Ping-pong after dark

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When spring descends in Berlin, it reads as an invitation to residents to get out their ping-pong bats and hit the city's tables. And players wanting to take the game inside after dark, can visit a ping-pong bar.

You could be forgiven for walking past the Dr. Pong bar and not registering its existence. Thick plastic sheeting on the windows separates the goings-on inside from the outside world. But if you stand close enough, you can just about discern human movement inside.

To cross the threshold is to enter another world - a world in which a ping-pong table takes center stage. Twenty or so players circle it at a gathering pace, batting the ball to and fro as they go. Rundlauf, or rotating ping-pong as the game is known, has become a bit of hit in a number of Berlin bars. And it's not hard to see why, for this is truly sport as a social activity.

Miss it and you're out

The rules are quite simple: Players - as many as the space allows - line up behind one another for their turn to hit the ball. But if you miss it, you're out. That way, what starts off as a slow shuffle around the table soon becomes a game of dexterity and velocity which sees the best players racing around the table to be in the right place at the right time. The ball waits for no-one.

It certainly didn't wait for me. When someone banged on the table to indicate that a fresh match was about to get underway, I dutifully took my place in the long line. But my turn came around faster than I'd expected, so fast in fact that I missed it - both my turn and the ball.

As it dropped to the floor, all eyes rose to me, and I tried to sneak off gracefully. At least now I could sit back to watch and learn. Only I couldn't, because a girl down the line who must have taken pity on me handed me the ball and told to me to try again.

"Thank you," I said, thinking if there's one thing I do with less elan than straight batting, it's serving. But there was no way out of this, so I gave it a whack. So hard, it turned out, that it didn't even touch the table on its way to the far wall.

Keep fit, party, meet people

I didn't make it through to the next round, but I did get a laugh. Not the taunting kind but the "never mind, it's only a bit of fun" variety. Though there can only be one winner in the Rundlauf, the players become a team in their own right.

And that, says brainchild and owner of Dr. Pong, Oliver Miller, is partly what his five-year-old venture is about. "I like the idea of a specific context where people can interact," he said. "The people in the space are the most interesting thing."

And as the night wears on, an increasing number of them arrive, armed and ready to play. There's a good mixture of tourists and locals, and as one girl from Switzerland told me, the bar has provided her with a truly fun way to meet people. That's all part of the concept.

"You step into the game and you stand next to one person, you see someone across the table who you think looks interesting," Oliver Miller said. "Then you're out and someone comes and sits next to you. By the end of the evening, you've talked to most people in the bar."

I got to talking to some other players during my next attempt at ping-pong stardom. This time I managed to stay in for a bit longer. Okay, so it was only one round, but you've got to start somewhere.

Move over Forrest Gump? Perhaps not quite yet.

Tamsin Walker is a seriously lousy ping-pong player.

Editor: Kate Bowen