How I Tackled the Slovak Open Fan Guide
Alright, so Slovak Open is coming up, and I’m hyped! Love me some table tennis action. Tried looking stuff up to plan my viewing and support some players – big mistake. Total nightmare. Info was scattered everywhere: the ITTF site sucks for schedules, player lists are buried deep on tournament pages nobody updates, it was a right mess. Figured other fans deserved better. Thought, screw it, I’ll make a proper checklist myself.
Digging Up the Details
First things first, needed the official schedule. Woke up Saturday morning, grabbed my coffee. Went straight to the Slovak Table Tennis Association’s main page. Took some clicking around, found the tournament section. They had a page for the Open, but the schedule link? Broken. Great. Remembered the ITTF events calendar might have an entry. Went there, found the Slovak Open listing – finally! But the times were vague, just dates and session blocks. No match times or order. Ugh. Scrolled down, spotted a tiny PDF icon labelled “Provisional Timetable”. Download was slow as anything, but I got it. Opened it – bam, pages and pages of tiny print, group stages, knockout rounds, all squeezed in. Took ages to figure out which days had key matches starting. Just wanted clean session times!
The Player Hunt
Next headache: players. Knew some big names were coming, but needed the full picture. Went back to that ITTF event page again. Scroll, scroll, scroll… spotted a tab called “Entries”. Clicked it. Boom, a massive list of names and associations, ordered by rank? Country? Who knows. Scrolled forever. Saw Wang Manyu, Truls Moregard – cool! But also so many players I didn’t recognize. Plus, weird country codes all over the place. Knew fans might want to find players they like. Spent literally an hour clicking little + signs next to country flags to see who from Romania, Ukraine, all over was playing. Copied names manually into a notepad file, country by country. My hand was cramping. Double-checked names against that original PDF schedule sometimes to see who was definitely playing when, because some entries pulled out last minute, I heard. Cursed the ITTF site design a few times.
Building the Damn Checklist
Okay, had my raw ingredients: messy schedule PDF times, messy player list from ITTF. Needed to make this actually usable. Fired up a spreadsheet. Wanted it dead simple.
- Schedule Part: Took the key times from the PDF. Made columns: Day, Session Time Block (like “Morning Session 10:00 AM”), Key Matches Expected (like “Women’s Singles R32” or “Finals”). Forgot about time zones first draft – doh! Had to go back and slap a big “Central European Time” at the top. Learned that the hard way last year watching something at 3 AM by mistake.
- Players Part: Took my messy notepad list of players and associations. Made another big table. Columns: Player Name, Association (wrote out the full country name this time, none of that “SMR” nonsense!), Men’s/Women’s. Had to double-check initials like “HK” were Hong Kong so folks weren’t confused. Alphabetized the lot just to make finding someone possible. Still missed some qualifiers who got added late, heard about them later.
Formatting & Sharing the Chaos
Spreadsheet worked, but looked ugly. Copied the schedule table and player table into a new document. Put a big heading first: “Slovak Open Fan Cheat Sheet”. Added a little rant at the top about why I bothered (“Cause finding this online sucks, folks!”). For the schedule, made sure the times were bold. For the players, bolded the really big names everyone knows. Realized I needed key links… ah, rules said no links. Fine. Just noted: “Check the ITTF Player List for the VERY latest”, “Official Schedules on the Slovak TT site (hope they update!)”. Pasted the whole thing into my blog draft. Took one look and thought, “Man, it’s functional.” Clicked publish before I second-guessed it. Done!
Was it perfect? Nope. Probably a typo or two sneaked in. Maybe missed one late entry player. But it’s leagues better than hunting scraps. That’s why I did it. Fellow fans, you’re welcome, save yourselves the headache I had!
