Table Tennis Still Bringing In Millions from Bets

Even as COVID-19 vaccines roll out and indoor activities open up, the table tennis craze is still going strong.

“You’d think table tennis would have been shoved to the side by now,” said Jackson Wieger, writer for Denver Sports Betting. “I think it’s here to stay.”

In a trend seen since the start of the pandemic, sports bettors continue to wager on the game in high numbers.

Colorado citizens bet $6.6 million on the sport in during the state’s first month of legal sports betting last year, and things haven’t slowed down one bit since then.

• April saw $8.96 million bet on the sport in Colorado — the fourth-largest wager for any sport in the state. 
• In March, Colorado’s ping pong pool hit $8.8 million — more than twice as much as betting on MMA.
• In January, the total bet on the sport was $11.8 million — more than any college football bowl game or NHL game in the state.

Colorado is one of the only states to release wager amounts by sport. Others either simply don’t publish specific numbers or lump table tennis into an “other” category.

The sport could eventually generate “billions of dollars, and we are really only scraping the surface with our current business model,” Steve Dainton, CEO of The International Table Tennis Federations, told The Straits Times.

The average player makes between $3,000 to $35,000 each season, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.