Throw angle of rubbers

Medax · Feb 6, 2017

Throw angle of rubbers : 101

Hi All,

In order to increase my knowledge of equipment, what are the basics of the "throw" angle of a rubber?
What does each type do and what does each overcome?

Hope they are sensible questions and I look forward to learning ????

Susanne · Feb 7, 2017

[FONT=&quot]The term throw angle is usually based on the arc with which the ball leaves the blade after the impact. Given the same stroke, the rubber with the higher arc would be labelled as high throw.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]The problem with the above definition is that a single rubber doesn’t have a single throw angle, but many different ones. Based on the incoming ball(spin and speed) and your stroke (blade angle, stroke direction) you get a unique throw angle for every ball. As we can see (or later see since the explanations follow below), we can only compare different rubbers throw angles on certain stroke types.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]However, people aren’t stupid and we’ll see later on why this infamous term enjoys such a high popularity, how and why the usual rubber reviewer labels a rubber as high or low throw and how you can still benefit from these (false or inexact) reviews to make a good decision.[/FONT]

Baal · Feb 7, 2017

Nice reply (Edit: since it was copied verbatim from somewhere else!).

Here is a bit more about it (not copied verbatim from a different website).

It is a property that emerges from several interacting things, including the adhesion of the topsheet to the ball (grip or tackiness), the shape and distribution of the underlying pips on the inner face of the topsheet, and the hardness and other properties of the sponge (including whether or not it is chemically boosted). And as already noted, it also depends a lot on the nature of the incoming shot (it's speed and spin). Two rubbers could both have high throw angles on average but you may see it more with one rubber on some shots than on others. So it is not as precise a term as it sounds.

A lot of the time when TT forum people talk about the throw angle, it is a short-hand term for talking about the racket angle they need to use to hit their favorite forehand counter, drive, or loop (or block). So, for example, if you are looping with your forehand, and your opponent is just blocking the ball back to you, you may need to use a more closed racket angle with Tenergy 05 than with some other rubbers. It's not because that rubber is super fast, it's because of the high angle or arc trajectory the ball seems to take coming off your racket, and if you don't close up your racket angle, the ball will arc off the table.

A lot of more advanced players like high throw rubbers because they often make it quite easy to safely attack fairly heavy underspin. They give a good margin for error on a lot of those shots. High throw angle rubbers often produce high levels of spin also. High throw angle rubbers often have some non-linear properties, which means that small increases in the speed of your racket produce disproportionately large and sometimes unexpected effects on the ball. That can make these rubbers very hard to master for developing players.

As imprecise as the term is, I have often found it useful coming from reviewers I trust.

Medax · Feb 7, 2017

thanks for the great responses so far

So far I am getting the following concepts:

The higher the "throw" or "Arc" of the rubber:
- The more of a closed racket to use in a block
- The "safer" it might be to lift a ball from an incoming back spin
- Suited more to a spin player than a flat hitter

I have been told by another source some information that reflects much of what is here such as the firmness of the sponge, the speed/control ratings, the type of shot played all has an input into the "throw" or "arc", but that's way too technical for what I am trying to understand here (hence the "101" caption)

any more "idiots/dummies" guides gratefully appreciated

Baal · Feb 7, 2017

Yes, but bear in mind that throw angle affects racket angle you need to use when you hit loops or counters, not just when you are blocking, and that is the usually the shots players use to get the first impression of a rubber.

I find it useful info for rubber. When people talk about throw angle of a blade, I usually find that much less useful or reliable. It is true that all things equal, more flexible blades do seem to throw higher, but the differences are smaller than you see with rubber.

When people talk about "control" of a blade or rubber, I always want to know control of WHAT? I don't find manufacturer control ratings to be of any use.

To me throw angle is more useful to know than "control".

NextLevel · Feb 7, 2017

This article explains it best:

https://thoughtsontabletennis.wordpress.com/2015/09/07/throw-angle/

Seems Susanne quoted it without referring to it

Susanne said:
The term throw angle is usually based on the arc with which the ball leaves the blade after the impact. Given the same stroke, the rubber with the higher arc would be labelled as high throw.
The problem with the above definition is that a single rubber doesn’t have a single throw angle, but many different ones. Based on the incoming ball(spin and speed) and your stroke (blade angle, stroke direction) you get a unique throw angle for every ball. As we can see (or later see since the explanations follow below), we can only compare different rubbers throw angles on certain stroke types.
However, people aren’t stupid and we’ll see later on why this infamous term enjoys such a high popularity, how and why the usual rubber reviewer labels a rubber as high or low throw and how you can still benefit from these (false or inexact) reviews to make a good decision.

Airoc · Feb 7, 2017

Baal said:
When people talk about "control" of a blade or rubber, I always want to know control of WHAT? I don't find manufacturer control ratings to be of any use.

I fully agree. Usually good "control" ratings come with low speed and low catapult, as you would think. Try finding a slow rubber with bad "control" ...
However, a slow rubber gives me zero "control" on many offensive shots, just as a fast rubber might give other people a hard time blocking or slicing.

As for throw angle, much of it depends on your personal technique. I read lots of requests for "rubbers with higher throw angle because topspins land in the net." My coach would´ve just told me to open the racket a little more and topspin properly ...

But the more people have heard, the more they think they can adjust their game by choice of material rather than practice

tropical · Feb 7, 2017

People come up with a term "throw" angle then add lengthy explanation to it and create more confusion. The more I read, I think except experts, readers are as confused as I am.

Why can't someone design a test and come up with a better explanation? We do that all the time in physics, engineering.

For example: thermal resistance of an insulator to a heat source is defined as l/kA where l is thickness of the insulator, k is conductivity of the insulator, and A is the contact area where the heat source comes in contact with the insulator.

So for throw angle test we can define something similar. For example only as I am not a expert in this rubber technology (in heat transfer I am), throw angle is a relation of angle of contact/speed of the blade/speed/spin of the incoming ball. What else?

Then one can develop a testing procedure of various speed, spin, contact angle, etc ... and come up with a chart showing a map of different throw angles of different rubbers. This will make explanation a lot easier to understand and one can tell immediately which rubber has more throw angle for general usage. My assumption is that a rubber has higher throw angle at 45 deg blade strike at 80km/hr for an incoming ball at 50 km/hr than the others will likely to have higher throw angle at different shots as well.

My 2 cents.

Baal · Feb 7, 2017

Edit: Tropical, this is long and if you don't want to read it all, just click on the video below.

The more detailed answer is that the phenomenon itself is complex and the term "throw angle for general usage" suffers from no definition of "general usage". What shot is that exactly? A loop? From close in or far away? Against a fast ball or a slow ball or against underspin? A block?

Different kinds of rubbers end up producing a higher throw angle in different ways. In some cases it is more topsheet-dependent, and in other cases it is more sponge-dependent. And with the topsheet, there is a contribution from the stickiness or grip of the top surface, and a contribution from how the underlying pips bend and rebound and of course some topsheets are thinner and more flexible than others. It's not like I/kR or I = V/R or y = mx+b or some other simple relationship. Because there are so many parameters, and some of them interact in meaningful ways, you end up with phenomena like the throw angle being highly dependent on the velocity of the ball as it is moving towards the blade, and different rubbers having a different dependence on that. So you would need a bunch of different measurements and then you need complex graphical ways to express the relationships. There would be a bunch of nasty differential equations needed to model this.

And at the end of the day, who cares? Because most of the time, you can adjust fairly easily, just like Airoc said.

Somebody was complaining somewhere that the throw angle of the rubber they were using was too low and they kept clipping the top of the net and wanted some other rubber to fix this problem. The answer? Just aim a little higher. (Especially since they were having this problem with Tenergy 05!). I know that sounds simplistic but a lot of the time answers in table tennis come down to something like that. (Or time the ball better or move faster or see it earlier).

I have been playing since about 1969, and pretty constantly for the last 20 years. I have periodically changed from rubbers with different throw angles. It takes a few days to kind of adjust If the changes are not too great. It probably takes longer to become perfectly comfortable with it (which is a really good reason why trying to fix a technical problem by constantly changing rubbers tends to be counterproductive, and why really good players rarely change their setup).

At the end of the day, it is a cost-benefit analysis. Is the information worth the cost of doing it?

Of course some of the companies probably measure all this stuff for their own R&D, and have all sorts of knowledge about how changing this or that thing affects it, and it is probably all a proprietary secret. And why should they tell us information that lets us make more informed choices when they can sell more rubbers by getting people to try lots of different products in hopes of making some 0.05% improvement? The manufacturers love EJs, and that is why the introduce so many subtle variations on the same thing.

Actually, as a first approximation your approach would yield some reproducible information but it might not be all that helpful in predicting what it will be like when you actually play with it.

You can search some videos from a guy called PathfinderPro on youtube (he goes by Debater on some TT forums) and he has made some efforts to try to measure some of this with a highspeed camera. He is very smart and conscientious guy. In fact, he is doing pretty much exactly what you propose.

And at the end he gives a long lost of reasons why his measurements may not mean much.

There is actually a set of three videos you can watch starting with this one:

In this one, he is trying to answer a simple question, does it make a difference what thickness rubber you use? You would think that would be easy to answer, right? Maybe not as easy as it sounds.

I really recommend it to you, it will give you really a better answer than this long rambling thing I just wrote.

NextLevel · Feb 7, 2017

tropical said:
People come up with a term "throw" angle then add lengthy explanation to it and create more confusion. The more I read, I think except experts, readers are as confused as I am.

Why can't someone design a test and come up with a better explanation? We do that all the time in physics, engineering.

For example: thermal resistance of an insulator to a heat source is defined as l/kA where l is thickness of the insulator, k is conductivity of the insulator, and A is the contact area where the heat source comes in contact with the insulator.

So for throw angle test we can define something similar. For example only as I am not a expert in this rubber technology (in heat transfer I am), throw angle is a relation of angle of contact/speed of the blade/speed/spin of the incoming ball. What else?

Then one can develop a testing procedure of various speed, spin, contact angle, etc ... and come up with a chart showing a map of different throw angles of different rubbers. This will make explanation a lot easier to understand and one can tell immediately which rubber has more throw angle for general usage. My assumption is that a rubber has higher throw angle at 45 deg blade strike at 80km/hr for an incoming ball at 50 km/hr than the others will likely to have higher throw angle at different shots as well.

My 2 cents.

I guess you want the Chinese Secrets explanation to throw angles. That's already what the term throw angle does for people who don't want to think harder about why it isn't fully accurate, which is what the deeper stuff I linked to gives you. Same as the grip - you can start off with the finger and the thumb but over time, your body will just focus on what gives it the best ball quality and experimentation and practice will define your game.

NextLevel · Feb 7, 2017

Baal said:
Edit: Tropical, this is long and if you don't want to read it all, just click on the video below.

The more detailed answer is that the phenomenon itself is complex and the term "throw angle for general usage" suffers from no definition of "general usage". What shot is that exactly? A loop? From close in or far away? Against a fast ball or a slow ball or against underspin? A block?

Different kinds of rubbers end up producing a higher throw angle in different ways. In some cases it is more topsheet-dependent, and in other cases it is more sponge-dependent. And with the topsheet, there is a contribution from the stickiness or grip of the top surface, and a contribution from how the underlying pips bend and rebound and of course some topsheets are thinner and more flexible than others. It's not like I/kR or I = V/R or y = mx+b or some other simple relationship. Because there are so many parameters, and some of them interact in meaningful ways, you end up with phenomena like the throw angle being highly dependent on the velocity of the ball as it is moving towards the blade, and different rubbers having a different dependence on that. So you would need a bunch of different measurements and then you need complex graphical ways to express the relationships. There would be a bunch of nasty differential equations needed to model this.

And at the end of the day, who cares? Because most of the time, you can adjust fairly easily, just like Airoc said.

Somebody was complaining somewhere that the throw angle of the rubber they were using was too low and they kept clipping the top of the net and wanted some other rubber to fix this problem. The answer? Just aim a little higher. (Especially since they were having this problem with Tenergy 05!). I know that sounds simplistic but a lot of the time answers in table tennis come down to something like that. (Or time the ball better or move faster or see it earlier).

I have been playing since about 1969, and pretty constantly for the last 20 years. I have periodically changed from rubbers with different throw angles. It takes a few days to kind of adjust If the changes are not too great. It probably takes longer to become perfectly comfortable with it (which is a really good reason why trying to fix a technical problem by constantly changing rubbers tends to be counterproductive, and why really good players rarely change their setup).

At the end of the day, it is a cost-benefit analysis. Is the information worth the cost of doing it?

Of course some of the companies probably measure all this stuff for their own R&D, and have all sorts of knowledge about how changing this or that thing affects it, and it is probably all a proprietary secret. And why should they tell us information that lets us make more informed choices when they can sell more rubbers by getting people to try lots of different products in hopes of making some 0.05% improvement? The manufacturers love EJs, and that is why the introduce so many subtle variations on the same thing.

Actually, as a first approximation your approach would yield some reproducible information but it might not be all that helpful in predicting what it will be like when you actually play with it.

You can search some videos from a guy called PathfinderPro on youtube (he goes by Debater on some TT forums) and he has made some efforts to try to measure some of this with a highspeed camera. He is very smart and conscientious guy. In fact, he is doing pretty much exactly what you propose.

And at the end he gives a long lost of reasons why his measurements may not mean much.

There is actually a set of three videos you can watch starting with this one:

In this one, he is trying to answer a simple question, does it make a difference what thickness rubber you use? You would think that would be easy to answer, right? Maybe not as easy as it sounds.

I really recommend it to you, it will give you really a better answer than this long rambling thing I just wrote.

As a general rule, we all like simplicity in things where we are not experts and tend to disdain it when we are.

Tenergy05 · Feb 7, 2017

tropical said:
People come up with a term "throw" angle then add lengthy explanation to it and create more confusion. The more I read, I think except experts, readers are as confused as I am.

Why can't someone design a test and come up with a better explanation? We do that all the time in physics, engineering.

For example: thermal resistance of an insulator to a heat source is defined as l/kA where l is thickness of the insulator, k is conductivity of the insulator, and A is the contact area where the heat source comes in contact with the insulator.

So for throw angle test we can define something similar. For example only as I am not a expert in this rubber technology (in heat transfer I am), throw angle is a relation of angle of contact/speed of the blade/speed/spin of the incoming ball. What else?

Then one can develop a testing procedure of various speed, spin, contact angle, etc ... and come up with a chart showing a map of different throw angles of different rubbers. This will make explanation a lot easier to understand and one can tell immediately which rubber has more throw angle for general usage. My assumption is that a rubber has higher throw angle at 45 deg blade strike at 80km/hr for an incoming ball at 50 km/hr than the others will likely to have higher throw angle at different shots as well.

My 2 cents.

If you want to understand how rubbers "throw", think about how how the ball can come off at an angle sideways from a otherwise flat piece of rubber, when you hit with a glancing stroke. The main component in the rubber that applies a force in that direction are the pips. Then look at the pips of sheets with higher throw vs lower throw. The former will have densely packed pips (more pips applying force = more force), and pips of a certain about square height/width ratio. This makes sense since too tall pips will bend over too much, applying less force and in perhaps the wrong direction, less sideways. Too short pips and it's hard to engage the sides, so you'll have to hit harder in that sideways direction to get the effect. If you apply this approximation, you'll be able to estimate how much the rubber throws. The sponge might help or hinder, if too soft the pips might also bend over too much, but as basic rule I've this to be accurate.

This is a comparison between rubbers, not absolute calculation. But it tells for certain situation, this will throw higher than that.

Of all the numbers on tabletennisdb survey, I personally find the throw to be about right. Most other properties like "spin", "speed" not so much. Weight, hardness and those physical traits area are also accurate with enough voters.

tropical · Feb 7, 2017

The first time I heard about thown angle was from a 1200 player in my club a few weeks ago. I think it is completely bogus as it come from such low rated player then I heard explanation from someone else who was ~2200. Then I came over here and heard explanation from all sources with nice attempts to explain a simple term with complex explanations.

Yeap .. I want an easy answer. A chart is the best. Regardless of how the ball is play, how the racket contact, how far player distance, etc. someone who came up with this thrown angle cRRap may think of it as a simple thing thus required an easy answer. Why the Hell I want to hear complex explanations for a simple term. I don't think anyone besides someone here who has answers for everything completely understand it (or not).
So if someone came up and told me his rubber has a thrown angle of 45 deg. What the hell does it mean? It doesn't mean sheet I'd tell him.

Tenergy05 · Feb 7, 2017

It's something you notice if you ever compare rubbers. Some will require more open racket attack angle to create the same arc, that is not in dispute.

Of course people will try to explain this effect they see, some more successfully than others.

tropical · Feb 7, 2017

Tenergy05 said:
If you want to understand how rubbers "throw", think about how how the ball can come off at an angle sideways from a otherwise flat piece of rubber, when you hit with a glancing stroke. The main component in the rubber that applies a force in that direction are the pips. Then look at the pips of sheets with higher throw vs lower throw. The former will have densely packed pips (more pips applying force = more force), and pips of a certain about square height/width ratio. This makes sense since too tall pips will bend over too much, applying less force and in perhaps the wrong direction, less sideways. Too short pips and it's hard to engage the sides, so you'll have to hit harder in that sideways direction to get the effect. If you apply this approximation, you'll be able to estimate how much the rubber throws. The sponge might help or hinder, if too soft the pips might also bend over too much, but as basic rule I've this to be accurate.

This is a comparison between rubbers, not absolute calculation. But it tells for certain situation, this will throw higher than that.

Of all the numbers on tabletennisdb survey, I personally find the throw to be about right. Most other properties like "spin", "speed" not so much. Weight, hardness and those physical traits area are also accurate with enough voters.

Your explanations seem reasonable and understandable. As we have seen, most racket and rubbers have properties like speed, spin, and control. Now we have another, which is throw angle, correct? I think the possibility is this term come from Butterfly who is notorious in marketing and exploitation of TT players. This term has no industry standard and is applicable to ONLY this special brand "Tenergy", right?

Ilia Minkin · Feb 7, 2017

tropical said:
Yeap .. I want an easy answer. A chart is the best. Regardless of how the ball is play, how the racket contact, how far player distance, etc. someone who came up with this thrown angle cRRap may think of it as a simple thing thus required an easy answer. Why the Hell I want to hear complex explanations for a simple term. I don't think anyone besides someone here who has answers for everything completely understand it (or not).

Beware of what you asking for. If you are not careful, you may summon The Table Tennis Engineer!

tropical · Feb 7, 2017

Ilia Minkin said:
Beware of what you asking for. If you are not careful, you may summon The Table Tennis Engineer!

Do you mind giving a much shorter video?

Ilia Minkin · Feb 7, 2017

tropical said:
Do you mind giving a much shorter video?

Just jump to 07:00.

tropical · Feb 7, 2017

No time for such. Just go to the point.

NextLevel · Feb 7, 2017

tropical said:
Your explanations seem reasonable and understandable. As we have seen, most racket and rubbers have properties like speed, spin, and control. Now we have another, which is throw angle, correct? I think the possibility is this term come from Butterfly who is notorious in marketing and exploitation of TT players. This term has no industry standard and is applicable to ONLY this special brand "Tenergy", right?

Throw angle is something you just notice if you use different rubbers and loop with them with similar strokes. You find that some give higher arcs and some give lower arcs. It's unlikely to be a butterfly invention and in the Tenergy video, they talk about the exit angles on a variety of strokes (blocks, loops, pushes), so they weren't pitching a single throw angle and were talking about the ways to contrast T05, T64 and T80. In fact, their video was one of the most illuminating ever made on rubber design and they deserve kudos for it as well as the related article.

http://en.butterflymag.com/2015/05/all-about-tenergy-12/
http://en.butterflymag.com/2015/06/all-about-tenergy-22/

Throw angle of rubbers

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