click to enlarge Tom Filippini is a longtime Denver entrepreneur. Christopher Willard / ABC Entertainment
Sharks, meet Pepper Pong, a Denver invention that could become the pickleball of table tennis, according to Pepper Pong founder Tom Filippini.The game has been around for a little over a year, but it will appear in front of the world on ABC’s Shark Tank Friday, November 22, when viewers see Filippini attempt to convince the mega-investors to dole out cash for the ping pong-esque equipment. Pepper Pong is a fully portable game with a net that stands independently as well as four paddles and three balls of different densities. The result is a game many will recognize as ping pong, but Filippini says the game is easier to pick up, quieter and way less cumbersome than a traditional ping pong setup.“Much like pickleball has leveled the playing field in the larger racket sports realm, vis-à-vis tennis and other racket sports, Pepper Pong really levels the playing field vis-à-vis ping pong, such that it’s really fun no matter if you’re a first-time player, or you’ve been playing for a long time,” Filippini says. “It’s a blast, whether you’re a great ping pong player or a terrible ping pong player.”Filippini is no ping pong scrub, having grown up in Chicago playing ping pong with his four siblings in the basement during the long winters. He moved to Colorado after college in Pennsylvania, but his passion for paddle sports never left. A career entrepreneur and business founder, he always wanted to create something that connects people over a fun activity.Pepper Pong has been bouncing around in Filippini’s head since the early 2000s. While in rehab in 2016 for his alcohol addiction, he began to lock down the idea. He was also playing hours of ping pong.“It was during that time that I really needed something to grab on to that could be a distraction from the battle that I was fighting,” Filippini says. “But over the years I became fairly disenchanted with ping pong, although I love it as a sport. It’s too unreliable in many cases. The gear is very fragile and tends to be broken easily. The table is, obviously, massive, and you’ve got to have a place to store it.”As he turned those thoughts over in rehab, Filippini realized his biggest problem with ping pong is its difficulty, leading to blowout matches and boredom from participants and observers alike. Pepper Pong has more durable equipment and the ball doesn’t fly quite as fast so it’s way easier to pick up and roll with, solving Filippini’s problems with his childhood sport.Pepper Pong’s rules are basically the same as ping pong but with some fun twists: the oldest player always serves first, and the trailing team in a game-point scenario always gets to serve. And if you’re playing best of three or five and find yourself facing elimination, Pepper Pong provides a point handicap for that, too.Filippini promises the game remains fun for even advanced players like himself as it becomes more strategic. Additionally, playing on imperfect surfaces like the top of a cooler or the hood of a car adds unusual elements to the game that would never emerge in ping pong.He often tries to connect the dots from the meteoric rise of pickleball to his Pepper Pong strategy, and thinks both are attractive to broad swaths of people because they use balls that allow airflow compared to their traditional counterparts in tennis and ping pong.“The heart of what makes it easier to play is that you’re playing with a soft, porous ball that doesn’t move nearly as fast, so you have more time to hit it,” Filippini says. The paddles are also cushioned in Pepper Pong, eliminating the noise problem that has plagued pickleball — and people who live by the courts.The team aspect of Pepper Pong is also important to Filippini, who has seen how effective active table games are at bringing people together. In the heart of pandemic restrictions in 2021, he and his family had grown weary of playing endless ping pong games against each other in their game room, so Filippini created