Questions on World Championships in Houston

Tought situation.

Yes, if USATT boycotts Texas you would have to travel to another state to get your TT fix. On the bright side, you can now make 10K by denouncing some Uber driver who helped a rape victim get to an abortion clinic. Isn't that a good deal?

Sorry but if a flagship tournament is held in a place that has recently passed legislation which even Joe Biden has referred to as an unprecedented assault on women's rights, then this is definitely an issue tonbe discussed on a table tennis forum. 

Mixing sports with politics tends to get a bit messy and is usually bad for the sport in the long run. My view is that most such actions are more posturing and PR stunts than serious actions trying to affect change. I think that they usually hurt athletes most.  So I generally don't like them. 

That said, I'm OK with organizations doing what they will. In this case, I'm assuming the cost would be quite high - even if they have some useful escape clauses in their contracts. And given that it is possible that either the ITTF or USATT might act on this, it does seem appropriate for speculation. But I could do without the exaggerations and hyperbole. That's the kind of thing that tends to degrade forum discussion. 

How much are tickets?

I just want the frickin' link. USATT was supposed to send it this morning and I know of one person who got it. But I sure didn't. Very annoying.

That one person said it was $500 + $75 for VIP tickets. That seems OK to me.

I got a link from a forum member and also USATT finally sent me a link. The whole system was a cluster f... and it took me a long time to figure it out. Maybe I'm just stupid. But my prejudice is that the site is poorly designed.

I chose a package and selected a seat. It brings me to a checkout location and I press "Continue". It brings me right back to the seat selection page. No extra messages. Just loops me back to where I was.

Well, after banging around I finally figured out that it sends you back so that you can select a seat for each time selection in your package. The initial seat you picked may not be available each day. So if you selected the Weekend All Access package, you had to loop back and re-select seats 3 or 4 times for Friday, Saturday, Sunday, etc. Again, no hint that you need to select your seats multiple times. The only reason I eventually figured it out was because it allowed me to do that and the prices for the added seats were $0. So it finally clicked what was going on. 

 

Made me laugh so hard.

Harder  than when I saw the price was $500 

I would not buy any tickets at all.  If I was going, I would just go on just the day when the most  players will be in action and buy ticket for that day only unless you are so hung up in hoping to see Ma Long win his fourth in a row. Even then I would just buy tickets for that final day only. 

 

I expect the ticket prices to drop drastically unless some serious politics will be involved. But unless prices drop drastically, the worldwide TV audience will be treated to an empty arena. This happened in many world championships during the cold war. I don't know if China brought in communist party workers to watch for free during previous events and will do so again in 2022 ....this used to be a big joke in eastern USSR bloc countries before the cold war. It would be fun to see how North Korea did in 1979 & will do so again if given a chance LOL