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There's a practical limit to how much grip you can realistically expect out of a rubber. It's based mainly on the material itself and the hysteresis of the topsheet and sponge. Maybe you can go a bit more spinny at the cost of extreme wear, but not a lot of modern rubbers are doing that. Of...

The weaving pattern is different, the thicknesses are different, and the handle shape has changed. I don't know if those were all in one go or not. They kind of are. It's why nobody's doing anything super wildly different to get similar results. It's more about the details and just statistical...

I will say FZD has a fairly flat backhand, but it's just a spectrum. The contact's *basically* the same.

I can hit some crazy forehands with absolute junk allround equipment on "who the fuck knows" brand rubber; equipment is usually not the limiting factor for not being able to do that at all. Maybe if your rubber has a particularly weak sponge around 1mm or the bat is super thin, but if you're...

The contact for a normal topspin shot is gonna be the same fundamentally on basically all inverted equipment that is working normally. I know the pimple geometry, pimple stiffness etc. will influence things like the throw angle and they may allow some types of shots to be more effective, or...

I glued on a sheet of Yinhe Moon Speed Medium to use on a joke bat, and I still find it a little bit soft for the backhand, but it's much more agreeable. People claim it measures to around 48deg on whatever scale ESN uses, one of the Shore scales.

Oh, so it's not always been ABS. That'd explain it. It feels like a completely different material, sounds different too. The very early balls wouldn't bounce twice the same way, it pissed us off to no end, so bad we just went back to cell because we could. The primary source of disagreements in...

I found the Europe DF much too soft for even my backhand, and I don't have a particularly big one. Great topsheet grip, though.

I remember some experiences with the first ABS balls, but they were terrible. Not in use anymore obviously. Stuff would break mid-rally multiple times a day. People here seem to mostly use DHS 3 star, Hueison 3 star and some other one, Gewo I think. They're not insultingly bad like the early...

I read some (early) research papers and they claimed the plastic ball has a higher coefficient of friction against the table and also a higher coefficient of restitution, but I just can't believe that, not with the balls we use now, at least. Even serves seem "slipperier" and it skips in a...

One thing I noticed coming back to the game and comparing cell ball vs plastic ball even on modern compounds is that heavy spin just isn't that threatening anymore. I haven't been playing too long and I have little problems blocking slow opening loops, something that would have for sure been...

Were you playing like that in your first month in the sport at all, or is this a progress update kind of thing?

The equipment situation is a lot more complicated now than even when I started a bit over a decade ago. Although I would say there are a lot more usable options now; I'm trying a bunch of rubbers and basically all of them are playable despite being inexpensive. The gap between the inexpensive...

You can't have excellent grip and excellent topsheet durability. Especially not with a 50~ year old design, although I'm sure the compound has changed over the years. If it didn't have a mythical status, nobody would be saying magical things like this.

Those blades are already quite fast everything considered. Blades can't actually make the ball any faster, they can only make it less slow, as a simplification. If your input force into the H3 is low, the shot will generally always come out slow; it's by design.

Compared to a lot of cheap tacky rubbers, I would say it's pretty touch sensitive. It's a top seller in Japan because Japanese are very superstitious and like tradition. The country looks identical to how it looked in 1926 in most of the country, the cars are just newer. It's just how they are...

Eh, you know, considering it again, I have so many near-free sheets of Chinese rubber that I still want to try out; why not just glue one of those on. I already know I don't like Focus 3. Generally I'd try to be economical with things like these, but as an amateur, time is the most important...

Oh yeah; I also glued that old Focus 3 sheet onto the pimple bat. Crazy slow with a very strange sensation on strong shots, but it's very easy to play with in the 30-50% power range. Topsheet grip is a bit better after some olive oil soaking that might have destroyed some of the oxidation...

I got a sheet of Europe DF to develop more brush into my backhand, and while I kind of hate it (slow as a snail, very physically intensive if you're trying to make quality, very spin sensitive for what is supposedly a beginner rubber due to the high topsheet grip, sponge is very hard to re-glue...

For good reason: suggesting a beginner pays 2-5 times more for a mediocre older generation rubber with a relatively difficult touch game is crazy. They could get something much more modern and representative of equipment they would move up to for typically half the price, although sometimes...