Table Tennis 50p (2011)

Table Tennis falls in the middle of the London 2012 set for mintage, so worn coins are common and their grade sets the price. The cross-hatched texture on the bats is the detail to check: when it is sharp and the edges of the table are clean, the coin sells for more. Brilliant uncirculated examples from the Table Tennis coin card or the coin cover sell above coins found in change, and sealed packs do best of all.

With 1,737,500 struck for circulation, the Table Tennis 50p is the eighteenth rarest of the 81 ranked 50p designs and has the 63rd lowest mintage of all 194 circulating UK designs. That puts it in the Scarce band, for mintages 1,000,000 to 2,499,999.

The next rarer 50p is the Gymnastics 50p, with 1,720,813 struck, and the next more common is the Basketball 50p, with 1,748,000 struck.

Two bats cross in the middle of the coin, one seen from the front and one from the back, each held by a hand reaching in from the edge. Behind them is the table with its net, and the ball sits at the upper right with curved lines tracing its path. Check the logo: it has the three Paralympic agitos inside the 0 and the words Paralympic Games, not the Olympic rings. No varieties of the crossed-bats design have been noted.

Alan Linsdell, an illustrator, saw the advert for the competition and set it aside because the closing date seemed a long way off. When he picked it up again, entries closed the next day and he was going out that afternoon. With no time for research, he made a few pencil sketches in the margin of a newspaper and settled on table tennis, a game he played. To scale the idea up onto the large template, he took a yellow vase with a round base from the window ledge and drew round it for one bat, then moved it along and drew round it again for the other. He joined them with a line, added handles and hands, put a table behind and finished with the ball and a swoosh of movement. He posted it in time to arrive by first class the following day and was surprised when it won. He had played from the age of eight into his late twenties, including for a team, and went back to the game after a heart problem ended his badminton.

It was one of the 30 coins in the Olympic set issued in 2011.