Rainer87 matchvideo

go for some jogging and toe exercises..its the best way to improve footwork.

Rainer, you looked like you were very high percentage landing those BH opening topspins. You appeared to be anticipating the serve receive to go there, and often it did. You seem to make good spin on the BH loop, good. Often, your BH loop is very predictable, usually right at the player and these two opponents can block and move you around. When you varied your placement and made them both move, you won nearly every point. You made some nice transitions from BH to FH, but seemed to be lacking power on your Fh topspins, almost none of the many FH topspins you hit towards your opponent's position seemed to trouble them much, until you made them move. Making an opening BH topspin doesn't usually win the point,but it can give you a nice ball to continue the attack and build pressure or finish the point. You will develop this more and more as you continue to be aware of what you must do further to make more trouble for your opponents.

You stayed near the table, no more than 1/2 meter back, which is a good position to make opening Bh topspins. 1 full meter back or more will make you go on the run to hit those BH topspins and doing that greatly reduces your landing percentages. You often reach too far forward and hit the ball too far in front of your strike zone and that leads to to mistake after mistake. You avoided that from the two clips I saw.

Now that you have the basics of anticipation and actually landing the loop with OK spin very consistant, there are several things you need to improve upon those topspins to trouble these opponents enough to win the majority of points.

Placement Depth: A close to the table blocker loves a slow to medium speed loop near him where all he has to do is lean forward, place the bat into position,and block - too easy and it is very high percentage to do it 6-10 times in a row. it is hard for you to make 10 topspins in a row every rally. That is the first reason why these opponents could outlast you in match play. Your loops were not landing very deep, mostly in the middle depth or 10 - 40 cm in front of the endline. That is the worst depth to place a slow or medium loop. You give too many options to your opponent to take pace or spin off the ball, and to either put the brakes on the ball or add speed to it, plus,they get better angles and you have less time to cope with the return. You need to either land the ball extreme shallow, like just past the net, or very deep within a few cm of the endline Not landing the topspin there, if it was a slow or medium speed topspin, is going to result in giving your opponet too much to work with.

Spin variation Nothing frustrates a close to teh table passive blocker more than changes in spin he cannot perceive. You have to be able to hit the topspin with much less reduced spin with the same body and arm motion. A close to the tabel passive blocker cannot tell the change of spin and will pay the price for it when you do a "Change-Up" loop. Once he tries to adjsut to that, you make HEAVY spin and he blocks it out or very high.

Speed You need to be able to make a powerloop much more often. You are getting the high percentage chances for it if you look for them. I am not saying your first topspin should be a powerloop, no. I am saying that when you get an easy ball, you should be able to do a powerloop to a good location and it will be a direct point winner. There is nothing like a nice BH loop to give you one of these balls. You already have a good pivot when you anticipate the ball coming to your BH or crossover, so why not use that to win more points? You were in hte game stepping around and making another topspin similar to the BH topspin, so why not make more power when hte chance is there? you have to place it well, so sometimes, one more loop to move the blocker will do. A slow to medium FH hookshot to a right ahnded opponent's wide FH is a really nice setup shot. When you did that in the match, you moved opponent (soemtimes won the point on that shot!) and gave yourself a chance to blast by him on an open table with many options on the angle. Of course judgement will come into play here, buit the more you strat thinking about this and trying it out, the better you will get at finishing points.

Placement (side to side) of loop. You made too many topsins with poor depth RIGHT at the spot your opponent is standing! You did not move opponent around much and let him move you! It is harder to make a BH topspin land down the opponent's FH line, but once you can do that at will, look out! A down the line BH topspin can either win the point outright, or give you a nice ball to finish, if you are looking to finish the next ball. An opening BH topspin crosscourt to opponent's playing elbow is usually blocked back to your BH, so why not make the next BH loop down the line to move the blocker to get a block to your FH, then be ready to pivot and do a FH power loop either right back at him ( n easier and safer shot that can still win the point, or down the BH line for a winner? Once you try out these combinations, you will be much more effective. You have already the shots to execute this.

One way to get more power on your BH topsin is to get down some more and get yur right shoulder rotated in front of you some more. Remember that you must have your nice position like you did your first BH topspins, only a little from table, crouched and ready to move. You explode up and forward, using more forward swing than you slow opening loop. You adjust the blade angle to be more open and explode/wrist snap through the ball at impact. Once you get this shot down, your opponent will have cutting hte ball to your BH, he knows there is a price to pay. The same concept applies to FH concerning the forward movement and balde angle and follwothrough more up for a ball that carries more underspin. With the FH, you get teh leg behind you some more, rotate a little more, stay loose and accellerate better. it takes some time, but it will come together.

You already do a great job connecting shots in a rally, but they are nor constructed in a way that troubles your opponets in these two clips. You already have the ability to make most of the shots needed to achieve this, you just have to think about it, envision it some more, and start doing some combination practice to get there. if you cannot train, then you will have to risk losing some more matches to get this down, but you will be a far stronger player later.

I am not The Man, he is a poster at MyTT, I am only a joker. The things I say about your game still apply to my game and I also need further improvement on them. It takes a while to get higher landing percentage, but when you control the easy small things, the percentages go up and have a foundation to improve more. TT forums like this are great to talk about it and stay motivated.

Rainer87 said:

Hi Der_Echte!

About grip, I have modified it to what you discribed, I still havent got used to that, because I changed it only about two months ago, when I so video about it. I watched my videos again and paid extra attention to my service, I admit that I dont work with my body and hand swing enough, looks like I am using mostly my wrist. I need to start swinging with my hand little bit more and put more body in it as well.

You have been making very good points about flaws in my game, I am very greatfull for that.

I am making progress in my recovery (tonsil surgery) and I hope to go start practising in the beginning of the March.

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It has been almost another 2 months. NO ONE learns to make great serves in a week, it takes a lot of time. How is your timing coming? How well are you able to impact the BOTTOM of the ball and make the servve short with anything more than light spin? One thing to help train this is to stand on the wood floor, strike ball with forward motion impacting bottom of ball, and try to get the ball to go out, bounce on floor a few times, then make it come back. You won't do this great teh first week, but with even 3-5 minutes a day while you are waiting for matches, it is a great way to practice the timing and impact. Eventually, it will come into place.

Rainer87 said:

Well, I appreciate highly that you take your time and bother to answer. Like you mentioned you have similar flaws in your game and this makes you notice them in my game also. After seeing what I am doing wrong and understaning how to correct them, makes me see things from other perspective, its like taking off the blindfold .

Your comments has helped me and my mates a lot. They help my mates, because what I am learning here, I can pass on to them and notice the same mistakes what I am making. Because I dont have coach, no one can really help me with my technique and tactics. Because my mates live live in another, I with them only once or twice a month. Also, I dont have regular trainingpartner in my city, then quite often, I find myself traing alone with TTrobot, what is good also. Recording my game and practice and sharing them in TT forums seems to be best solution at the moment and so far you and others have given me feedback what I needed and like you mentioned youself, help me keep motivated .

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This is one of the best things about the TT forums. I post in a lot of TT forums and when I was a recreational player who thought he was serious, TT forums were the only way to learn and the sharing/learning was a real motivator for me, and it still is. Now since I am in Korea, playing often vs good players, getting training, and doing a LOT of tourneys is too easy to do here, yet when I lived in USA, I was in pretty much the same situation as you. It was a multi-forum poster I actually got to meat in real life who got me started along the road of good serves, which was really my first improvement in the sport that really helped my results. Without TT forums, doing that would defineately NOT have happened.

English is obviously NOT your first language, but you get the job done very well. It is not easy to post in another language and you are not afraid of it. Keep up the posting and it would interesting to see you do a short vid of you serving. Try short side/bottom and fast/deep underspin corner to corner. I am interested in how you are coming along. SERVING is one of the few things you can practice effectively by yourself, even if it can get boring, even just 5 minutes a day over a year can make a world of difference. Once you get the serves down and can learn how to limit receiver options and have a good plan to setup and attack, once you get to that point, playing the game gets 10x more fun.

Edit: Making a serve vid is good in that others can quickly identify some things for you and point them out. One common thing I see here is when players try to serve short, they start out with the correct bat angle, but on hte backswing, curve the blade and do not fully make it horizontal at impact. When telling these players live what is happening, they do not get it and keep making the same mistake over and over. When a player sees it on video, there is no mistake. That player generally becomes more aware of the mistake and is more likely to correct it.

This is a profitable thing for you in your situation as you have no one near you to point out things to you, yet even if this is the case, watching it on video is a great way to realize what is going on.. or not. This awareness is one of the steps needed to overcome problems.

Even if my serves are good and work up to 1.5 levels above me, I can receive a good benefit if I can improve my serve game even more. Fixing this is always an ongoing thing, but is with all other things, improving with time. Vids have helped me out a lot. You tube vids of pros serving give you ideas and show how to time and impact the ball.

A serve vid will not show all your spin, but it will show your timing, body movement, and impact angles. That will provide invaluable feedback for you to realize what you are doing, or not doing, so you have a knowledge to use to start correcting things.

As you improve, you will discover many times more things wrong with your game. This is the way and there is no stopping it.

Hi.. I am also a beginner like you, trying to improve my serves.. so, feel free to ignore.. From the video, it looks like you're too concerned about making it bounce twice on the other side whereas you should only worried about generating as much spin as you can. Here's some sound advice.. http://www.tabletenniscoaching.com/node/907

Once you get maximum spin, then you can experiment varying the amount of spin and placement of the serve.

Another link to an article about serving with a shakehander's grip. http://tabletennis.about.com/od/howtoserve/a/serving_grips.htm

One more thing I would like to add..
Before you begin your serve motion, eye the spot where you want the ball to land and aim for it. Place visual markers if it would help you see how close/far you're from the target. It's all about getting better, faster, isn't it? All the best and keep trying!

Rainer87, cool to see you post a vid. 99% of TT forumers do not post a vid, maybe afraid of comments.

You have adjusted your grip a bit, bt if you move your thumb a bit more to teh outside of the bat, you will have a looser wrist and better spin.

Another thing is you are not quite impacting the bottom of the ball. You start your swing parallel to the table, then adjust the blade angle on backswing, then do not fully correct it before impact. Don't worry. This is typical of new players learning and you will correct it with time. Another thing you can do is tilt the tip of the bat downwards a bit for side/underspin, which can help you keep it short a bit more.

You are also trying to swing downwards, instead of forward. This is keeping you from making spin and keeping you from landing it short with spin most of the time.

Good vid and here is a short check list.

Are you loose?

Is the grip a bit more to outside of bat?

Is impact on bottom of ball and stroke completly forward?

Is first bounce a little past halfway to net?

Is there enough bat speed to make spin?

Are you using the whole body crouch and timing?

Are you using some wrist at the end to finsih?

Do not worry about height, as that will improve with better impact. First priority is to get the impact timing, grip, bat speed and bat angle correct. The rest improves with understanding and more repetitions.

Later, you will concern yourself with the possible returns and how they setup your 3rd ball attack for pressure or a winner, or a positive situation in a rally. Right now, keep it simple by learning grip, looseness, impact timing/acelleration, spin generation, placement, and ability to keep it short at will with the spin you want. When you make heavy spin, you can vary it later and also correct the problems with height. Those are easier to fix later once you get the basics of a short spinny serve to a high percentage.

Remember that you are taking a very LARGE step in your TT development by improving hte serve, which is one of hte few things you can improve alone with practice. it will also help you later with serve receive as you understand how spin is generated or not by swing and bat.

Again, the good part about serving practice is you can do it by yourself, or even without a table, just using the floor. serving for an hour straight is real boring stuff, but even 5 minutes a day practice will help you out big-time over a few months or a year. When I was in Iraq, there was a TT table in our recreation trailer where we could also use internet phone to call home. There were ZERO players there, but I could practice serves anytime. However, since the sound of a lot of balls bouncing is very irritating, I would limit my practice to 4-5 minutes. I played practicall ZERO TT in that year on that camp, but after I got back to USA and did a sanctioned tourney, my ratings went up noticeably. My game was real rusty, but I had a much better serve/attack game and it was enough at that level to move up.

Hi Rainer87,

About serve practice, I might be able to give you a few tips as I do gain most of my points in matches from serve/3rd ball attack.

I think in terms of learning any serve, I learn them best by actually serving fast and long with as much spin as possible at the beginning. To me that's the easiest way of developing feeling for your serve. You don't need to even care about height or length, just think about getting max amounts of spin. When you develop the feeling of producing nasty amounts of spin then you would intuitively know how to control the depth and height of your serves. This way you would be way more relaxed when serving(trying to get it short the first time around is really hard, at least for me). When you can generate heavy amounts of spin, you can then do slight variations and deceptive motions, such as moving your elbow up after a downspin serve to make it look like topspin or exaggerating the slicing motion on the ball downwards where you're actually hooking the ball upwards.

Also think about how you can utilise your body weight and weight transfer into your serves(I've posted a short frame analysis of Zhang Jike's serve on this forum a little way back) on how to use your body weight in serving and returning to ready position. A relaxed wrist with full range of motion is also very important. I recommend a smoother wrist/arm action but then each player has his own preferences(Schlager sometimes serves with very stiff looking motions).

In fact at lower levels(I'm not sure where are you at the moment) you can get away with serving long and fast provided that you have enough quality on your fast serves. It's a viable strategy that most forum members don't agree on, especially against players who have better pushing and blocking skills and not too good loops. Long serves need to be really deep and fast(1st bounce), have good placement(for me it's curving into the body serves, wide angle serves) and, very importantly, spin variation. Sometimes you can even intentionally serve a bit higher with more spin while keeping it deep, if you sense your opponent borrowing your pace for their attack as this will mess up their timing significantly. You can serve fast side-under, side-top, pure top, bottom, no-spin, pure sidespin, etc...(long serves do not necessarily have to be topspin!)

Think about this, if you serve long and deep it's really hard for them to do any sort of push with high quality, so their options are reduced to looping/fast attack. If they insist on pushing, the push will come slow and long which you can put away with a strong loop(something that I actually can't do on some days!). If they can't read the long serve properly they would almost definitely miss their attacks or do a low quality loop(in most cases) where you can fast counter/block or FH counterloop to their weak areas. Besides, long serves reduce the amount of placement options for them which makes your life much easier. This will also force you to improve your rallying skills by a lot(topspin rallying) which is good for your future development.

If you do a short serve and it gets read properly you'll have to deal with short pushes, long pushes, flicks and etc... with extreme angles which is way too much variation and trouble.

Of course if their 1st attack is of too high a quality for you to handle then you can always switch to short serves(Or it may be you need to work on your blocks?). However, you need to keep them honest by serving long sometimes, otherwise they'll be too comfortable in their position

I personally serve 80% long and 20% short with most of my short serves with no-spin or some kind of heavy side-topspin variation to force the rally, and at my level I still get ridiculous serve/3rd ball percentages that somehow kills the fun of the game for others...(some of my games were really myself getting around 80% of my service points and them getting 80% of their service points, and it all boils down to the serve receive, how well we were able to break another's serve)

When you say 'when I try to move my wrist faster then service goes too long' that is because you are not brushing the ball fine enough. Also you need to loosen up a bit when serving