Donic Baum Esprit

Hi everyone,

In this review, I will review my first ever carbon blade Donic Baum Esprit. The setup I'm using is Donic Baum Esprit with DHS Neo Hurricane 3 on FH side and Tibhar Evolution FX-P on BH side. And after playing with this blade for a week, here's my review :

Donic Baum Esprit is my first carbon blade since I played table tennis in 2014. Usually, I'm using an all-wood blade, but I'd like to experiment a little bit by moving to a carbon blade. I'm an attacking player who likes to loop the ball very often. For me, Donic Baum Esprit helps me to loop the ball more consistently. The speed I can generate is great enough and the amount of control & spin is very good. It also has very large sweet spot which give you more forgiveness even if you slightly mishit the ball.

Short game is so smooth. I can control the short game easier. The amount of dwell time that this blade has also good for flicking the ball. My short push is getting better now and my forehand also my backhand flick become more deadly.

In looping and counter-top spin rally, my shot also getting more consistent. The amount of control from Donic Baum Esprit also good when you're playing far from the table. I found that I need an extra effort to create a long arc when I played far from the table, but when using Donic Baum Esprit I can do a very big swing without worrying the ball come out of the table. Blocking also quiet easy to do with this blade I can do both active and passive block without too much effort. For me this blade is very balance in short-distance, mid-distance, and long-distance game.

Things I don't really like from Donic Baum Esprit is the wood quality issue. It seems the wood pretty easy to get damaged. The layer is pretty thin and sometimes it makes me really nervous to play aggresively from close the table.

In my opinion, this blade good for player who really love to top-spin the ball a lot. I will not recommend Donic Baum Esprit for direct hitters because the blade is not so hard so you won't get any benefit by hitting the ball flat.

The Baum Esprit has, for a Carbon-Blade, a relatively soft feeling for which reason the blade provides good control in all gameplay-situations.
In my opinion the bigggest strenght of the Baum Esprit is that this blade provides extremly good control in passive play for a offensive blade as well as when you want to play topspin-topspin rallies at halfdistance you can play pretty fast but also spinny shots due to the high arc the blade grants.

In terms of the weight of the blade I have to say that the Baum Esprit isn't really heavy. Mine has 88g. It is a bit headheavy but I think that this isn't bad as with this attribute you are able to put spin on the ball more easily than with a blade like the Clipper Wood for example.

And because all of that I have been playing with the Baum Esprit, which is a underrated blade, for a season and I'm won't change the blade for a while since I think that it is a great blade for versatile offensive players.