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I looked at Mark V HPS as a backhand rubber to serve as a step up before going to a tensor, mainly because it's dramatically cheaper than something like R7 or Vega. Do you think that's true or is it more like a fast old style rubber?

2018 would be the last time, but we played with cell ball mostly even so late as they were more durable, cheaper and still available locally. The early plastic ball were woeful IIRC. I still don't like the new ones personally but it is what it is. I found it a bit easier now when I came back to...

When I was playing around your level, I remember only really developing things after working on being relaxed and spinning the ball more. There's only so far you can really get hitting flat and tense. If you want to develop big shots, learn to loop heavy backspin feed. I would guess that right...

It's easier to generate force in an absolute sense, simply due to the huge performance difference; but easier to handle? Not even close. The lateral dropoff slope on a slick like that is multiple times that of a road tire, same with the thermal slopes. The peaks are also narrower. It's also a...

I tried to make a graph but it's probably not understandable. You understand my point, though. You can produce a similar performance with a rubber costing less than half the cost of the other one just by trying harder. If you put Max Verstappen into a roadcar on eco tires, he's not going to...

I'm more meaning that if you take a person off the street and put them on a skidpad, all they really need to do to get very close to a car's objective performance limit is to turn the wheel to the rough correct angle and hold a bit of throttle. I've coached complete beginners to do it...

Yep, I think so. There's a lot of "huh what the fuck" moments where I have to suddenly snap the racket in some weird way because I was way too late or early or close or whatever. I paid a bit more attention at looking at the ball clearly through the whole flightpath and it helped, though. I...

Did one more because my body was feeling good. We see if I regret it tomorrow. Drills and some games at the end. Fared alright in the games, better than I'd expect. Nothing of note, too rusty. Lots of very weak serve receive from me against heavy and deep serves, typical stuff. In the drills...

I don't usually do stuff with a hundred balls, so I use the Hand Mk. I.

To be fair the performance difference between table tennis rubbers and blades is much lower on account of them being human-actuated and the forces being so much lower. The laptime difference between a poor driver and a world champion might be 10% in absolute terms. I wonder how many people get...

Everyone's entitled to be as much of a goober as they like. :) I do feel like the goober-index has risen a few levels since I last posted here, though. Everyone just talks about equipment and drama now and not so much about, you know, hitting the ball.

There'd be little downside to collecting empirical data and quantifying some things. In a perfect world of course. I suspect nobody will do it because acquiring the dataset is difficult unless you have personal access to hundreds of professionals and measure their parameters. I'd love to see it...

Well, I do have a physics simulation background, so I guess I have that inclination. I do understand what you mean though. I just think it's important to separate the things to avoid magical thinking. It's probably better if we know more precisely what effects actually happen from what things...

Another session today. Amazingly some aspects of my game have improved, and my physical conditioning is much better. I did make sure to take very frequent breaks in order to not wear myself out. In terms of improvements, my stroke is fuller, although the contact is still only about 20-30%...

That's fair and I agree, but I don't think I commented about that. My post was purely about the performance of the serve, not the human or psychological aspect of the serve.

Don't you think it'd be a good idea to post some video of yourself playing? A year isn't that long, and your level could be very different depending on if you train with a coach for 30 hours a week or if you hit casually for 3. I think it's going to be difficult to gauge how appropriate any...

None, as in 0%? I guess I don't know anything about serving in matches. Feel free to pick into it if you're going to say that *none* of it is true.

I prefer to have about 60 setups that I cycle through on every point. Really keeps them guessing.

It's necessary to throw the ball a little bit towards you for a good serve motion. Otherwise you'd need to throw the ball in front of your chest (which some people do), or move backwards. For a typical pendulum serve at least, I don't find any benefits on axe type backhand serves. I don't think...

You'd need to look at the blade face surface and measure the roughness, but ultimately they should be all fine, shouldn't they. I wouldn't worry about "what Ma Long uses" because it's not going to be the same blade and it doesn't have to be because you're not the same players. Even if you get...