How to make tactics?

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Hi, I lost to my opponent 11 0 today. Yesterday I beat him 2 times. I asked him how did he beat me. He said "I solved your game. You cant beat me from now on" He is a pro player and he is really decent. 10 years of play. And I decided to ask you. How to make different tactics to be unpredictable. I cant make tactics because I am newbie. I dont know how to deal with many balls. Can you teach me basics. I am lefty. Thanks
 
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says Spin and more spin.
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Based on your game, you have to have a game plan in the first place. Although your playing is fine, there really is no way you beat a pro. So, maybe you mean that this guy is a decent level player.

But you need strategy for sure. You need to think about what you want to get back from your serves. How you want to take control of the points. And what you want to do in the rallies.

Right now, all you are doing is putting the ball on the table and hoping the other person misses.


Sent from The Subterranean Workshop by Telepathy
 
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Hi, I lost to my opponent 11 0 today. Yesterday I beat him 2 times. I asked him how did he beat me. He said "I solved your game. You cant beat me from now on" He is a pro player and he is really decent. 10 years of play. And I decided to ask you. How to make different tactics to be unpredictable. I cant make tactics because I am newbie. I dont know how to deal with many balls. Can you teach me basics. I am lefty. Thanks

It is probably easier to start with the following two areas:

  1. Service
  2. Service return


Service
Like Ma Lin said, you need to be able to use the same service motion to produce two different spins. You also need to use two different service motions to produce the same spin. This is called illusion. You need at least 3 different spins for your service, therefore 6 different motions. Make them short (i.e. second bounce on the opposite side of the table)

In my experience, you need to develop at least 4 types of long service - top spin, side spin and heavy back spin and no spin. These are useful at critical moments like 12-12.

Service return
Many Chinese coaches say the quality of your service return determines 60-80% of your fate in the match. First thing - you need to be able to read service by recognizing the pattern of the incoming ball. Again, be unpredictable and make variations. Short return? Long chop? Flick? Side spin flick? Open attack at different directions?
 
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What helped me was defining my win condition. My strongest quality are serves and forehand loops and counter loops , so i naturally modeled my style to have good setups, and then loopkill the ball with my forehand. This gave me a clear directive of what i have to do, and everything fell kind of in place. So my advice is that you define what kind of play style you want to have, and then figure out what you need to do to win with that play style and work from there . One you have a simple gameplan you can figure out the nuances.
 
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Whatever you do, regardless of tactics, you can't hope to consistently win someone with more consistent basic strokes than yours. Better fundamentals create their own tactic, too.

The whole idea of tactics is to exploit an opponents weakness, IE his inconsistent fundamentals, where his shot is weaker than yours (or where he is weak physically, or due to rubber choice, or due to behavioral/psychological patterns).
Him saying "I got you figured out" basically means that he found a weakness in your fundamentals and can exploit it. I suspect the weakness of the forehand topspin a lot more than the serve.

I would personally suggest to improve the fundamentals and not worry about tactics. Yeah you could easily notice that someone has a harder time lifting backspin with his backhand or something and keep pushing there hoping to get an easy long push back, but they'll just be doing the same thing to you and ultimately the one with better fundamentals will win. Real tactics is after great fundamentals.
 
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So what was he doing in the 11 points you lost yesterday? Wasf it 11 different things, or a few things a lot of times.

The first part of tactics is being aware of what is really happening during points. Sounds easy, but it isn't, not when you are playing and just watching the ball. Much easier to see from an observer, which is why players have match coaches.
 
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I agree with Lightzy. When I was watching Dan vs Timo Boll I noticed that Timo really wasn't doing anything fancy. Just the basic techniques at a high level. When you watch a lot of Dan's videos you might notice he loves to get into a rally and try to outlast his opponent. It's fascinating to watch how the pro's deal with this, or not, with their arsenal of skill, techniques, and training.
 
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I am not sure that what Lightzy is saying actually applies to Alpay. It may apply to a lower level player. But, it does not seem to apply to what I have seen in the footage from Alpay.

A lot of what tactics are about is giving you an easier ball to open with and take over the point. That is also why serving is about deception. When you serve, if you can get your opponent to push and make a slight mistake, like the ball is an inch or two higher than they wanted, you can open with a much stronger shot and take over the point. If you can return the opponent's serve in a way that makes it so you can get your opponent to give you a weak return, you can take over the point.

If you can stay closer to the table you can play bigger angles and control the table.

If you are going to back up, you should be able to do it and make the opponent have to take uncomfortable shots.

What Lightzy is talking about sounds like info for a more beginner player. Alpay has decent technique. He just looks like he has no idea what he is trying to do when he plays. He simply looks like he is keeping the ball in play and hoping the other player messes up. Which could work on a weak player. But it will not work on a player who is at a remotely high level.

Against higher level players you need more than just hoping to find the opponent's weaknesses. You need clear plans for points and methods for setting yourself up and techniques for getting your opponents to take weak shots to give you easier opportunities to control the table.

An example: A very simple tactic that a player like Ma Lin used was that he would serve spin/no spin. He would mix short serves between heavy backspin and "no spin" (really, very light backspin) and by doing that, and showing extremely heavy backspin that the opponent had to respect, he would use the short no spin serves to get easy balls to attack. The fact that the opponent returned the serve an inch or two higher made it so Ma Lin could use his third ball attack to end the point. If you can serve short, heavy backspin, then short no spin serves can become a very effective weapon.

Whereas, Alpay is pushing long serves. He is pushing long pushes. He has no third or fifth ball attack. All his serves are long without him thinking about what he could use the serve for. He does not attack his opponents serves or backspin shots. He waits for the opponent to open and backs up and puts easy balls back over and over simply hoping for the opponent to mess up.

He actually does need some way of thinking about the actual structure of the points. Even if he was backing up and had the plan to lob (fish) and make it so the high balls were hard in some way like corkscrew sidespin, that would at least be a plan. But he has nothing but the experience of playing guys who are not good enough to dismantle his lack of strategy.

And yet his technique is good enough that he is still a decent level player.
 
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Absolutely agree with Carl. And what he say was my point of view in the previous thread too.
Alpay, I think you need to practice attacks with someone capable of controlled persistent block returns, trying to get more and more aggressive with time, trying to land the ball on different places on the table - right, left, to the body, through the diagonals and by the side line, shorter, deeper, changing your distance from the table and looking how the attacking window changes with the change of the angle depending on the distance. With time you may think about adding side spin to widen that angle. When you get confident enough begin practice with someone who is able to counterattack your attacks. You have to practice how to attack chopped balls to.
When you get more confident with all that, you will be able to quickly analize situations and simultaniously to decide where and how to send the ball. All this should be combined with analyzing your opponent strength and weakness to make a plan how and where to serve, how and where to return and how, where and when to attack.
 
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Absolutely agree with Carl. And what he say was my point of view in the previous thread too.
Alpay, I think you need to practice attacks with someone capable of controlled persistent block returns, trying to get more and more aggressive with time, trying to land the ball on different places on the table - right, left, to the body, through the diagonals and by the side line, shorter, deeper, changing your distance from the table and looking how the attacking window changes with the change of the angle depending on the distance. With time you may think about adding side spin to widen that angle. When you get confident enough begin practice with someone who is able to counterattack your attacks. You have to practice how to attack chopped balls to.
When you get more confident with all that, you will be able to quickly analize situations and simultaniously to decide where and how to send the ball. All this should be combined with analyzing your opponent strength and weakness to make a plan how and where to serve, how and where to return and how, where and when to attack.

Yeah. Before I made my first post, I almost bounced this to that thread since it really is the same subject. But I was too busy with work to take the time and I didn't think it mattered that much that Alpay made another thread on the same subject.
 
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Here, for context, here is Alpay's post from his other thread on this basic subject. When TTDaily members watched the match posted in the videos below, the subject quickly turned to tactics or lack of tactics. Other observations were about how Alpay is using very fast equipment and seems to not have confidence with offensive shots because the equipment may be too fast for him. And I am not so sure that is completely separate from how Alpay simply backs up and puts the ball back on the table instead of looking for opportunities to open the aggression.

Hi! I'm alpay and I recorded a match which is the finale of 4th league of a veteran table tennis club. (I'm on 4th league because I started this year on playing veteran club league.) I lost badly to this veteran and I want to ask you what are my errors and what should I improve on my technique. I won this man 3 weeks ago. I improved a lot but I lost. Maybe I scared while playing. And I was a bit tired. But I won't make excuses. I played bad generally. I didn't deserved to win with this play. So I lost 3-0. I have videos of these 3 sets and a warm up video. Can you watch warm up and help to fix my technique? And I want you to watch my match video and tell my in-game errors. Thanks for helping!

WARM UP
1ST SET
2ND SET
3RD SET
 
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PS: it may sound off topic because you cannot see the spam from the spambot anymore. But props to PGPG for sending out the notifications that have helped us delete the spam as soon as possible. TTDaily Moderation Team does appreciate that. And pgpg has been on top of reporting spam for quite a while. So, thank you pgpg!
 
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