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Pros with the quality of Lebrun don't just miss the ball though. It's almost always because the opponent varied something (often spin wise, which can be quite invisible to typical audience unless you were watching the wrist and racket movement like a hawk). Even if it's a pop up or a higher...

Yes but if it wasn't so spinny he would still be able to make a quality topspin from this worse position. The spin quality + the placement was the killer here.

Yes that is right. Because pros can adjust to whatever spin you're giving them. So for eg if you invested 100% into a spinny af loop, your opponent probably misses the first 1 or 2 and then adjusts, and then for the rest of the match you're out of gears, and the opponent successfully counters...

No it's not, the one he did against Alexis was the normal push. The ones he did against Togami in the crucial stages were absolutely loaded with extra wrist acceleration and body usage. Some extra spice... he found Togami's weakness and just continued to exploit it.

It wasn't just a normal push though, it was loaded with a tremendous amount of backspin (look at the wrist acceleration in those few pushes). LJK didn't push with such intent before the last few points. I bet Togami never really trained to loop a deep push with so much underspin on it (again...

From my watching of many CNT matches, it's pretty much new serve/receive placements / spin + putting extreme spin in the loops to really make sure they land - also this creates some rhythm disruptions for the opponents because they're not used to it. A lot of CNT opponents rely on speed and...

Today was funny, I chopped a few of the nasty fast long sideunder / sidetopspin balls hard and got the points from my opponents underestimating the spin (it was ridiculously spinny lol). Could work even better than a weak loop (I was pretty much surprised every time and didn't get into a good...

I have something worse - the BH sideswipe against long FH pendulum serves, it pretty much gives them a weird af extreme sidespin ball which you can vary between sideunderspin and sidetopspin. It can be quite disgusting for them to loop it. But the problem with all of these is that against good...

Agree, trying to loopkill fast long spinny serves with lots of deception and variation is kinda a fool's endeavour. Borrowing the energy and using it to loop with a lot of spin and taken early is usually a better approach especially if you vary placement and spin. This gives both time pressure...

I hate those short balls too especially if it's randomly half long. Short receives don't work all that well with half long serves. Best imo is probably a sideswipe or a soft flick imo (most error tolerant). If I'm feeling good I will really look to punish the half long serve and flick the...

Imo the coach is right - everyone would love to hit the BH directly in front of the body in the middle (not on left nor on right), and top players like Ma Long/Harimoto/etc all try to hit BHs in those position. But in a real matches the balls ain't gonna be that comfortable, so knowing how to...

This is Lin Yun Ju explaining how he deals with long serves with his chiquita first and ask questions later style of play. Pay serious attention to how his feet moves.

It's all in the footwork. You need to take 3 steps to reach your short FH (right, left and right). So if you detect something amiss (ie it's gonna be long), right after 1st step of this 3 step sequence, you either step back with your left leg to cover the deep BH, or use that left step to pivot...

My balls usually just get cracked or lost after some time. The new plastic balls arent the most sturdy imo...

Threat level of topspin BH is much higher imo because of spin and Magnus effect. You need to train a shit ton to get the punch BH to work consistently. Even Ma Long has a mainly topspin BH (he often reaches 6000+rpm with the shot), just that it's not as spectacular as WCQ or FZD. But it is solid...

There are some receives which allow for more room of error when receiving and a later timing receive, which reduces demands on very precise reading of the serve. Imo the most forgiving receive is the slow spinny opening loop aimed to the middle of the table (if ball is long), followed by...

The good blockers I play with don't give me nice balls to loopkill :( it's always some weird shit which I need to add a lot of safety/spin to even land the shot. I just need to train to become an actual consistent topspin machine. Yes I too had a huge leap in level too once I figured out my BH...

Glad that Harimoto is no longer doing that nonsense push long and block, block and block till opponent makes a mistake style. He was actively controlling the short game and really hunting for that 1st strong loop. This bodes well for his future.

First part is correct but at even more advanced amateur levels, there's no way players just have 2 serves. Just from placement alone there are 9, also there is sideunder, sidetop, no spin, pure backspin, reverse sideunder, reverse sidetop with 2 different types of sidespin (either brushed on...

I think best of 3 matches are quite unfavourable to BH dominant rally players in general because usually you need to warm everything up a bit and get used to the opponent's balls to really return all of the 1st topspin loops and force the game into rally mode. These kind of matches are...