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How are the best penhold style players?
To better not sarcastically answer your question (compared to my first answer). Penhold is really dying off. My coach, who was a professional female penhold player in her prime, recommends to upcoming children students to play shakehand instead.(recommends to the parents not the child).
She'll teach either way regardless but with the modern game you really need both sides and the RPB is very difficult to learn and execute well so she says it's harder to learn than shakehand.
AT THE AMATEUR LEVEL:
Shakehand is a more natural, and a more stable grip than penhold. Also, it's easier to "figure out" when starting out, since some people can relate it to other racket sports.
The wrist has a lot of freedom for penhold. In fact, this freedom might give penholders an advantage over shakehand players.
However, there is too much freedom, so much that most players don't know what to do with it, and they end up not using it properly. This allows for a lot of improper variations that could screw up your game later on.
Most people don't even know how to hold the paddle correctly for penhold; they just kind of wing it and roll with it without thinking too much about it, especially when first starting out, and especially if they start out 'playing for fun'.
Also, less is generally known about penhold outside of China. There is a severe lack of information about proper penhold technique compared to that of shakehand technique.
Even I wouldn't be too sure about explaining RPB to another player, because I sort of just went with whatever felt optimal.
A lot of penholders have suboptimal backhands because they didn't learn it properly. I would imagine they sort of went whatever they found acceptable.
I remember there was a time I was trying to find a proper video on how to do a proper penhold forehand flick. I couldn't find much. (There was that one video of Xu Xin doing it multiple times, but I can't find it anymore. Can someone link it?)
There is a lack of videos on the penhold, and for a sensible reason: there aren't many penhold players.
All of this sums up to making penhold VERY DIFFICULT TO LEARN PROPERLY.
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MY THEORY(might be wrong, as usual):
If China produced players like a factory, I would imagine that they would probably not use the process that produced more defects. That would be penhold. I would imagine that it would be very easy for a penhold player to get something screwed up along the way, because I definitely know that I have. I use my wrist freedom to experiment with all sorts of strokes in order to find what I think is optimal. I still do this.
Mass producing pro players would be easier if they were all taught shakehand.
I don't think penhold is much weaker than shakehand, especially with the RPB, but I think it is much harder to produce a top player, given the odds.
I see penhold as shakehand tilted 90 degrees towards the ground.
I remember there was a time I was trying to find a proper video on how to do a proper penhold forehand flick. I couldn't find much. (There was that one video of Xu Xin doing it multiple times, but I can't find it anymore. Can someone link it?)
There is a lack of videos on the penhold, and for a sensible reason: there aren't many penhold players.