How Did I Win or Lose a Match?

Littledragonman7 said:

PPP, do you still live in Calif?

LDM7

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hi ldm7
no never
Der was referring to DTTW which was a forum on which I was a mod for a while. back in. the day. DTTW= “Denis Table Tennis World” a greek/english tt forum
Back in the Day DTTW MyTT were two of the most lively TT forums with plenty of well informed posters.
In fact i have never been stateside, much to my regret, but I have been around the globe and visited a couple of worlds 77 & 83.
I am now retired to Ireland

Littledragonman7 said:

Hey NL,

that's C00L how you make a point and reference it with a video link (I want to learn to do that ...)

how come you've never done one of these for me 😥

LDM7

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I have to be around a computer and watch table tennis on it to do links as it isn't as easy to do links on a cellphone. And I just haven't watched or written about table tennis as much with family and stuff. Maybe there were some points against the blocker I could do this with?

That said , a lot of this comes off as critical below USATT 1600 to be honest as usually players below that level haven't developed decent strokes and placement on both sides so it is usually hard to look at the point construction and say something more than work on your technique... but if you post video I will do something when I have time and try to be kind.

I gave LDM7 a bunch of short serves to practice stepping in and stop arm, get right to bounce and do a touch back right over net. This is a skill he will need down the road and will also help him learn flipping.

I got a player a level or two higher to give him 10 minutes of long serves varied placement, pace, and spin, but all long and LDM7's mission was to try to see the ball and attack every one. It didn't become an immediate resounding success, but it was. He got to see that learning to judge the placement, pace, spin, height, direction and such is not easy and it will take a lot of time to improve.

He got to see that after first attack on weak ball, he needs to keep bat level above table, so he can step into the block and finish it.

None of what we did today will lead to immediate improvement, it was almost entirely strategic development stuff.

We did doubles matches. LDM7 got paired with a very unorthodox player who cannot spell topspin if he was to get a free winning lottery ticket, but he has the best raw footwork of anyone in the city and he can spell the crap outta the word POUND (as in pound the ball). LDM7 got some practice opening the point... and receiving serves vs the quarter pounder's brother, who is the Pastor I have been trying to train into a topspin player (unsuccessfully - he had been a flat pounder for forty years).

Littledragonman7 said:

Morning IB66,

One area focusing to improve is striking EVERY ball with quality (spin, location, timing, height ...) exerting pressure onto the other (especially on opening)

This requires an attitude adjustment above my neck, between my ears

I am training every shot with intent (BH whip, FH power from the ground up)

Also I make certain I am physically warmed up, ready to compete, even a practice session as I am a believer of you practice how you play matches (carries over better)

Good show mate 👍

Let's do another round of video analysis in two week (a break & get some training in)

LDM7

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Yesterday I got a memory card for my phone, so now in a better position to record more matches without stuffing the storage on my phone!!
Good idea to do a match every couple of weeks, we’ll go down that route.

Pre match warm up - if at ‘home’ venue, we arrive early, set up and warm up, the vid I posted was the 1st match of the evening!! You can see I was already sweating before the match started!!
We usually do FH-Fh drive then FH loop and block, same on BH. Then serve and receive / 3rd ball attack/open up, serve is backspin/Side spin. So open up is v backspin.
If we have enough time, long serve any spin any placement and direct open up BH / FH no pushing.
’Away’ matches, its more a case of making the best of a bad situation!! Sometimes you are lucky to get 5 mins warm up!! Many clubs have limited table time and have to be out of the hall at a set time. It is what it is!!!

Hi NL, PPP, Der and LDM7,

Many thanks for posting observations and recommendations, appreciated greatly!!
Please keep them coming in future, hopefully you’ll have enough time on your hands to do so!!

Cheers.

Der_Echte said:

I gave LDM7 a bunch of short serves to practice stepping in and stop arm, get right to bounce and do a touch back right over net. This is a skill he will need down the road and will also help him learn flipping.

I got a player a level or two higher to give him 10 minutes of long serves varied placement, pace, and spin, but all long and LDM7's mission was to try to see the ball and attack every one. It didn't become an immediate resounding success, but it was. He got to see that learning to judge the placement, pace, spin, height, direction and such is not easy and it will take a lot of time to improve.

He got to see that after first attack on weak ball, he needs to keep bat level above table, so he can step into the block and finish it.

None of what we did today will lead to immediate improvement, it was almost entirely strategic development stuff.

We did doubles matches. LDM7 got paired with a very unorthodox player who cannot spell topspin if he was to get a free winning lottery ticket, but he has the best raw footwork of anyone in the city and he can spell the crap outta the word POUND (as in pound the ball). LDM7 got some practice opening the point... and receiving serves vs the quarter pounder's brother, who is the Pastor I have been trying to train into a topspin player (unsuccessfully - he had been a flat pounder for forty years).

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That's the thing about coaching, everyone does it differently. For me, there are no truly short serves at the U2200 level so I would focus on just looping serves especially the half long ones which don't allow you to mostly use their pace. But I do remember that some players do tty to keep balls short or even half long against players who like to load up on everything that comes long at a certain level, it can be a devastatingly effective to prevent those players with big strokes contained by not giving them everything they want.

Anything that improvess serve and serve return is a big deal, it is too easy to overlook the amount of points you can lose just by failing to practice and get comfortable with executing the correct return against various, sidespin, backspin and topspin serves and recognizing based on your mistake the adjustment you need to make to return the ball properly.

Littledragonman7 said:

I would focus on just looping serves especially the half long ones

=> you are consistent in what you preach, i've heard this comment from you b4

=> what about the double bouncing serves, should i practice looping those too (instead of safely putting them back on the other side, maybe aim for a particular spot)?

=> With practice, i think i can, jst a little scary of hitting knuckles on the table and ball is further in front of me & closer to the net so that might be a different stroke

=> one of my training partner suggested at my level USATT 1200 90% of serves are loop-able, do you agree with that assessment?

prevent those players with big strokes contained by not giving them everything they want

=> to me this is the contra-positive of looping half-long from a service stand point

=> so if that is my playing style, how would one slow me down from looping (both wings) half-long serves?

=> how bout fast dead right at my elbow middle?

=> how about higher, deep chops right at my stomach? (push returner further back)

Anything that improves serve and serve return is a big deal, it is too easy to overlook the amount of points

=> I've never spent any consistent amount of time studying return of serves, most times I am guessing, nervous, sometimes confused, I can return high % (say 7 out of 10) of the same serve, to the same spot, then repeat with a different type of serve, THE PROBLEM IS when serves are random ... most times I am guessing, nervous, sometimes confused, there's just too many variable to worry about

LDM7

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You ask a lot of questions, I am tempted to provide answers, but I also realize that my answers may not be that helpful to you because they are without context. So I will focus on serve return and leave the rest for some other time. There is no amount of talking that will fix serve return issues, it is the biggest thing that gets better with experience and practice. But you need to structure your experience so that certain things become apparent faster. The biggest thing you can do to structure your experience is to learn to play to play standard strokes against all kinds of serves.

I said at U2200 (not 1200, U2200), that almost no one serves short, so I think your training partner was being kind, I hope it was not DerEchte as it means we have to argue, I think 100% of serves at the U1200 level are loopable, the issue of course is that the person who loops all of them isn't going to be U1200 for long if they ever were. So the statement is a bit deceptive, as is my statement that most of the u2200 serves are not short, it is not that that no one serves short at u2200, the issue is that the quality and consistency would not pass the pro-level test for a short serve as many of the serves would be too high or would drift long more than would be apparent from the judgment of the players because they often give their opponents credit. So if you learn to just judge the length of serves, you may not attack the serve all the time, but you will give your opponents far less credit, the amount of training it takes to consistently serve the perfect length double-bounce half long serve is not something many players below 2200 can invest in. If you doubt me, challenge your coach who is a strong server to get the length right 6 out of 10 times for $50 (as in out of 10, serves, he must be able to call 3 of those that will double bounce and hit the back end line and 3 of those that will just come off the table), and if you lose, you can send me the bill. But whether I pay or not, you will learn something important.

The main thing though is to get comfortable using standard strokes to return serves so you get into the topspin mentality when the ball comes long (footwork is a part of this in matches, but in practice, start by assuming they come where you like them - footwork will them be about preparing to move into position to like them). You can and should practice placement when you are comfortable adjusting to the basic sidespin being served. But the safe returns are usually fine unless you want to take risk, as there is always risk when your stroke is not going into the face of the ball's path, which is usually what happens when you redirect a topspin shot.

The thing about looping is that you are making the ball take a certain path. if you practice by yourself or with your coach under structured conditions, you should be able to vary the arc of your stroke with the spin speed and shape of your stroke. The next factor to take into account is the incoming ball. Now the thing about serve return looping is that there isn't some far away target as serve return looping is close to the table. So you rarely play a big stroke on serve return unless the ball is high or you have a perfect practiced read, you are taking the ball close to the table and not off a long short but off a ball that has bounced once on the opponent's side, which usually makes it a ball unlike any other you will face in the point. So with that in mind, you practice serve return looping with a step by step mindset. You try to find a ball that puts the stroke on the table after you have guaranteed you know what is on the ball.

A stroke is defined by 1) where the racket starts 2) where the racket contacts the ball 3) where the racket finishes, or in other words, the path of your stroke/racket 4) the speed of the racket swing and 5) how thick or thin your contact on the ball was. Of course, the biggest variable not mentioned is the spin on the incoming ball. but that is what you need to practice against to see what happens. Let us say you get reverse sidespin, there are many ways to handle it, but swing one way and see what happens to the ball. then adjust your stroke ( start lower or higher, contact a different point on the ball, and have a different finishing position - change one of the five or even all of the five depending on what you are testing) and see what happens to the ball against the same serve. Continue this process. Then switch the serve to another serve. Continue this process. One of the issues with learning is that the brain adapts to what it always gets, which is why you need to add variation to training to simulate matches so that your brain is forced to adjust faster. If you swing one way all the time, you never practice adjusting to the ball. But if you get some variation in practice, you get into the habit of adjusting both in practice and matches. You need a mix of block and random training if you want to see better match results but also improve your technique over time.

You should also practice deliberating looping balls into the top half of the net. The main thing is to feel comfortable that your stroke path is controlling the ball. Don't feel that you must put the ball on the table perfectly. As you get better, players who generate higher levels of topspin will force you to close your racket more and so the stroke that kept the ball on the table against the 1200 player is going to put the ball into the sky vs a 2200 player unless you adjust.
There are some concepts related to learning to stop the spin and continue the spin. But they would require me write even more than the amount of gibberish I have written. But basically, a racket angle/contact point that compensates for the spin on the ball will stop the ball from rotating in that direction (it is closed relative to the ball) and send the ball back to where it came from - a racket angle that continues the spin will allow the spin to go through (it is open relative to the ball). If you watch videos on adjusting to sidespin from say Pingskills, you will see a lot of these.

The thing is then you approach a backspin serve with a stroke trajectory for a topspin ball, the ball tends die off the racket into the table. If you approach a no-spin with the path for backspin stroke, the ball tends to high and often long (no spin is usually the most confusing to people who are not good at generating spin because no spin on serves is often a sign of inadequate technique as much as it is a deliberate choice, but many people at the lower levels have inadequate technique so they can't tell the difference). Sidespin, you need to adjust what side of the ball you hit (often subconsciously). Sometimes, a no spin serve will just go off the racket into the net because it doesn't grip the racket at all. Or if you push a nospin serve or a topspin serve, beneath the ball, the ball pops up. It is reading these responses to standard strokes (and allowing your body to read them by trusting your body to learn over time rather than beating up yourself) that makes using standard responses valuable. Because you can use your training to adjust in real matches once you have an idea of what the server is doing and try to look out for it. At the U1200 level, this is rarely this complicated, players usually just have one serve they try to do (usually with strong spin or lacking any spin), they may move it around a little and hope it messes you up somehow, once you figure it out, it tends to be easy to attack over and over. And those with good serves are so used to the easy points that when you return the serve, you tend to win the point outright.


The main thing again:

A stroke is defined by where the racket starts 2) where the racket contacts the ball 3) where the racket finishes, or in other words, the path of your stroke/racket 4) the speed of the racket swing and 5) how thick or thin your contact on the ball was. Sometimes, I just speak about the stroke as a curve and whether your curve is big or the curve is small but different curves can have different results with different racket stroke speeds and contact thickness.

When returning serves, practice returning bunches of serves you know what is on the ball and try to use different strokes to see what happens to the ball. You could try a certain stroke on a backspin ball with thin contact and with practice with thicker contact and see your limit. With sidespin serves, contact the right top, the left top etc. For some, start with the racket lower, for some start with the racket higher, for others finish with the racket lower, for some finish with the racket higher. Then at some point, just trust your body to do what it has learned and adapt to the ball.

Most serves are that 1200 levels have spin that even if high can be easily compensated for with the right contact point choice, But this is something you learn with practice. Basically, see long serve return as a part of what should be your broad topspin stroke training as well as learning to adjust to spin with your topspin stroke - because you are usually playing the ball closer to the table on serve return, you shouldn't be swinging upwards (it should be more over the ball usually relative to the rally stroke). If you see it this broadly, improvement becomes easier and hopefully more structured - you still need to put in the hours.

The 1/2 long serve, needs a lot of practice (symmetrical) the 1/2 long un- symmetrical serve even more so,!!!
I watched a few matches this evening from the WTT finals and a WTT tournament from a couple of weeks back.
I saw only 1 over the table loop to a 1/2 long serve, which was done by Ma Long v Felix Labrun, Ma Long lost the point!!
If the 1/2 long serve attempt strayed long by 50mm (2 inches) or more they were generally looped.
or a similar stroke to a flick return was used especially on BH side.
I think much of the time the pro’s tackle 1/2 long serves by deciding to do 1 of 2 options.
flick the ball, or get in and take the ball early, and play a touch shot of some description, be it a push, touch block etc THEY READ THE BALL SOOOO MUCH BETTER AND FASTER!!
But I still think they take away the indecision that a 1/2 long serve presents, by having these 2 options. So perhaps even if the 1/2 long serve was going to go that 2 inches too long, they aren’t over fussed!!

The other thing I noticed was that there seems to be a few more longer serves as well

IB66 said:

The 1/2 long serve, needs a lot of practice (symmetrical) the 1/2 long un- symmetrical serve even more so,!!!
I watched a few matches this evening from the WTT finals and a WTT tournament from a couple of weeks back.
I saw only 1 over the table loop to a 1/2 long serve, which was done by Ma Long v Felix Labrun, Ma Long lost the point!!
If the 1/2 long serve attempt strayed long by 50mm (2 inches) or more they were generally looped.
or a similar stroke to a flick return was used especially on BH side.
I think much of the time the pro’s tackle 1/2 long serves by deciding to do 1 of 2 options.
flick the ball, or get in and take the ball early, and play a touch shot of some description, be it a push, touch block etc THEY READ THE BALL SOOOO MUCH BETTER AND FASTER!!
But I still think they take away the indecision that a 1/2 long serve presents, by having these 2 options. So perhaps even if the 1/2 long serve was going to go that 2 inches too long, they aren’t over fussed!!

The other thing I noticed was that there seems to be a few more longer serves as well

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Nothing I am saying here is really my original thinking, it is plagiarized stuff.

The thing is that the pros (as servers) mix up half long short and half long long serves, and they use the variation to get easy balls off returns that attempt to drop long serves short - usually, the decision to drop the ball short has to be made early because your options are fewer when you get to the ball late - so by taking advantage of the opponent's need to make an early decision, they mix up things. Also their defensive capabilities are better, so on bad days, the receiver may just decide to push long and hope for the best in rally. Ultimately, getting the first attack in and winning points off it makes assumptions about the level of the opponent, if an opponent can't handle my opening (forehand), I open more, but if they are blocking me around, I may need to be a bit more calculating.

All that said my main point is that let the opponent demonstrate, especially on down the line serves, that they know how to serve the ball short - if you give them the benefit of the doubt with early pushes/flicks like a pro, you might be costing yourself opportunities to play the first topspin and that can be the difference in a match or at critical points. The distance down the line is shorter and balls tend to drift. I have horrible memories of playing a particular opponent and always popping up his topspin backhand serve, until I realized one day that if I was popping it up so badly, it was unlikely to stay short because heavy topspin drifts long. You don't even have to loop the balls hard, you just have to keep your mind open so that you know you have the option. Also that if you are not consistently attacking or pushing them short, maybe they are longer than you think they are.

If you play a handicap match with a pro, you might see two short serves. After that, the rest are usually attempts to bait you to treat a long ball as if it is a short ball. Since it is handicap match, knowing this can help. In a real match, it wouldn't make a difference.

https://youtu.be/60VWuid7U0c

Adam Bobrow vid, exercise 1 !!!, some other good exercises as well !!

IB66 said:

https://youtu.be/60VWuid7U0c

Adam Bobrow vid, exercise 1 !!!, some other good exercises as well !!

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The crazy thing is that I referred to that video in an earlier version of my response to LDM7.

LDM7, at 1200 level the simplest thing to do is assume all the serves are long and wait for them to come off the table. If more than two or three serves bounce twice on the table then your opponent has proved he can serve short so you have to think about it. Make him prove it, more than once! If all his serves come off the table then don't think about the length any more.

Now you can focus on location and speed, and last spin. I de-emphasize spin because you can assume all serves are close to no-spin *unless* you see a big motion in a spin-creating direction. A big undercut, a big sidespin. It's nearly impossible to stay at 1200 if you can serve heavy and deceptive spin. You will simply win too many serve points. So assume your opponent can't do that. If he proves you wrong, okay, then you have to deal with surprising amounts of spin. But most likely you either get little spin, or very obvious spin.

Location and speed are the most important factors because you want to loop if you get a good forehand look. Try to cover maybe 70% of the table with your forehand if you can. Speed is for your timing practice, to take the ball at a high point close to the top of the bounce. Don't try to win the point on the receive with power. Just make a relaxed, easy loop and aim for your opponent's elbow. You may miss a lot at first and that is totally okay. It's better to miss an active stroke than to put an easy pop-up kill for your opponent on the table.

I assume you don't have a reliable backhand loop, because again it's nearly impossible to stay at the 1200 level if you do. You will simply win too many points with it. If you start to loop almost all the serves that come to your forehand 70% of the table that will feel very, very bad to your opponents. Trust me on this, they won't like it at all. So they will aim most of their serves at your backhand 30%. You have two options for those receives, depending on what you want to accomplish in the match. You could treat those predictable long serves to your backhand as a kind of multiball practice and try to backhand topspin against them. This will be difficult and you may lose by missing a lot. Once you stop missing a lot you will no longer be playing 1200-rated opponents. Or if it is a match you want to win for whatever reason, you could either push long at your opponent's elbow if you think the serve has enough backspin to allow that. Or if it's basically a dead ball you could backhand hit it at his elbow.

In this model we make two assumptions: serves are long; and spin is either absent or very obvious. You must validate these assumptions for every opponent, but I expect them to be nearly universally true at 1200 level.

That leaves your only two decisions to make: is the serve to your forehand or backhand? If it's to your backhand, will you push or hit? If you decide to try backhand topspin then you can skip that second decision and you only have to read which side it comes to.

Either way the model isn't very complex and I am 100% confident you can do it with only a little bit of practice. Don't be afraid to try. You will only get better and leave these opponents far behind you.

One drill I used to try (I used it more when I coached, because I couldn't find someone to train with who consistently wanted to serve to me):

1 topspin long serve
1 nospin long serve
1 backspin long serve
1 sidespin long serve
1 short backspin serve (which you need to push short or maybe flick if you are at that stage)

And repeat until you have practice for both forehand over multiple tries, and then do for backhand. You can vary the sidespin type (use left sidespin sometimes, use right sidespin other times) so that you get exposure to both sidespins. As my late coach used to say, no matter how crazy the serve looks, the ball can only be spinning in one way and on one-axis when you hit it.