The Full History of Rule Changes: What Table Tennis Changed in 80 Years, and Why

Probably the most rule-tinkering sport there is

Football changed only a handful of rules in over a century, and tennis has had only a few major changes. But table tennis, from 1937 to now, has been touched almost every decade — from net height to ball size, from serving to rubber color, from glue to scoring.

The reason is simple: it is a sport pushed along by its equipment. Change the equipment and the playing style changes; change the style and the spectacle changes; change the spectacle and the rules have to follow.

What follows is chronological. Use it as a quick reference, or as a thread for understanding why the sport looks the way it does today.

1. 1937: three “stop the bleeding” fixes

Cause: at the 1936 World Championships in Prague, a single rally lasted 2 hours 12 minutes, the men’s team final ran 11 hours, and a men’s singles match was decided by a coin toss after seven hours. (Full story in A Point That Lasted 2 Hours 12 Minutes.)

A note: the 6-inch net height has not changed since — though in recent years some have argued for raising it, because the ball is so fast and defensive play has been squeezed so hard.

2. 1959: standardizing the bat

Seven years after the sponge bat appeared, the ITTF finally set rules on bat covering materials, standardizing the bat. It was the first time the rules formally entered the territory of “equipment legality” — equipment was no longer a free zone for unlimited innovation.

3. 1985: two rubbers must be different colors

Change: the two sides of the bat must have different-coloured rubbers.

What it addressed: the “twiddle” style was common — a player glued rubbers of different properties on the two sides (say inverted on one, long pips on the other) and flipped the bat at contact, so the opponent could not read what was coming.

The essence: take information asymmetry out of the game. Your opponent has the right to know which side hit the ball.

4. 1999: restricting long pips

Process: in May 1998, at an ITTF board meeting in South Africa, a resolution restricting long pips passed by 19 votes to 18.

Content: from July 1, 1999, the ratio of pip height to diameter must be less than 1.1 (within the permitted tolerance).

What it addressed: long pips can “eat” incoming spin and return it reversed, producing balls opponents find extremely hard to adapt to. Limiting how tall and thin the pips can be weakens that “non-technical advantage.”

One vote. That shows how fierce the argument over long pips was. Long-pips players remain one of the most contested groups in amateur competition.

5. 2000: the 38 mm ball becomes the 40 mm ball

This was the first ball change in ITTF history.

A winding process:

• The bigger-ball plan was already being prepared during Xu Yinsheng’s tenure as ITTF president, with a great deal of groundwork.
• On August 3, 1999, the 38 mm to 40 mm proposal fell two votes short of the required three-quarters majority and was shelved.
• On February 23, 2000, an ITTF extraordinary congress and congress in Kuala Lumpur passed the bigger ball.
• From October 1, 2000, it was in use: 40 mm diameter, 2.7 grams.

What it addressed: the ball was too fast, the spin too heavy, the rallies too short, and spectators could not follow. A ball that flies a little slower makes room for a few more rallies.

The result: officially framed as “more rallies and better spectacle.” In practice it favored power players — the bigger ball rewards force, and spin-based styles lost part of their edge. This is also where the later claim that “rules changes aim to restrict China” begins.

6. 2001: the 21-point game becomes 11 points

Process: on April 26, 2001, the ITTF congress in Osaka passed the new scoring method; under the statutes, major reforms took effect September 1 of that year.

Content:

What it addressed: more intensity, more upsets, shorter matches, and conditions suited to television.

The real impact ran far deeper than the official description. Under 21-point scoring you could start slowly, read your opponent, and “experiment in the first half of the game.” Under 11 points, lose the first three balls and you are a third of the way to losing the game.

Modern table tennis thus became a front-loaded sport: the serve and the third-ball attack can decide a game, and the outcome is compressed into the opening. Every question today about why the first three balls matter so much traces back to 2001.

7. 2002: the hidden-serve ban

Process: passed at the Osaka congress in 2001 and introduced September 1, 2002.

Content: a server must not hide the ball from the receiver with the body, the tossing hand, the arm, or clothing.

Adham Sharara, ITTF president at the time, put it plainly: as long as the receiver can see the ball’s line, serving even from behind is legal.

What it addressed: for a generation of top players, much of the serving advantage rested on “the opponent simply cannot see it.” This is regarded as the most complete “technical reset” in the sport’s history — it forced a whole generation of professionals to rebuild their serving from “hiding” to “spin and placement.”

Controversy: it is widely read as a major step by the ITTF to blunt the advantage of China’s gifted servers, a point discussed with the eighth item below.

8. 2008: two heavy rules in one year

February 2008: restricting the “overseas legionnaires”

Process: on February 29, 2008, the ITTF board passed it by 46 votes to 2.

Content: athletes who change nationality after age 21 cannot represent their new association at the World Championships or World Cup; for juniors, registration periods are tiered by age (sources give both 3/5 years and 5/7 years, so no single figure is settled here).

What it addressed: the ITTF’s public reason — if a country’s players flood other associations, they block the growth of local players and hinder the sport’s balanced global development. Context: at the 2007 Women’s World Cup, 13 of the 16 players were of Chinese origin.

September 2008: the speed-glue ban

Process:

• In 2004, the ITTF first raised a full ban on speed glue during the team events at the Doha World Championships; the proposal came from the Japan Table Tennis Association, triggered by a case that April in which a male athlete, said to have used speed glue for years, was hospitalized with symptoms of poisoning.
• At the 2006 World Championships the ITTF made its formal decision.
• From September 1, 2008, solvent glues with organic volatiles were banned, replaced by volatile-free (water-based) glue.

What it addressed: athlete health.

Real impact: speed glue markedly raises rubber elasticity (the trade calls it “boosting”). Switching to water-based glue cut rubber elasticity by about 40%, slowing the ball, reducing spin, and lengthening rallies.

The effect was uneven across styles: players built on speed and power (such as Ma Lin and Wang Liqin) were hit hardest; European players with strong physical foundations and mid-to-long-range rallying were less affected; choppers were hardly affected at all. So it, too, is filed under “weakening China’s advantage.”

9. 2014: celluloid gives way to plastic (40+)

Why change it: celluloid is flammable — the same material as early movie film. Safety and supply were the main reasons.

Key changes:

• The material became a non-flammable new plastic;
• The diameter went from 39.50–40.50 mm up to 40.00–40.60 mm — meaning the old 40 mm “big ball” became the new lower bound. Hence “40+.”

Real impact:

• Spin dropped noticeably, rewarding power and physical strength;
• Balls broke more easily. A Beijing team coach at the time noted that early on “a single session could break a dozen or more.”

The 2014 Incheon Asian Games were the last major event at which the national team used celluloid balls.

10. 2021: more rubber colors

Change: rubbers in colors other than red and black were allowed (pink, purple, green, blue, and so on), but one side must remain black — to accommodate color-blind players, so they can still tell the two sides apart by light and dark.

A quick-reference table

So did the changes work?

Judged only against “make the game more watchable,” the record is mixed:

• What worked: the 11-point game did create more climaxes; the hidden-serve ban did let the receiver see; the bigger and plastic balls did make rallies clearer.
• What it cost: spin was steadily weakened, the space for spin-and-skill styles was squeezed, and defensive styles — chopping in particular — grew harder to sustain. The loudest complaints about “balls that take less and less spin” come from amateurs, who depend on spin more than anyone.

And judged against the widely suspected goal of “restricting China,” the answer is largely no: from Sharara taking office in 1999 to his departure in 2014, China’s dominance barely moved, and the men’s game was if anything more dominant than before, while Europe, Japan, and Korea slipped.

That is the point worth remembering: rules can change equipment, scoring, and serving, but they cannot change a training system, the depth of talent, and six hours of practice a day. It is also why, when the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic programme was overhauled, most observers still judged that the landscape would be hard for any rule to rewrite.

Further reading

• A Point That Lasted 2 Hours 12 Minutes: Prague 1936: where the time limit and the expedite system came from
• Into the Olympics and the Modern Olympic Landscape (1988–2028): the four rewrites of the event programme
• The Japanese Era: How a Piece of Sponge Ended Europe’s 25-Year Rule: the first demonstration that equipment can change the landscape
• Equipment Buying Guide: Where the Money Should Go First: the equipment world as constrained by the rules

In one line: eighty years of rules history has just one thread — make the equipment do less, make the players do more, and make the rallies visible — and behind every change sit a technical goal and a commercial one at the same time.