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The difficulty of the chiquita is built into the level, risk and reward. The most effective short serve returners are not pips players, maybe in your world they are, but in reality, none of the pips players are considered threatening because of their pips. You can put the ball on the table...

Yes, but you also have to balance that with how likely the return is to win the point when it lands. Since you went there, finish the analysis. Anyone who lives in a world where Lp returns serves 100% of the time is playing at a really low level.

So we played the African TT Dallas league today with 7 players. The one player who would have been clear favorite was out of the country (not that he is unbeatable strictly speaking but I haven't beaten him yet and he would have been seeded #1 by rating). As organizer and top seed, I got a...

So the supposed stability of the receive makes it more devastating? It's almost like you believe your arguments to the point you really believe a long pips return puts more pressure on a server than a Chiquita.

You seem to think most skill is athletic. Do you really believe a long pips push is more devastating than a banana flick or a short push?

Maybe you have this perspective because of who you play with but that is not my perspective at all. LPs cant produce much variation on serve return and if you lock into the ball, you can attack it almost every time. Of course the inordinate amount of practice against inverted makes this feel...

Not at the initial stages (long pips won't work on a beginner), but at the stage when you start finding the spin on the ball that inverted produces to be an expectation and your spin to be significant. This usually begins at somewhere around the level Gozo is, which is why learning to play...

Blade is also too slow, you need a Fan Zhendong Super ALC or Super ZLC to enter the conversation.

It's no more difficult than getting better at playing good inverted players.

Not at the "initial stages" but at the lower intermediate levels. But that is because everyone usually tries to use inverted conventionally. I know because when I didn't, I used to cause my fair share of trouble to players as well. Like I said, the pips are just the convenient excuse ball...

If you practice and play against pips players, you will change your mind about this. But you are currently at a stage of this issue which many players do not progress beyond, often not because they cannot, but because they do not want to. It would have been interesting to watch the match, but...

All of these things are true but level relative. If she was a higher level player than Gozo, then the pips were just the convenient explanation for how he felt. But if she was a lower level player or the same level, the issue is that Gozo just needed to adopting a mindset where he stopped...

actually I would argue you can serve off and power loop through these players if their level is lower than yours. But you have experience from eras where spin was a bigger factor than it is today, so you are probably used to just reading thr ball, rallying with them and comfortably getting...

So on Friday, I saw a guy who I have played a few times in practice and who has a good up and coming game about to play an older lefty long pips player I had played before. I expected the guy to lose badly and I watched the first game and he did the typical thing of acting like long pips are...

Here is the weapon!

It's embarrassing to say this but out of nowhere while messing around, I realized I hold the Cybershape way too strongly when I block and when I return serve. I realized for some reason that it helps me with aggressive serve return on some shots, but in general it is something I need to keep...

You can swing *forwards* and *upwards* and get good spin, don't think of it as an either-or proposition, though if you practice controlling the quality of the ball, you should be able to create a variety of swings that you can use to give the ball different effects in response to incoming balls...

Actually, they are very close to being the same topsheet. The sponge is not softer, but there is no reason to believe the MX-P topsheet might not feel that way to someone, especially if the MX-P is fresh and boosted. But as you point out, such subjective tests are not precise measures of anything.

Not just a WTTC semi-finalist, but a *3-time* WTTC semi-finalist, making him easily one of the greatest players in TT history to never win the WTTC singles. Honestly, the first team tried as hard as they reasonably could, they just faced good opposition and I feel Wang Chuqin struggled to get...

I had similar experiences even when I knew how to play pips (somewhat). I was maybe around 1700, and I would play someone who came off the street with his dead racket, and because I was so used to hitting topspin and blocking, I would struggle a lot against such players in rallies, didn't know...