Talking about women's game, you just need to take a look at CXT, a veteran of Chinese women's team. She represents a typical so called women's game.
Another term we often heard from Chinese is 'playing woman's game with flavor of men's style'. Here, the best example is SYS. But, I'll also include German's Sabina Winter.
Basically, to play this style, a woman player needs to add more tools in her attacking game in addition to the primary base of backhand exchange, mainly aggressive flipping short balls inside the table and explosively step around launching a forehand power loop. These two offensive tools are not easy for most female players to master. It requires a keen sense of reading the game, making quick decision, a snappy wrist, core strength and explosive footwork.
Nowadays, SYS has the best step around forehand attack and WMY has the best banana flip on women side. No wonder they are the two best players. Sabina, on the other hand, due to using anti on her backhand, she has to depend heavily on her forehand attack and lots of time she does step around forehand loop. Sabina probably at her age still is the most athletic woman in the world.
An exciting scene in men's game is off the table loop rally. Sorry, this element still is quite lacking in woman's game. Women simply don't have the strength and speed to throw long distance bomb at each other.
It almost feels funny to describe a bulky guy like LJKing using women's game to beat Harimoto. If you take a close look at both decider he played against Alex and Tomo, he mainly just slowed down the pace inviting the other side to get impatient and commit errors. All his opponents were used to get fast paced shots and redirect them back. Now, they suddenly felt either a little out of position or lost in rhythm.
