Daily Table Tennis Chit Chat

[UpSideDownCarl]

Hit with Mark Croitoroo today. He is getting better at playing lefty darn fast. Scary. Working on him giving me totally random returns off my serves and with my serves I was working on mixing spin/no-spin.

After he had me practice serves and showed me how to get my hips into the serve better.

It is totally natural for me to do it on my hook serve. But it is harder on the pendulum. Frustrating.

Anyway, I was practicing just simple slow backspin while trying to add the motion from the hips and body he showed me and I noticed, on some of them they came right back to the net. But they really didn't have a lot of spin. And the ones that were heavy, they did not come back.

I said it to Mark and he was watching and he said: "It means your serves are getting better! The ones with more spin are skidding."

Pretty weird and interesting.


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[Archosaurus]

What does he mean with skidding?

Spin so heavy that it doesn't grab the table anymore: just spins across it without much grip?

 

[UpSideDownCarl]

What does he mean with skidding?

Spin so heavy that it doesn't grab the table anymore: just spins across it without much grip?

Oh no. Another thing that Archo can start saying is happening or that he is working on. [emoji2]

When a backspin serve is nice and low and fast and has a decently flat trajectory, you can sometimes get them to skid on the table.


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[Archosaurus]

@UpSideDownCarl

So it won't come back while it's on the table, but it will come back once it's on the ground?

 

[Der_Echte]

Archos, just silently say Uncle and move on. Pls.

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[UpSideDownCarl]

So it won't come back while it's on the table, but it will come back once it's on the ground?

Sounds right. Heavy spin slips on table but once it hits the floor, the floor has more grip than the table.

But Der_Echte had some good advice. I have no idea why you latch on to stuff like this when you should just learn the basics and post some videos of your own serves. There will be people who can help you get them better. It is also something you can practice on your own and actually improve. Look at Siva, the guy really couldn't play. And yet his serves were pretty decent.

And Der is great at getting people to improve their serves. And so is NextLevel. So don't be afraid of posting videos. In spite of all the smack you've talked, those guys can still help you improve.


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[NextLevel]

Hit with Mark Croitoroo today. He is getting better at playing lefty darn fast. Scary. Working on him giving me totally random returns off my serves and with my serves I was working on mixing spin/no-spin.

After he had me practice serves and showed me how to get my hips into the serve better.

It is totally natural for me to do it on my hook serve. But it is harder on the pendulum. Frustrating.

Anyway, I was practicing just simple slow backspin while trying to add the motion from the hips and body he showed me and I noticed, on some of them they came right back to the net. But they really didn't have a lot of spin. And the ones that were heavy, they did not come back.

I said it to Mark and he was watching and he said: "It means your serves are getting better! The ones with more spin are skidding."

Pretty weird and interesting.


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I wouldn't fully agree with Mark's explanation based on my experience. And since I have had two 2500+ players from China call my my serves extremely spinny in two different states 6 months apart, not during coaching but comments made during rated matches, I think I do have something reasonable to say here.

Spinny is really about the spin to speed ratio as the actual revolutions per minute is possibly and likely higher on faster serves. But spin to speed ratio isn't everything - having the serve skid or in actuality, stay low, is about getting more forward motion and making it skim like a stone thrown across a pond. So what is happening is that you are getting good depth with a lower trajectory, but even if the serve has a lot of spin, it has more speed as well, which is not necessarily a bad thing as long as the serve double bounces and stays low. If it goes long, it can always be looped by the right kind of player, so if you want to serve long, you have to set people with other serves and hope they don't read the long version unless your goal is to counter loop what can be an extremely heavy opener off a long backspin serve.

The great thing about the skidding version is that once a serve dips below net height, it means that your opponent has to lift it to get it over the net. Also, if it is heavy, the contact point to bring the ball up is further underneath the ball as the ball is on the fall, so people who do not open their rackets enough and try to push the ball late will net the ball repeatedly as it is too low to get over the net with bad technique.

That's what makes my current backspin serve so special and why it gets repeated pushes into the net. People are not used to seeing that level of backspin from a short motion and I get a skidder maybe 20-30% of the time. And when I get that skidder, people who don't realize it is a skidder just put it into the net.

As your touch gets better, it is possible to serve very short skidders, as you can confirm if you look at the last video I posted. They are not ideal as they are for some people easier to drop short. But skidders are far better than long backspin or high backspin, no matter how heavy the backspin is. High short backspin gives a kill opportunity to the right kind of returner and long backspin can be looped. So master the skidder. But if it bounces only twice on the other side, it is unlikely to come back towards the net, except in some rare cases where the spin is so heavy that the third bounce after the second is extremely short and then backward motion commences. I do have a few of those in the last best backspin serving video ever I posted I think.

For making the serve skid, the hips are important but I find the whip pattern more critical. After I went to the advanced whip pattern I presented in the video, I made my serves almost skid at will.

 

[NextLevel]

I need a super like button for this Post! Rambo it is!

I am happy you signed up. Try to play people widely, start with weaker opponents as their balls will have less spin and they will be more predictable so you can attack them as confidently as you want to. The focus is on playing a quality shot, either heavy spin when low, or heavy spin and/or pace when the ball is high. Use spin avoidance, whippy strokes and racket head speed with lots of thick or thin brush, thin brush when you need to bend or place the ball with precision and keep it low. Use your body to loop the ball, not just your hand. Loop almost as if you are doing a cartwheel and see how fast and spinny you can make the ball when you do a forehand. See how much spin you can generate with that kind of stroke while keeping the ball short and slow. Then you will see that many balls you are pushing are really balls you can attack hard. Then since you move very fast, you will be able to select the balls you want to use full body loops on. And as your technique gets better, you won't need full body loops to get quality in rallies, but you will feel the use of your body when doing small strokes.

 

[UpSideDownCarl]

Yeah, I think what you are saying, NextLevel, pretty much fills in the blanks. Mark is always encouraging me to have faster lower serves while getting at least 2 bounces. The serves I was doing, the ones that were slower and had less spin, most of them came back to the net. The ones that were faster were mostly getting 3 bounced from BH corner to BH corner some of them looked like they would start coming back if there was one more bounce and if they did, they would be coming back towards the net fast. Whereas the ones with less spin were really just coming back lazily.

But for me, I had two actual focuses. One was tossing high, well above my head. The other was using hip rotation with the serve. I really just serve with my arm. Matthew Khan also told me I should work on adding my hips. But Mark showed me exactly the movement he thought I should use.

When I put it into the serve and receive drills, because I am focused on trying to toss a few feet higher, I forget to reset. Same with if I add the hips. So the idea was to just focus on adding the hips and the higher toss without having to focus on getting ready for the 3rd ball. So that, hopefully I can get it into real play sooner. Break it down and make it simple. Which is also why I was doing the ones with only a small amount of spin and how I noticed that the ones that were not heavy came back to the net mostly because they were slower.

I promise, those would not be hard serves to return because they did not have enough forward momentum to be good light spin serves. They were just for timing the hips with the arm and getting the hips to initiate the movement of the arm. The ones that were heavier were not really my heavy serves either. But it was cool, I was pulling under and past the ball. And I was not putting much effort at all and they had more spin than I thought they would because of my hips even though all I was really trying to do was the hips.


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[NextLevel]

Yeah, I think what you are saying, NextLevel, pretty much fills in the blanks. Mark is always encouraging me to have faster lower serves while getting at least 2 bounces. The serves I was doing, the ones that were slower and had less spin, most of them came back to the net. The ones that were faster were mostly getting 3 bounced from BH corner to BH corner some of them looked like they would start coming back if there was one more bounce and if they did, they would be coming back towards the net fast. Whereas the ones with less spin were really just coming back lazily.

But for me, I had two actual focuses. One was tossing high, well above my head. The other was using hip rotation with the serve. I really just serve with my arm. Matthew Khan also told me I should work on adding my hips. But Mark showed me exactly the movement he thought I should use.

When I put it into the serve and receive drills, because I am focused on trying to toss a few feet higher, I forget to reset. Same with if I add the hips. So the idea was to just focus on adding the hips and the higher toss without having to focus on getting ready for the 3rd ball. So that, hopefully I can get it into real play sooner. Break it down and make it simple. Which is also why I was doing the ones with only a small amount of spin and how I noticed that the ones that were not heavy came back to the net mostly because they were slower.

I promise, those would not be hard serves to return because they did not have enough forward momentum to be good light spin serves. They were just for timing the hips with the arm and getting the hips to initiate the movement of the arm. The ones that were heavier were not really my heavy serves either. But it was cool, I was pulling under and past the ball. And I was not putting much effort at all and they had more spin than I thought they would because of my hips even though all I was really trying to do was the hips.


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Baal made a comment about the serve being really slow making people misread it even more. To be honest, I am not even sure that the ones you think are light won't be misread by people. In the end, what matters is making the serve appear heavier or lighter than it actually is. In the absolute sense, I am sure I could get heavier backspin by serving with a bigger motion. But in addition to possibly being harder to keep short, it would give the whole game away and people would anticipate the heavy backspin. The thing about lower trajectory is that the serve travels relatively faster and it is easier to disguise if you can make other serves have a similar low trajectory, which is easier than making the other serves have a high trajectory, for example. Faster means less time to read the spin from flight.

When Makele was around during Brett's visit, Brett kept trying to fix Makele's backspin serve. But Makele's original backspin serve came high and short to the forehand. And let me tell you, I netted that serve when I attacked it 80%+ of the time I think, maybe 90%. It was a visual illusion and I was not the only one who struggled with it. We couldn't explain why what Brett called terrible technique was so hard for us to kill easily. But we all agreed that the serve was heavier than it looked and that was probably 90%+ of the struggle. I started looping it when I used a vertical stroke over the table.

These things take time and as long as you are putting in the hours and getting some supervision from higher level players, good things will happen as long as you persist. MY elbow position still sucks but all the time I spent on that gave me new contact points for making the ball break wider on my serve and made my pendulum serve more dangerous and versatile. Serving is like entering a lab and testing stuff. You may reinvent the wheel, but it will be your wheel, and you can design it however you want it and it will be yours.

 

[UpSideDownCarl]

By the way, Mark really liked my fake topspin serve.

I have a pendulum topspin serve that is harder to see. And one that is easier to see. But the one that is easier to see has much more topspin. It is easier to see because I pull my wrist up noticeably during the whip.

The fake topspin one is backspin and I pull the wrist up just after the ball leaves the racket. It isn't worth wasting time doing on someone lower level because they won't see the nuance. And therefore, by not seeing the detail, they could guess correctly because of how much more I do backspin serves than topspin. But it worked a couple of times on Mark where he said, "do that again!" Before I showed him the deception.

He may not have been fooled righty. But lefty he was. And he is starting to be good enough lefty. [emoji2]


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[NextLevel]

By the way, Mark really liked my fake topspin serve.

I have a pendulum topspin serve that is harder to see. And one that is easier to see. But the one that is easier to see has much more topspin. It is easier to see because I pull my wrist up noticeably during the whip.

The fake topspin one is backspin and I pull the wrist up just after the ball leaves the racket. It isn't worth wasting time doing on someone lower level because they won't see the nuance. But it worked a couple of times on Mark where he said, "do that again!" Before I showed him what I was doing.

He may not have been fooled righty. But lefty he was. And he is starting to be good enough lefty. [emoji2]


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Fake follow-throughs are powerful when you have fast wrist action. Like I said, you are a master server, you just don't fully realize it yet. When Brett was trying to fix my punch, he said, "You need more of Carl's drum stick approach". Brett's analogy is hammering in a nail.

I need to write my report for the tournament today so that I can go to bed. Lots of stuff I did today - not all of it will go into the report. But I will try my best.

 

[UpSideDownCarl]

These things take time and as long as you are putting in the hours and getting some supervision from higher level players, good things will happen as long as you persist. MY elbow position still sucks but all the time I spent on that gave me new contact points for making the ball break wider on my serve and made my pendulum serve more dangerous and versatile. Serving is like entering a lab and testing stuff. You may reinvent the wheel, but it will be your wheel, and you can design it however you want it and it will be yours.

This paragraph is pure gold.




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[NextLevel]

So I played on Friday night and played some good table tennis. I think I have finally come to grips with my best forehand and I have committed to using it as best and as long as I can. I just have to integrate it with my backhand. I can loop just about any ball with it, I can counterloop with it and I can kill high balls with it. I just have to remember that this is it, and stop all the stupid experimenting that has taken me off track over the last 6 months. I am not trying to be a pro - I could have done some serious damage if I had stuck with this forehand for the last 6 months.

I got a new student on Friday as well. It seems that work I did with the former temp is getting people to want to work with me a little.

On Saturday, I Wanted to see how my play would bear out. Also, there is a Butterfly Teams tournament this month and the tournament on Saturday used the Butterfly G40+ ball so I wanted to play it as prep for that reason. I went 1-4. I liked the way I played and made some good shots, but I was really unhappy to lose to Rich DeWitt 0-3 after having decent chances in every game. The one thing that is interesting here is that I played him largely as a looper so it will be worth reviewing the video tape to see what I need to fix that might just change the tenor of the matches completely.

Here are links to my only win and to my match vs the 2500 player (who messes around too much). I played some great points in every match.

After the tournament was over, I played around with a couple of lower rated players. One of them, after losing to me, said he couldn't play a rematch because he couldn't even return my serves so it wasn't any fun so I spent about 20 minutes or so serving to him and explaining how I get certain things to happen. I think he gained an appreciation of what goes into the trickery after I ran through just about my whole serve arsenal and showed him how I use sleight of hand to mix up the spins.

Since I lost to Rich and wasn't that happy, I Went to Princeton Pong for more punishment. I borrowed a Viscaria from a friend to test it (of course, I am going to use it, complain about its feeling, go back to my all wood blades or whatever... I did call the guy who I gave my Look King to modify for me today - reduce head size and put more weight in the handle so we will see).

I played a guy who likes to smash a lot and of course, he had issues with my serves. Then I played a kid with medium pips on his backhand (who I lost to in the last tournament I played at Princeton) and beat him 3-1. The medium pips tend to bend when I serve or push to them so I have to attack the next ball without lifting it as it is not a backspin ball. I finally came to grips with this and it improved my results. I then played the kid's father (a penholder that is one of my special opponents) and I beat him 3-2 in an exciting match with great shots and blocks made by both sides. Again, despite some errors, learning to see that the pips bend on my backspin balls was critical to making accurate loops.

Then I had my first loss at the club that day to a guy who has been out with a sprained ankle for a while but is getting back in. He plays with an Innerforce T5000 and has a hard smash on easy balls. He won two close games and went up 2-0. I won the 3rd but feel to far behind early in the 4th and failed to make a come back. He just seemed to blocking everything I threw at him and I missed quite a few of his serves.

Then I Watched my friend play him and my friend, after winning the first game, lost as well. But that first game opened my eyes and helped me see why I used to beat the smasher so easily in the past even when others complained about him and why I lost the match. You see, I like to play with heavy slow spin brush. But I was looping the ball hard and the smasher was making blocks that were challenging my ability to reset and reloop. But when I was beating the smasher, I used to play with slow topspin most of the time and it would allow me to get an easy ball to challenge him with. And now, the smasher is blocking and looping even better, so I have to be more patient with the slow spin. But my new forehand is versatile enough to produce the slow spin at will. So I won the rematch 3-1. MY friend played slow the first game, but when he started looping harder and harder in the subsequent games, the blocks came back faster and faster and he got frustrated. By looping slowly, I handcuffed the smasher a bit as he had to time the balls better, which is not always easy when you are using a fast racket.

Then I played some matches with a few other friends - lots of good blocks and forehands and serves. In general, I am playing well - I just hope I stay healthy enough this month for all of it to bear fruit.

 

[Gene Tuttle]

Good job on Lehman. It looked like he just couldn't manage to keep you from getting the third ball attack off your serves. I played in a tournament in El Paso this weekend. The tournament was a round robin and I did better than I have in most of my prior tournaments. I have been working on keeping the impact point lower on my serves like Der Echte showed me when I was in D.C. and it is starting to be more habit rather than something I have to constantly think about. By reading the posts and watching the videos of the players here in this forum I have finally managed to start assimilating some better techniques and strategies. My gains have been small but I am slowly starting to gain some consistency and a stronger mental game. In the first part of the round robin, I fell into my old habit of losing concentration and form when the games got tight and went 1-4 though I didn't lose to anyone ranked under me. In the second half of the round robin when I was in the "B" bracket I managed to remember some of the things from this forum about focus and using your strengths and I adapted to what was needed to win. I managed to go 4-1 though I felt I should have beaten the one person I lost to as he really did not have anything I felt was dominant but he was just better at working on my weaknesses than I was at working on his. I was pleased overall but I have to focus right from the start in the tournament and realise that every game is important if you are playing to win.

 

[Der_Echte]

That is some good stuff GT and you ought to tell me address to send you your Chili's card to make for all those tolls I had you go through to get to Smash TTC.

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[Boogar]

I made a best of video of my last league match, here it is:

 

[JeffM]

I made a best of video of my last league match, here it is:

Nice compilation of points there Boogar! Keep up the good work!

Can't wait to see your video of the best points in 2016 at the end of the year

 

[Boogar]

Nice compilation of points there Boogar! Keep up the good work!

Can't wait to see your video of the best points in 2016 at the end of the year

Thanks are you implying I have to do one now ?

 

[JeffM]

Thanks are you implying I have to do one now ?

Not implying you have to do one, but I think it will be quite cool if we see people do that.
At the end of the year, a time where we can re-live the best moments of TT of the players we are familiar with (those that were captured on camera) for the year.
What a way to finish the year