So 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
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.
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.
