Illegal serves, are you guilty of any

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Most of these illegal services are not that serious and could be considered acceptable in amature matches.

This kind of thinking is just a slippery slope to no one playing by the rules. "If you do that I can do this" and why bother to play if you can't follow a few simple rules?

If someone break the service rules why should I not be able to speed glue and if he's speedgluing I should be able to play with banned pips. Follow the rules or don't play.
 

JHB

says Aged and infirm of purpose
Very good video ! I'm currently teaching myself the modern method of forehand service and I know I'm sometimes guilty of not tossing the ball high enough. I suspect I'm also off the vertical sometimes ! As for the arm/shoulder/head part, I'd need someone else to tell me if I were guilty of any of those - I've no idea. On backhand service meanwhile it is much easier to be totally legal, you just need to watch that you don't toss the ball slightly forward so that you serve from over the table.

I agree with Old School, I want to be completely legal. Most of the social players at my club however are really not fussed, in fact I think one or two of them never learned (nor were ever shown) how to serve legally in the first place ! I also know a couple of lower league players who have perfectly legal service actions but are all fingers and thumbs and struggle to exercise any control over the ball at all. I'm afraid table tennis is one of those sports where many people don't play competitively and so widespread ignorance of the rules is quite common.
 
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This kind of thinking is just a slippery slope to no one playing by the rules. "If you do that I can do this" and why bother to play if you can't follow a few simple rules?

If someone break the service rules why should I not be able to speed glue and if he's speedgluing I should be able to play with banned pips. Follow the rules or don't play.

Don't get me wrong. My service is totally leagal. But in the low level league I am currently playing, around 50% services are not. It is just a bit harsh to tell a 60 years old grandpa that he just lost one point because he didn't toss the ball. In fact, most of the older generation players don't toss the ball. Lots of them are using illigal long pimple rubbers too. What can you do if you are the umpire? Ban them from playing?
 
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There is another grey area about service. A few weeks ago I played a match against a very good player. His service is legal, but he intentionally make a huge noise using his feet. Actually he is usng such power that the floor is shaking and even the table is slightly moved. Is this legal? I am not sure but would like to know your opinion.
 
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There is another grey area about service. A few weeks ago I played a match against a very good player. His service is legal, but he intentionally make a huge noise using his feet. Actually he is usng such power that the floor is shaking and even the table is slightly moved. Is this legal? I am not sure but would like to know your opinion.

If that is the case then that should be banned too, in fact this can distract or be worse that illegal serve itself, so what is the point to do a legal serve but you do another thing that is not good or not helping? it is like cheating with 2nd option when he didn't use 1st option.
 

JHB

says Aged and infirm of purpose
Don't get me wrong. My service is totally leagal. But in the low level league I am currently playing, around 50% services are not. It is just a bit harsh to tell a 60 years old grandpa that he just lost one point because he didn't toss the ball. In fact, most of the older generation players don't toss the ball. Lots of them are using illigal long pimple rubbers too. What can you do if you are the umpire? Ban them from playing?

Oi ! Less of the 60-year-old grandpa, if you don't mind ! 😆😉
 
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Don't get me wrong. My service is totally leagal. But in the low level league I am currently playing, around 50% services are not. It is just a bit harsh to tell a 60 years old grandpa that he just lost one point because he didn't toss the ball. In fact, most of the older generation players don't toss the ball. Lots of them are using illigal long pimple rubbers too. What can you do if you are the umpire? Ban them from playing?

They should be asked to follow the rules considering it's not hard and if they can't they should be banned until they comply, old age is not an excuse. It's because people let it slide that the state of the sport at the amateur level is in such a bad state.

I play golf and golf have gone through it's fair share of changes to balls, clubs and materials over the years and yet I have never meat anyone playing with banned equipment or ignoring the the rules like people ignore the rules and play with banned rubbers/gluing like in TT.
 
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There is another grey area about service. A few weeks ago I played a match against a very good player. His service is legal, but he intentionally make a huge noise using his feet. Actually he is usng such power that the floor is shaking and even the table is slightly moved. Is this legal? I am not sure but would like to know your opinion.

Mving the table is a point for tthe opponent.
 
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We travel 3 hours to a club for tournaments every month or so.
I have discussed with our players some of their serves that were illegal so we were prepared for the tourney.
then when we get there we see that the club tshirt is a white shirt. Several kids were competing wearing this shirt.
Then several of the club players ( which I found out later are taking lessons from the club owner who is a national level player from another country ) were doing very blatant illegal serves.
one example would be a guy that dropped the ball 8"-12" below the table.
several others hid the ball with their hand or arm.

I don't think it affected our game against them, but it was surprising.
 
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There is another grey area about service. A few weeks ago I played a match against a very good player. His service is legal, but he intentionally make a huge noise using his feet. Actually he is usng such power that the floor is shaking and even the table is slightly moved. Is this legal? I am not sure but would like to know your opinion.

One question:
Was your opponent kinda old?

I might sound like a grandfather now, but back in the eighties there was no two-colored racket rule.
So many choppers played with two black rubbers, one inverted spinny, like a tackiness c and on the backhand nittaku's best anti and they were pretty good in twiddling the racket. So when they were serving you could hardly read the spin on the ball. If the serve was fast, you had a real hard time reacting on that serve.

One thing that would help in that times, was listen to the sound coming from the rubbers when the opponent was serving. The Anti made a totally different sound, than the inverted. But what 'smart' choppers tried, was to cover the sound with stomping on the floor while serving or shouting sounds like 'uh' or something. So after a while the ITTF didn't allow that anymore... Doing this nowadays is only making little sense to me.
maybe he's been playing already back then.
 
disguising the sound would give an astute opponent enough information to read the serve better ... hence the foot stomp. although that does require a low level of background noise that is sometimes not even possible at bigger/more populous venues (or just super good hearing) ...

i used to hate it when people stomped loudly, now it doesn't bother me much anymore ...
 
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