In Hackers, Steven Levy spends some time talking about how the engineers blow off steam playing ping pong, and describes a little about how good they are:

When Gosper hit a Ping-Pong ball, the result was something as looney as a PDP-6 display hack—he put so much English on the ball that complex and counterintuitive forces were summoned, and there was no telling where the ball might go. Gosper loved the spin, the denial of gravity that allowed you to violently slam a ball so that instead of sailing past the end of a table it suddenly curved down, and when the opponent tried to hit it the ball would be spinning so furiously that it would fly off toward the ceiling. Or he would chop at a ball to increase the spin so much that it almost flattened out, nearly exploding in mid-air from the centrifugal force. “There were times when in games I was having,” Gosper would later say, “a ball would do something in mid-air, something unphysical, that would cause spectators to gasp. I have seen inexplicable things happen in mid-air. Those were interesting moments.”

This sent me looking for examples of ping pong trick shots, and I found Pongfinity (instagram):

These three Finnish guys are like the Nerdy Dude Perfect of Ping Pong (I actually mistyped their name first as “Pongperfect”), and some of the shots are literally unbelievable. #5 took me more time than I care to admit to understand what was happening.

Their channel is so great, the videos are extremely entertaining. This video is full of jaw-dropping stuff too:

If you like this stuff, there’s a ton more at their YouTube channel.