@Shuki
Quite the way to think about it. Clearly the advice given here has been but a detriment to my game! I should probably stop asking for advice lest my game get worse...
Today, or well, yesterday, (My sleeping/waking hours are screwed up right now) I did some drills with the guy I usually play against in the videos.
I had basically not slept and wasn't in my best form myself, but I could move well enough for near-top performance. He was getting tired and inconsistent.
Somehow up to now I hadn't really understood that there's a 5+ or so level difference between us. I'd just kept taking him to 8 or 9 points, sometimes 10 without any thought, but now when I tested him a bit, he fell apart. We did some drills but the level difference was too apparent here for me to put some effort in and have him not miss, so I decided I could teach him to feed multiball and do some falkenberg.
I fed him some, and he sucked initially which is understandable, mostly because my feed is pretty bad anyway, but I quickly made my feed more tight and he started hitting balls at a good pace.
He picked up the basic technique of feeding very fast, but I think his ball control in general is not good enough for a tight feed. I had to deal with net balls, balls short on the table, balls very deep, first ball coming off the backhand sideline etc.
They were flying everywhere: up, down, left, right, in my face, into my left rib, off wide. I told him to slow down a tad, and it tightened up a little, but it didn't get much better. I had maybe a 67% success rate in looping them, but that's pretty good with what kind of inconsistency I had to deal with I guess. For one it really trained moving to the ball with my legs first because I really had to move to get to half of them and I didn't know where the hell they were gonna end up. Lately I've been feeling a difference between *really* moving to the ball legs first, and between kinda moving but reaching. More of this should help make the feelings more apparent.
What are some things I could tell him or show him to get his multiball feed more consistent? Mainly he can't place the shots consistently laterally, and his feed gets shorter as we go on. I told him to apply a bit more power to the 2nd and 3rd ball and that helped a bit. But there could be something more I can do. I told him to stand on the side of the table and bounce the ball first and he did get the basic idea down in the first few balls, we just didn't practice it for more than an hour or so.
