For a while now, I have never been able to fully understand what the Nexy folk mean by "bang impact". I have always been a heavy topspin brush looper of sorts who even when I loop drive was basically doing a very thick brush with hard sponge.
I got the Nexy OLAM to test as part of an effort on mytabletennis.net to get testers and reviewers for the OLAM/Zealot. What I had heard about the Zealot had already left me not so much of a fan with comparisons to the YEO fairly common place. The Nexy designer described OLAM as a special blade that expels the ball and talked about things like "line factor", "point factor" and "bang impact" etc.. I wondered about the marketing hype but decided that hey, it was worth a shot to see if this blade was really special. Moreover, as someone who likes softer outer plies with dwell time, this could simply be a reaffirmation of my position that blades with hard outer plies help no one.
I got an OLAM (88g ST handle) from Nexy. It looked good and had this annoying red diamond stud on the handle but nothing so bad I couldn't use it. I stuck on MX-S briefly on the rubber and tried it out in a couple of matches. MX-S though tends to play similarly on just about every blade I put it on - the one thing we noticed was that the ball came out the rubber faster when I used MX-S and that blocking was amazingly easy. So the depth of contact made the blade feel fast but the rebound wasn't like rockets or anything like that. I almost felt sometimes that I couldn't hold the rubber on the blade (I had this experience later when serving with MX-P on the blade where the ball seemed to stay on the racket for such a short time I could hardly serve the ball over the net when brushing). This might be a result of the hard beechwood outer ply, an outer ply I have never played with before. Below the beech however, we have the usual spruce, limba and kiri suspects from looping blades, so this blade is a looper's blade where you have to work to get some impact beneath the top play, but the hardness of the top ply creates a lot of linear control.
I was going to write this blade off as another harder blade that I couldn't use but I was impressed by the blocking control. I decided that I couldn't do a review in good faith without playing with the blade for an extended period and that I had a tournament coming up and couldn't do so so I used the blade occasionally until the tournament I prepared for was over. I am now playing with it through out this week to better understand what the blade about - I am using Evolution MX-P rubbers on both sides.
This blade may have helped me see where I got the benefit of hard outer plies wrong. In a sense, one can argue that soft outer plies and some wood combinations promote brush impact and harder outer plies and some wood combinations promote bang impact. It's not that you can't do both brush and bang with any combination, but it seemed that the OLAM rewarded deep impact. Because the blade was so linear, I kept trying to increase the contact depth of my stroke and it seemed that the linearity of the blade made seeking a deeper contact depth rewarding. Brush topspin strokes work, but making harder contact works even better on topspin balls and with great control too. The MX-P felt like a good match because its high grip/dwell counteracted the feeling of slippage that I felt on the OLAM in general. And MX-P rewards contact depth as its sponge is relatively hard so I didn't feel that there was a serious risk of bottoming out the MX-P sponge on power strokes.
The OLAM itself is either a massive innovation or a hint to me that I have gotten the benefits of hard outer plies wrong. It might be the latter, but I highly recommend this blade to anyone who is currently a fan of brushy strokes and wants to improve the contact depth on their shots. Use it with extremely modern rubbers with high grip like Tenergy or Evolution or the slippage may drive you crazy if your contact depth is not high enough - the topsheet will almost entirely determine short game control and slippage. You will feel as if you have laser accuracy on many of your shots because of how the blade performs on bang impact. I will post some practice and match video from this weekend to close out the review later. Will also add any comments then.
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