to this rule.
Amateurs will almost never meet it. In an 11-point game, amateur players rarely last beyond five minutes, so expedite is never triggered. If it happens at your table, both players’ defense and patience are genuinely something to see.
What the rule really shows
The best takeaway from the Prague story is not trivia. It is a thread running through the sport’s whole history:
When table tennis changes its rules, the main goal is rarely “fairer” — it is “more watchable.”
- 1937, lowering the net → suppress grinding, encourage attack;
- 2000, the bigger ball → slow the pace so broadcast cameras can capture the rallies;
- 2001, the 11-point game → produce more frequent climaxes;
- 2002, the hidden-serve ban → let the receiver see the ball;
- 2014, the plastic ball → safety and supply, with lower spin as a side effect;
- and the expedite system left by 1937 is where all of it began.
When a sport’s rules can be rewritten because the matches are too ugly to watch, it is no longer a parlor game. From that moment, spectators and broadcasters became silent shareholders in the sport.
Further reading
- The Full History of Rule Changes: From Net Height to Plastic Ball: what else the ITTF changed after 1937
- From Dinner-Table Game to World Sport: how rubber bats made “grinding” possible
- Han Ying: After Two Achilles Tears: what today’s choppers are up against
- How Table Tennis Became China’s National Game: a parallel thread to the history of rules
In one line: that 2-hour-12-minute point in Prague in 1936 forced the net down, brought in the time limit, and produced the expedite system — table tennis admitting, at last, that to survive it has to be watchable.