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Virtuoso +

OSP Blades, made the old fashioned way: hand made, built after you order it.

Blade construction: Limba-Limba-Ayous-Limba-Limba


Okay, I think this is the perfect racket for me right now. It is an Off (speed rated) blade. It is fast enough but not too fast. The outer plies are fairly soft and it has great touch for the short game. So pushing the ball short or looping or flipping short are easy and the blade allows you to make all kinds of touch shots.


You can make your pushes very short and nice and spinny. This helps make receiving serve much easier. Flipping short balls is also pretty easy because this blade allows you to do all touch shots with good control.


It also has great feedback and really nice wood feeling. So it is easy to feel exactly where on the blade surface you have made contact.


The blade has excellent dwell time so you can loop with control and a lot of spin. It feels like I can put the ball exactly where I want to. But it also has good gears so that when I swing harder I can make shots with great power.


The blade is good at looping from any distance. When I am backed up I have no problem playing from far. But the blade really shines close to the table and at mid-distance where you can make power loops with precision.


This blade is ideal for an Allround Offensive player who does a little of everything and values spin and placement on his shots but also wants to be able to put the ball away with power shots when the opportunity arises.


The blade has some flex but not as much as the Virtuoso. The blade has a really nice deep pitch on contact that makes me want to keep driving the ball and making power loops. This blade can make you addicted to the feeling of a good loop or drive.


All in all, this blade feels like the ideal blade for an intermediate to advanced offensive minded player.


A friend of mine who is a semi-pro player has one of those 6mm Clippers which he got in 1991. He also has two Nittaku/Avalox P-700s from back in the same year. Those two blades feel unreal. Before I felt this and my Virtuoso (OFF-), those three blades felt better than any other blade I had tried. The Virtuoso + and the Virtuoso (OFF-) feel just as good but a little bit slower with more control and dwell time. But they have that big wood feeling that I really love.

Some people who don't like it say it is too soft. I asked for it to be, basically, as heavy as possible: I have the small head (150mm x 157mm) and it is over 90 grams which is what they list as the heaviest weight. That is perfect for me, especially since the handle is NOT hollow so it is NOT head heavy which I also like.

It is center balanced. Not too much weight in the handle. Not too much weight in the head. So some people will like that and others will not. Like Der_Echte will want more weight in the handle and someone else will want more weight in the head. But for me it is perfect. [emoji2]

And one person told me he didn't like it because it freaked him out how he could feel exactly where the ball was on the blade face when he hit. That also is not a downside to me.

A lot of people will complain it is too slow, I definitely don't think so. But those people who want Sardius or Schlager Carbon speed will. Someone who is used to a TB ALC will notice it is a bit slower but, if that is not a concern, they will adjust to it.

For me it is more than fast enough even though my technique is good enough to handle a Schlager Carbon. [emoji2]

I just like the all wood, moderate speed thing and generating my own power.

Oh, one more positive. For a long time I have felt that Butterfly blades are the most solid I have seen. You bang the side on the edge of the table by accident while serving and they seem to sustain the least damage.

Somehow this one seems indestructible. My Virtuoso (OFF-) and my V'King are both solid and about the same in terms of sustaining blows as a Butterfly blade.

But this V+ is a tank. It may be because they made the small head with the highest weight. But I have slammed it into the edge of the table a couple of times and it barely got scratched. I was actually amazed by how solid it is. I have never seen a blade as strong as this one.

The topsheet on these rubbers is amazing they really grab the ball well and let you create a lot of spin. This one is medium hard. I have tried this one, and the Stiff and Limber versions. Stiff is a little harder but not too hard. Limber is softer and perhaps too soft or not the right kind of soft. But this one is really quite good. I played with this one the least. But it plays really well and you can generate a lot of spin with it. The throw angle is medium, not too low, not too high. This rubber is great for topspin and for opening against backspin. This is a very good backhand rubber. I like the Stiff version more for forehand. But this one is really good for the extra control with all that spin on the backhand side.

So, this rubber was really nice for the first few weeks. Then the sponge seemed to sort of die. Like it had been boosted but lost the boost effect. And then it played very slow until I reboosted it. I don't like to boost. But this rubber needed it after a few weeks. Otherwise I would have tossed it. Once it was rebooted it played fine and has lasted a long time. Once it was reboosted it felt really good. It has really good spin. Amazing control and the topcoat really grabs the ball well.

The thing about these Victas rubbers is the topcoat really has great grip and grabs the ball very well producing great spin. The sponge is a bit dense and it is harder to feel the ball with these rubbers than it is with Tenergy. But, the topsheet is so good on the Victas rubbers that these are worth using. They play better than the price that is charged for them. So they are a great value.

Allright. This rubber pretty much rocks. The price is pretty reasonable for how good it is. The topsheet is simply amazing. You get great spin and a ton of control. I feel like I can loop anything with this rubber. The sponge is the one drawback to it. The sponge could be better. But the sponge is not bad. It just is not as good as it could be. And the topsheet is so good it makes up for that. This rubber was made for the 40+ Poly ball. It works great with either the celluloid or the poly ball. But it really grabs the poly ball quite well. The throw angle on this rubber is medium high. But you get a great arc on the ball because of how much spin this rubber can generate.

And this is one of the most durable rubbers I have used. Even with this rubber looks dead and worn out, it still grabs the ball well enough to keep using it.

This is an amazing blade for those interested in a controlled offensive (Off-) blade that has good flex and amazing feeling. I love this blade and am happy with it.

My Virtuoso Off-, I have to say, is pretty much the perfect blade. The blade is soft. It has a really high throw angle so it is really easy to loop backspin with this blade. It has a ton of dwell time. The ball stays on for long enough to really generate a lot of spin. It felt that way to me. But people who were on the other side of the table started asking, “how are you getting so much more spin?” The flex of the blade also helps with dwell time and extra spin. It loops like a dream. And to me, this is the biggest asset, it has the best wood feel and the most sensitive wood feel I have ever played with. The delicate, sensitive wood feel is there but there are no unwanted vibrations. You can easily feel different kinds of ball contact. It is like a fine tuned instrument.


Part of this has to do with the woods being used and the thickness of the different plies. Part of this has to do with the gluing process when OSP laminated the plies.


This particular blade has the plies: Limba-Limba-Ayous-Limba-Limba. The outer ply is very thin. that also goes into why the blade gives you such an ability to feel the ball so well.


In reviews I had read this blade is supposed to be very good at close to the table. I heard it loses something as you go farther back. I found this blade to be amazing close to the table. I know my level went up because of how well this blade performs in short game and over the table. I know this is not the fastest blade I have used. Not even close. And when I switched to it I was coming from a blade that is considerably faster. So for the first few days it felt on the slow side. But once I got used to it and really felt in sync with the blade, it felt to me like it performed quite well from all distances.


This blade also a really nice sound on contact which I love. It is a nice, fairly deep, snapping sound, almost a crunching sound when you get good solid contact. It is part of the feedback of the blade, but, to me the sound is important and affects to feel. I love the sound that you get from this blade. It gives so much feedback that it did take a few days for me to get used to it though. Then I fell in love with the feedback and the sound.


With this blade OSP offers a variety of head sizes. 150mm x 157mm (small), 150mm x 158mm (medium) or 150mm x 159mm (large). The medium and large head sizes are going to give you more wood feeling, a faster pace and a larger sweet spot. They are also going to perform better for backhand centered play. But they will also cause the blade to have a bit more weight in the head. I chose the “small” head size. Although they call 150mm x 157mm a small head size, that is a very standard head size. Some blades that have that head size are Stiga Clipper, Stiga Offensive Classic, Stiga Allround Evolution, Timo Boll ALC, ZLF, ZLC, Spirit, Viscaria. The list goes on.

In my opinion this is one of the best rubbers for Backhand. This is my favorite backhand rubber. I had this on my racket and a friend who is a pro was using T80. I asked if I could see how his racket played. He had H3 on FH and I wanted to try that. He used my racket and said, "I like your backhand rubber. It is better for backhand than mine. I am going to switch to that!" Hahaha. He saw how easy it was to do over the table backhand loops (banana) with 05FX. Nothing is as good. The ball sinks into the sponge so well on backhand so that you can really spin the ball when you flip. Not as fast for backhand as T64, but a bigger arc and a higher throw angle.

This is one of my favorite rubbers. The sponge is amazing it lets you feel the ball better and it gives you a greater window for contact. If your contact is a little off you can still really get the ball to sink into the sponge and spin the heck out of it. It is not too fast so it has plenty of control. It is very spinny and more than fast enough. It does so many things well. It is good for serving; you can make your serves very spinny when you want, you can keep them low. It is good for giving back spinny returns or for flipping the return. It is good for looping close to the table, at mid-distance, and is still pretty decent if you have to get backed up. This is the rubber I like best for my forehand. But I could use it for my backhand as well.

I would like it if this rubber's sponge was a tiny bit softer. But it works really well. You get a ton of pace for over the table flips with backhand. It is good on forehand as well. The topsheet grabs the ball nicely. I think the sponge is a bit hard for my backhand but it plays great on both wings. Good for looping close to the table, over the table and at longer ranges. It seems to have a slightly lower throw angle than Tenergy 05. But I really think this is a darn good rubber. I just started using it for my backhand and am still more used to 05FX for backhand which I used for about a year. But it has more pace and power than the 05FX. I just like how I could easily get the ball to sink into the sponge with my backhand.

I guess the downsides of this rubber are price and durability. It would be nice if something that costs that much lasted a really long time. But, table tennis rubbers don't really last that long for the most part. On the positive side of things, I think this is one of the best rubbers out there for the backhand. The ball sinks in really well so you can generate massive amounts of spin with a great deal of control. With the short stroke of a backhand you can really get spin and pace with this rubber. It is definitely the best rubber I have used for my backhand. It flips great. It loops great. It counter loops great. I spent a lot of time trying to find other rubbers that were good enough. But this really is a top notch rubber.

So I tried this blade for about 30 min a week ago. The blade was fine. There was nothing bad about it. It did everything adequately. The dwell time was good so you could get decent spin. The carbon made it so that it was hard to feel the ball. The most glaring thing about this blade was that there was nothing special about it, and for a blade that costs as much as it does, at least in my opinion, that is not good.

The only downside to this blade is, I do think it is a bit expensive. But this is a great blade. I love this blade. This is my blade of choice. It is crisp and the topsheet is hard but the Zylon under the topsheet gives it softness, great dwell time and a lot of spin. When you really dig into the ball you feel a snap that I just love feeling when I crush the ball. It has great control. It is not too fast but it has more than enough speed. Because there is Zylon but there is no carbon you can feel the ball on the blade face really well. It has as good feeling as any all wood blade but the Zylon gives this blade extra gears. It has control and touch for short game, a ton of spin for looping and more than enough speed when you dig into it. This blade might lose a little pace when you are back from the table. But I have to say that I don't actually notice this. I feel I can use it at any distance. It combines really well with Tenergy 05 and 05 FX.

I really think this is one of the best blades out there.