Daily Table Tennis Chit Chat

pgpg said:

Now you know why most players look at their rubber in disbelief after their shot went into the net or sailed long - to make sure there is no wet spot on the rubber!

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Haha, that is true But during the whole set I was thinking "It is my technique, not my racket" and "Why am I so slow today, I'm moving like a bag of potatoes" only to discover that... it was my equipement!

With due respect , if my blade is wet the maximum points I would lose is one ,its possible that it might be most important point in the game and the difference between winning and losing , but if your blade is wet you can pretty much tell it the very moment you hit it , the ball just drops vertically down at the point of impact if you are looping or blocking , if you pushing it will go vertically up .... if you lost more than one point , boy you have to work on your awareness levels when you are playing !

Boogar said:

Thanks again pgpg for the guidance I had a lot of fun!
I didn't feel like taking videos there sorry. Felt wrong to set up the camera on those tables where you have to switch all the time.
Ah and jea my phone broke, that as well

So in total i got to play three times in the so called New World once in Princeton near NY, once in Montreal Quebec and now here in Boston. Btw what was the club called pgpg?

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Your phone first got stolen, then it broke as well?

Thanks for all the love guys . Will keep persevering until the trial and hopefully pass it.

Boogar said:

Did i say stolen at one point? hum my mind seemed to be else where when i wrote that.
The screen shattered and i can't use the touchscreen anymore.

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Maybe time for a new phone then A possibility for better video quality

JeffM said:

Thanks for all the love guys . Will keep persevering until the trial and hopefully pass it.

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For the trial, practice your serves and serve return and your third ball attack. Get someone to serve you the basic spins and develop good returns for them, especially well placed attacking and defensive returns. Learn where to contact the ball to negate the effects of sidespin. If you do well on the first three or four strokes of the rally, the match takes care of itself. Nothing about technique works as well in terms of preparing for a tournament.

Play as many matches as you can leading up to the trial. And when you play them try to play in a tournament mindset, playing to win. If your trial is approaching , you need to focus on developing your match winning mental "zone"

NextLevel said:

For the trial, practice your serves and serve return and your third ball attack. Get someone to serve you the basic spins and develop good returns for them, especially well placed attacking and defensive returns. Learn where to contact the ball to negate the effects of sidespin. If you do well on the first three or four strokes of the rally, the match takes care of itself. Nothing about technique works as well in terms of preparing for a tournament.

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There have to be a gazillion ways to prep for a tourney to peak at right time and get in the ZONE.

Whatever you do, you are not going to improve in skill by even a half level in a matter of two weeks, so it isn't worth it to try in that direction.

Your preparations should be more focused and testing and recovering the body, getting your mind right, and relaxing. I have had a lot of my best results in tourneys where I reduced my TT activities in half, healed up, and had a laughing mindset. I felt like I was the TT version of Woody Woodpecker.

This is the best advise for you right now Jeff ... Der_echte just nailed it ... make sure you maintain your touch and don't play too much towards the end ... definitely not too much in the last two days leading up to the tournament. Make sure you check you are breathing when you are playing and be relaxed, focus on the ball and small and basic things like focusing on first bounce when receiving serve etc.

Der_Echte said:

There have to be a gazillion ways to prep for a tourney to peak at right time and get in the ZONE.

Whatever you do, you are not going to improve in skill by even a half level in a matter of two weeks, so it isn't worth it to try in that direction.

Your preparations should be more focused and testing and recovering the body, getting your mind right, and relaxing. I have had a lot of my best results in tourneys where I reduced my TT activities in half, healed up, and had a laughing mindset. I felt like I was the TT version of Woody Woodpecker.

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ttmonster said:

if you lost more than one point , boy you have to work on your awareness levels when you are playing !

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Looks like I have a new personal coach!

It all depends on how much you are willing to pay

Ilia Minkin said:

Looks like I have a new personal coach!

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Ilia, in America, when requesting professional personal services, you can get away with murder if you offer pay in boxes of beer.

In the case of Monster, his sweet spot is COOKIES, so pay a gal or guy some premium to make up special cookies for Monster.

I got a top-secret spy pic of Monster last time he visited Madison Square for an event. He is the dude disguised as a puppet in this meme.

Der_Echte said:

Ilia, in America, when requesting professional personal services, you can get away with murder if you offer pay in boxes of beer.

In the case of Monster, his sweet spot is COOKIES, so pay a gal or guy some premium to make up special cookies for Monster.

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I can cook some nice Russian style cheescake pancakes if that will work as cookies

Anytime Illia , the pancakes too yummy to refuse ... anyways jokes apart the point I was trying to make and admittedly did not make it properly is this ...
when you have sweat on paddle its pretty much binary , the ball behaves too weirdly for you to get the impression that its your technique ... so my best guess you had some issues going on and may be you put sweat on the paddle just before you checked it .... its hard to imagine that sweat will change the playing characteristic ever so slightly that you would be fooled into thinking that its you who is making the mistake ...

Ok thanks, Der_Echte and Monster : ) I am going to another club to play tmr night and then play again on saturday night, and that should be it in terms of playing against real people. And I will try my best to get into the relaxed mode on next Thursday to play my best.

Here is the video in case any of you want to see how bad I played.. (had to upload this video twice because first time completed upload in 7 hours, but youtube rejects it as I haven't verified my youtube acc, so I had to re-upload it afterwards).

Why don't you think you played well? What were you expecting to do?

NextLevel said:

Why don't you think you played well? What were you expecting to do?

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Just in comparison to practice. In the match, I didn't loop balls over with my backhand much, keep missing the high balls, and bad positioning. I just didn't feel like Im playing like myself. But with the posts above, I know it is something that I will just have to work on, especially with the relax mentality, to play as if playing in practice.

Most people play 60% to 70% of the level they can show in practice. see if David can give you some feedback if he is around , he is a penhold guy and has
much more insight into all things penhold than us ....

See if this helps :

1. I think you are gripping your paddle too hard, so check on that .

2. Practice a lot of serves at home when you have time, not new serves or spinnier serves, just your regular serves. And I would say create a routine where you take 2-3 deep breaths before serving or receiving, don't worry if the opponent is waiting , you are supposed to play at the pace that is optimal for you and there is no rudeness in that.

3. Don't let your opponent dictate the pace of play. Take your time before you serve, think about what you are going to serve and why and what you are going to do next ...

4. When receiving serves, especially against somebody who serves illegal serves of the kind we are seeing here, I would have my left hand permanently raised, so that I get into ready position comfortably before he lets his cannon lose.

5. The above two has nothing to do with technique , so you should be able to incorporate in your game play if you stick it into your mind . The next ones are about technique so you can ignore them and not read them since you are going to your tournament , mainly, don't "ball watch" after you hit your first loop, get back to ready position , thats the reason you lost some of the points even though you initiated attack.

6. This one is to ponder over later , don't worry about this right now because it my interpretation of why you are making mistakes in your loop and you should really work on that with somebody in real life. I think on the loops you are missing ( not on all of them ) , you are going too much "up" with your arm , with a slightly late timing on the ball, with not enough forward motion, not enough brush contact and not enough waist rotation timed with the arm. To fix the timing you can ask somebody to block down the line while you loop slowly , same on the backhand side. I suspect because of the robot you use to train your strokes feeds the ball is a little higher than usual its giving you too much time to prepare your loop compared to actually real life balls. Again, I am not a coach but this is what I perceive, if you have a coach get it vetted from him after showing him the game play video. But I would not bother about that now , and just focus on holding the paddle not too tightly .