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Well, depends on the disability. Even against wheelchair players you may serve short, as long as the ball leaves the table over the back line. So no Ma Lin ghost serve, and no angular serves dropping of the side.

In short, yes. After a while I just file your inability with dealing with short top away as uninteresting/unchallenging and stop doiing it. That is of course a weakness of mine, yet it makes me enjoy my matches more. At the expense of not winning some of them, of course, so that “there is a...

See Franziska’s back? Notice the big bright target that appeared on it?

Surprisingly hard question. “If you gotta ask, you ain’t never gonna get to know”, as Satchmo had it, is probably the best answer. Short of that, I’d say positive is to seek the upper hand by outplaying the opponent without seeking to cripple him/her, and negative would be to seek weaknesses...

My old coach quite often speaks.of this. He asks, how do you want to play? And then gets you to work on those aspects relevant to that. That’s your training, working on and further developing strengths. Even so, in competition you can play positively or negatively. It’s a choice indeed.

Wait, what? You don’t get magical TT superpowers if you step one foot to the left or right at the right spot right before labour commences? Shocking!

Wow, that Xu Xin interview. I already admire him greatly for his game, now I also admire him for his willingness to actually discuss his opponent's performance candidly, without ulterior motives or mindplay shenanigans. He's such a great champ in so many ways.

As far as anecdotal evidence carries, I actually have heard non-Chinese players mentioning injury as a reason for suboptimal gameplay, both incidentally and as reasons for longer bouts of lower performance levels. Boll, Ovtcharov, Maze, Petrissa Solja. Waldner, Schlager, Gatien… I think almost...

As for tactics, focusing on taking away your opponent's strengths vs. focusing on deploying your own sounds like a pseudodilemma. It isn't one or the other, quite the contrary. Shutting down the opponent opens the avenues to play to your strengths. These things go hand in hand, in my experience.

There’s probably a related divide here — between those aiming to win first and foremost, and those that want the satisfaction of a well-played match first and foremost. I’m in the latter camp, I must admit. I do prefer winning, but not at the cost of playing with less pleasure and do not mind...

True. I can lift mostly any underspin ball with mostly any rubber. Then again, some rubbers demand more and forgive less. To somebody still developing technique/training their sensory system to get going I would advise a soft to mid-hard grippy rubber. Rozena, Vega Intro/Euro, Neoflexx FT 40...

Knowing next to nothing about boosting at all: why not glue it to a blade, then press it on for a while?

And you’d include the Butterfly gear in the ‘Japanese’ category?

Loopy reasoning?

How would you place rubbers like Mark V, Sriver, Tackiness C, Tackiness D? I’d say: non-tensor, but also non-Chinese.

That narrow victory Kato had over Ito was really bad news for the in-form ZYL. She really could show strenght and regain confidence if she came out on top against Ito, redemption by revenge. Sadly, that opportunity did not come. And no, I do not suggest Ito intentionally dropped that match to...

10.3.12.1 The player’s hair must be matt and brightly coloured in a hue distinctive from both racket coverings. 10.13.12.2 Bald players must take appropriate measures to dampen light reflection.

Woo hoo! The number of backers doubled in a day! (From your own Statiskovka Dpt. of Deception by Statistics.)

There’s a section with comment and answers, and in that section it’s explained that two wheels propel the ball, and head rotation is used to create left/right side top- or underspin.

Sounds like you know what you’re doing. A 5-ply all-wood blade is fine. Stiga’s Allround Classic is a widely used one. Rakza 7-Soft has good speed and spin. It’s soft, which makes it a bit easier to do some things and a bit harder to do other things. A tradeoff thing.