You can keep it on your backhand, there are lots of tacky tensors that are doing really well. I know a couple of people who really like Joola Golden Tango and this is going on my bat when my order comes in tomorrow.
The issues are more than that, though they mostly show up in higher level play. Regardless, if you like the rubber when you use it, that is the most important thing.
NL,
Being able to keep the ball short is easier with a tacky rubber. It is one of the reasons why the Chinese dominated because they always found it easier to keep the ball short than most of their opposition, even against side-topspin serves. It is also the reason why hybrids are becoming more common with top European players, many compensating with slightly faster blades to compensate for stickiness.
Hard to say - need to know the lineups!
For blades it's faster at the top end, but slower in the short game too, hence the proliferation of inner composite blades.
That's partly a taste thing, some people don't like the non-lineariry of innerforce blades and prefer to just leave that to the rubber. The most popular blades in the world are not innerforce (Viscaria and clones, Mizutani and clones), though I have to admit that Innerforce ZLCs have become popular with Harimoto and Franziska etc and ALC with Dima. Whether the W968 and the Ma Long are really innerforce I leave to the experts.
Exciting!
Me too…Dane & Beast are gonna be hard to beat..
The Innerforce ZLC's are actually quite linear which I like.
The good thing was that FH was not an issue. I was slightly less consistent in looping vs. blocks, but my loops vs. backspins were actually better. That was surprising given it's only been a week since using a drastically different blade. On the BH side though it was terrible. In practice while my BH doesn't have the same level of power as my FH, consistency was similar. A bit worse against backspin, a bit better at close to the table counters.
Nice. Do you have a ratings goal you are trying to achieve this year? We need to push each otherSo today I played in my first league matches with my 968. If you read the review thread, you'd seen that I was concerned about my FH. To counter that I practiced a lot more FH than I usually do during the week. Due to my dramatic improvements in BH during practices, I decided that it's finally time for me to start using it in games. My playing style has always, always been push and block on BH, while attacking everything that comes to the FH side.
Well, it didn't go so well
Once the games started, however, I instinctively reverted back to push and block on the BH side. I had to really focus on being aggressive with my BH, and even then sometimes I reacted too slowly and had to tell myself "you're attacking this", instead of just instinctively attack it. When I really focused on the BH, the rest of my game suffered as well. I suppose it'll just take some time to change my mindset, but I do wonder if there's a quicker way to get that changed?
I ended the day going 1-3, losing the 3 games 3-0, 3-0, and 3-1. I was competitive in all the games, but when it came down to the critical points I was just all out of sorts. The only game I won was 3-2. I won the first 2 while half focusing on my BH, lost the next 2 while 100% focused on using my BH, then I'm a bit ashamed to admit that I did intentionally revert back to my old playing style the last set because I didn't want to lose all the matches. He was also the only player rated lower than me in the group, and I didn't want to take the ratings loss.
Hmm, good question. I don't have AA ratings goal right now, my immediate goal is just to become a two-winged looper rather than a single wing one. My next goal will be to improve my form on both sides so that I can be more efficient.
