Daily Table Tennis Chit Chat

[Peter93]

Has anyone ordered from prott recently? Just curious how fast shipping was to the US with EMS. They quote a pretty long time and back a number of years ago when I ordered from them they had Hong Kong DHL which was extremely fast.

 

[NextLevel]

I mess around with my looping technique a lot, and there is a particular approach I have always wanted to use but which I have never been quite able to make stable. I does seem to produce my most powerful ball. I will test it with my coach tomorrow hopefully and get his insights.

 

[jk1980]

i had a singles and doubles competition yesterday.
due to the lack of time the singles competition only used the best of three format, so winning to games would be enough to win.
we had 4 groups with 5 people each. I won every game bar the one where i thought "i already played this guy and he isnt that good". Indeed that very guy that i finally lost to was actually winning the group (which is ridiculous tbh). I think i won the first set with 11-3 or something and then my mind went into the mode "hey, i can try new stuff out now and probably win anyways", which led to the situation where he was leading 10-5 against me in the second set. I managed to come close, but he beat me 13-11 in the end. Suffice to say i could not get my mind back into the winning habbit of the first set and lost the 3rd game close.

This was a very good lesson in the need to be more humble and fight every point, because i basically "f*ed around and found out"
after the group phase of the singles i went into the doubles competition with groups of three, whereby only the first of each group would proceed plus the best 2nd placed. I told my team mate "hey, we will win this group, every other team in our group has one player in it that is not that experienced". Totally forgetting about the lesson of the singles phase being too cocky and what happend ? we lost to the first team we played against with 1-2 sets (best of three again) and beat the next team 2-0. That was obviously not good enough to proceed. We already packed our bags and where ready to leave, when the organizing staff came to us and told us to wait, because we could still proceed as best second placed. we just had to wait for the other groups to finish so they could calculate who was the best second placed team. Luckily it was us, so we proceeded to the knockout phase. It was already the semi final (with only 4 teams proceeding from the group phase), so we had only two games to go. Lucky the first opponent in the semi final was a quite good team and my team mate knew one of the opponents very well. I would even say that this was the best player in that doubles competation. This lead us to know that only pushing securly to our win would not be possible, so we had to attack. Which was good in the end, because putting them under pressure made the second opponent crumble more often and we managed to win it. In the final we were even more attacking and finally won that competation.

take away of this day for me is:
- every match has to be played and fought seriously, no matter the prior set results
- using the mindset to safely push yourself to the win against weaker opponents is not a good strategy.

the last point is a two edged sword though. While it was working fine in the singles competation simply returning the ball until the opponent got impatient and tried to finish a ball that was not easy to finish, in the doubles competation it simply gimped our chances.

i hope i can take away the right lessons in terms of mentality from this experience.

 

[yamagata]

Watching Arunas service game and he does not hold the racket to allow him to achieve maximum spin. Is it a misconception that max spin equals good?

 

[Takkyu_wa_inochi]

went to a tournament yday. Format was directly KO. got Boko'ed 0-3 in R1 immediately by a young guy.
he played decently but not extraordinary.

not a lot of warmup, never got into my rhythm. i can't recall playing a decent spinny BH of all match during rallies (only BH receives got good from G3). i had leads in G2 and G3 but wasted them because my serve game was horrible, most of my serves were met by chiquita, and opponent got an immediate advantage there. Guy played intelligently. He saw i was tense and nervous so didn't play fast but with placement and let me rush and make mistakes.

pfffff

 

[jk1980]

Watching Arunas service game and he does not hold the racket to allow him to achieve maximum spin. Is it a misconception that max spin equals good?

aruna has a more non conventional technique more acking to somebody using a strong emphasys on power, so i guess he just does not care that much and will stick with his "brute force" method.

 

[blahness]

I just played a few matches using anti after a multimonth break. Anyway, the real funny thing is that I destroyed a few conventional players who had conventional strokes and the scores were not even that close.

However, the weird thing is that it wasnt so easy winning against a few weird ass beginner players flying about with weird strokes, whereas in the past with inverted it was so easy to beat these kind of players, just heavy topspin from both wings and it is an ez win. Although I still won, it wasnt as easy as what it would be like if i had 2x inverted.

The problem is that im confusing the heck out of higher level conventional players, but am not stable enough to win comfortably against these weird unconventional players.

 

[yamagata]

I just played a few matches using anti after a multimonth break. Anyway, the real funny thing is that I destroyed a few conventional players who had conventional strokes and the scores were not even that close.

However, the weird thing is that it wasnt so easy winning against a few weird ass beginner players flying about with weird strokes, whereas in the past with inverted it was so easy to beat these kind of players, just heavy topspin from both wings and it is an ez win. Although I still won, it wasnt as easy as what it would be like if i had 2x inverted.

The problem is that im confusing the heck out of higher level conventional players, but am not stable enough to win comfortably against these weird unconventional players.

How did the anti help you against the conventional players? Was it that your returns were more consistent, or that your anti strokes confused them, or that ball placement were easier, or that your inverted attacks had more bite?

 

[NextLevel]

Watching Arunas service game and he does not hold the racket to allow him to achieve maximum spin. Is it a misconception that max spin equals good?

Service is a creative activity and there are many grips that allow you to get good spin, even though they might have some limitations. Aruna doesn't serve that much pendulum and mostly serves punch and backhand. Trust me the spin is max, even the straight backspin and no spin he occasionally does.

 

[dingyibvs]

I've been doing some more training this week. The FH is still a work in progress, even in training I easily forget some elements of my new form, seems primarily the right-to-left rotation as I still tend to do a lot of low to high movement. Overall improving, however. I think FH loops from the BH corner is still an issue, so that's gonna be my focus for now. After that I'll focus on FH/BH transitions to make sure my form stays no matter the situation.

My BH drive is becoming seriously deadly. I can now do continuous loops against block, with each shot incorporating wrist, elbow, shoulder, and body. At least when I'm using the FZD ALC/D09c I can make the racket crack loudly with most shots. It's a lot harder with the Q968/H3 combo, but even when it doesn't crack the quality remains high. The focus now is on footwork. I need to position myself properly more consistently for maximum quality/consistency.

For service return and short game practices, I need to continue to improve my judgment of the service as well as the footwork to get into position quickly. I'm getting much better now at getting into position to return short. Before I would make one short return and then get surprised when the opponent returns my short return short, resulting in a pop up. Now I can play the short game continuously much better until I get an opportunity to attack. However, right now I can only attack effectively when the return is long, I can't get into position quickly enough to BH loop over the table effectively (i.e. to both corners). That requires me to improve my in-and-out footwork, which will be a focus.

 

[blahness]

How did the anti help you against the conventional players? Was it that your returns were more consistent, or that your anti strokes confused them, or that ball placement were easier, or that your inverted attacks had more bite?

I won against a RC level 1600 ish coach this way, even after not playing for months (didnt expect it but it happened lol, I came close with 2 wing inverted but always lost at crucial moments for some reason). The way anti helped me massively is to return difficult deceptive spinny serves much easier to give me a fighting chance. Otherwise with 2x inverted, serve receive is always a major, major pain - ask anyone on this forum and they know. Especially against someone with illegal hidden serves (not the coach, but a lot of other players do serve illegal).

Anti receive is actually quite nasty for the opponent because I can selectively choose whether or not to reverse the spin. Basically digging into the sponge makes it behave like normal inverted rubber, but sliding it across the ball makes it behave like long pips. So on pushes against underspin I can return either medium underspin to medium topspin and that is confusing af. Even on countering I can choose whether or not to return topspin or underspin depending on my stroke.

I discovered i can even chiquita and loop with the anti (I'm using Butterfly super anti) which was also quite devastating because even I didnt know what spin I was generating on those lol, and the anti rubber simply was so spin insensitive that I could do it against most serves with only minor adjustments.

However, especially against conventional 2 wing inverted players they struggle to receive my serves too because I have quite good serves (both hook and pendulum) which are quite hard to read.

My inverted FH is quite powerful and spinny all along (though consistency and footwork are not where I would like it to be). One thing I realized after playing against those weird relative beginners is that the inverted FH is my major weapon as a combination player and my goal must be to aggressively find opportunities to FH loop instead of over-relying on the anti to win me points.

 

[yamagata]

The other day, seeing the Louxembourgish couple play was interesting, the girl with long and short pips, the guy with anti…

Today I practiced some fh flicks and felt a wrist pain. Ouch. Don’t want to have an ailment that hinders my development howe I realize that many in my age has to deal with it.

Just now saw Navid Shams chew on his rubber, put the entire bat in the mouth, makes me wonder if rubber comes in different flavors?

 

[blahness]

Played again (with the antispin setup). Was even against my LP/inverted penhold training partner. I realized that I can simply loop with the antispin to gain initiative. Or fake loop it to allow the spin reversal to kick in. Against him, pushing will only get me into trouble because he is extremely adept at attacking underspin balls (typical strong af penholder FH).

Using this aggressive return of serve, I was about even in games. Most of the games it was my FH that let me down. I kept serving a very spinny fast long hook sidetopspin, he fade chops it to my FH with the LP and it becomes a ridiculously heavy sideunderspin and half long ball and my D05 rubber kept slipping on me which pissed me off. Even my serve spin was really bad compared to normal because of that rubber. Could probably have done better if not for my 2 yr old D05 rubber which really needs some surface treatment to extend its tackiness again. Dont really wanna change rubber if i can just use tackiness treatments to get it to perform the way I want it.

 

[Larshos]

During our lunch breaks at work we play TT in the basement of our office building.
One of my colleagues have a (premade) Stiga Pulse 5-star. I asked to try it and the racket itsself was OK. However, the way it felt in my hand was REALLY good! Anyone know if some of the regular Stiga blades have the same identical grip? I suspect these blades are made not by Stiga themselves..?

 

[Snek]

During our lunch breaks at work we play TT in the basement of our office building.
One of my colleagues have a (premade) Stiga Pulse 5-star. I asked to try it and the racket itsself was OK. However, the way it felt in my hand was REALLY good! Anyone know if some of the regular Stiga blades have the same identical grip? I suspect these blades are made not by Stiga themselves..?
View attachment 34646

I think stiga blades have different handles than their pre made bats. I have tried couple of them and I have stiga cybershape wood fl. Premade handles have thicker handle.

 

[beeray1]

Me: Orders a new Harimoto ALC and sets it out on my desk before work ready to glue when I get home.

Joey the puppy: Looks delicious, thanks human!

 

[Wrighty67]

Me: Orders a new Harimoto ALC and sets it out on my desk before work ready to glue when I get home.

Joey the puppy: Looks delicious, thanks human!

View attachment 34648View attachment 34647

Shit - that is very upsetting...

 

[TampaBayTableTennis]

chewed harimoto up worse than matsushima in that all japan semi

 

[NetProphet]

Me: Orders a new Harimoto ALC and sets it out on my desk before work ready to glue when I get home.

Joey the puppy: Looks delicious, thanks human!

View attachment 34648View attachment 34647

It needed to be outerforce to withstand Joey! 😬

 

[Gozo Zyreruna]

@Der_Echte ,

The Tibhar Aurus is staring to grow on me. I am training / learning to loop those pesky half longs as well as FH topspin / attack those light underspin ball above the table with it. Have some success with it.

p/s: These days, I see a lot of pesky half longs and short light underspin balls that pop up. Must learn how to attack them or else, plenty of missed opportunities.

Nonetheless...