Table Tennis at the 2004 Summer Olympics

Men and women again competed in singles and doubles. But the formats were completely different. There were no longer any qualifying round-robin pools. The tournament was strictly single-elimination, with seeding done by world ranking. In the singles, the 33-64 ranked players played in round one, and were joined in round two by the players seeded 17-32. The winners in round two then met the top 16 seeds in round three. Thus, the first three rounds always had 32 players and 16 matches. A similar format was used in doubles, with the 17-32 ranked teams playing in round, joined by the 9-16 seeds in round two, and the 1-8 seeds were given byes into round three. In addition, the matches were different. They were no longer best of three or five games played to 21, but all matches were best of seven games played to 11.