What’s Better: Playing Hard or Playing Smart?

[Dr Evil]

against higher level players, getting the ball on with low quality will cost you points and the match

Depends what you mean by low quality. I know strong players who play without heavy spin or speed. The best of them said he never learned to hit with any power until he was 2500 (he eventually got to ~2650 and still rarely hits hard). I'd bet most people reading this thread hit the ball with enough power to be hundreds of points better than they are right now. Significant improvement usually means improvement in consistency and placement.

 

[NextLevel]

Depends what you mean by low quality. I know strong players who play without heavy spin or speed. The best of them said he never learned to hit with any power until he was 2500 (he eventually got to ~2650 and still rarely hits hard). I'd bet most people reading this thread hit the ball with enough power to be hundreds of points better than they are right now. Significant improvement usually means improvement in consistency and placement.

Would love to know who this is. Placement and deception are probably simultaneously the most difficult and underrated aspects of quality. Moving a ball 3-6 inches can transform its qualify but it is hard to describe and sometimes incredibly hard to master. The mental part of table tennis is always imperceptible but what often shows up as quality is not so much power but the difficulty for s player to anticipate and therefore control the ball. So quality sometimes gets its impact not so much from the energy on the ball but from the fact that speed challenges reaction time. Since placement and deception also do so, and even control and consistency in terms of being able to bring back balls that the opponent is used to considering winners, i think traditional TY coaching especially at the amateur level just focuses on what is easier to visibly train. However, as we get more ways of measuring and developing things that are currently thought of as invisible and at a cost that can popularize them, more quantitative training will go into those dimensions as well.

 

[Dr Evil]

Would love to know who this is. Placement and deception are probably simultaneously the most difficult and underrated aspects of quality. Moving a ball 3-6 inches can transform its qualify but it is hard to describe and sometimes incredibly hard to master. The mental part of table tennis is always imperceptible but what often shows up as quality is not so much power but the difficulty for s player to anticipate and therefore control the ball. So quality sometimes gets its impact not so much from the energy on the ball but from the fact that speed challenges reaction time. Since placement and deception also do so, and even control and consistency in terms of being able to bring back balls that the opponent is used to considering winners, i think traditional TY coaching especially at the amateur level just focuses on what is easier to visibly train. However, as we get more ways of measuring and developing things that are currently thought of as invisible and at a cost that can popularize them, more quantitative training will go into those dimensions as well.

As you say, differences in placement that are more or less invisible on video can be decisive. Would be great if accessible Spinsight-like tech becomes available to let players measure and manage the many subtle aspects of the game. You might know the player I had in mind (Gal Alguetti) from when he was a junior.

 

[Tony's Table Tennis]

Depends what you mean by low quality.

low quality is low quality

I know strong players who play without heavy spin or speed. The best of them said he never learned to hit with any power until he was 2500 (he eventually got to ~2650 and still rarely hits hard).

what you said here is high quality

quality does not equate power,