Daily Table Tennis Chit Chat

[RPB Enthusiast]

So I got my Butterfly Viscaria Super ALC CPen yesterday and today I got my Butterfly Zyre-03 2.7 and Stiga Helix Platinum 55°, so I'll be able to use it tomorrow at club 🤯 Going to slap on 2 layers of booster since Zyre-03 feels much better (to me like that) and it'll be interesting to see how the Helix Platinum 55 ° plays with booster (used to hard rubbers on back so shouldn't be a biggie). Going to commit to using this set-up for a few months see how I'm liking it 😲

 

[just_one_more_chop]

I will get a chance to test myself tomorrow at a club match, opponents are probably rated a lot higher than me, but I will aim to use my forehand with more stability just as @NextLevel kindly took some time to coach me last weekend 🏓

The opponents strongest player was injured, so the overall team of them was weaker. We won as a team and I managed to win my one singles match against an opponent with similar rating.
What I enjoyed a lot more than the win, was how stable my FH attacks landed. 🏓

So I got my Butterfly Viscaria Super ALC CPen yesterday and today I got my Butterfly Zyre-03 2.7 and Stiga Helix Platinum 55°, so I'll be able to use it tomorrow at club 🤯

I always thought about using the Stiga Helix Platinum on my Cybershape. I will stay with my current setup for this season, but I would be curious how it plays if u dont mind sharing after testing😁

 

[Tyce]

I focused on getting a stable right leg and using it as a pivot point for the FH loop tonight. It was a lot of conscious work but when I did it the way I thought it should be, it did help. I tried to loop with maybe half effort max, and I still managed to get the feeling of engaging the rubber. Together with working on using the hit box on my BH and a lot of supporting footwork it felt like I could play with very low effort and still get good balls in.
My bat feeling is increasing rapidly, the weekend really did an awesome job there. Feels like I'm making valuable steps

 

[RPB Enthusiast]

The opponents strongest player was injured, so the overall team of them was weaker. We won as a team and I managed to win my one singles match against an opponent with similar rating.
What I enjoyed a lot more than the win, was how stable my FH attacks landed. 🏓

I always thought about using the Stiga Helix Platinum on my Cybershape. I will stay with my current setup for this season, but I would be curious how it plays if u dont mind sharing after testing😁

I will try to do a Day 1 update and also a Week 1 update on how it plays 🙂 I got it because it was $60 USD on PROTT.vip and there's not many reviews I found on YouTube for 55° 😢 Depending on how it plays within the next few months, I'll stick with it, or go back to Tenergy 05 Hard or possibly give Dignics 09c one more shot on backhand, but Zyre-03 and Helix Platinum 55° will be my setup till next May after my team tournament in May.

 

[Tyce]

Focusing on the weight transfer, and using a stable pivot point trying not to buckle/collapse the knees has really brought back that feeling that in the end, equipment matters a lot less than some of us EJs make it out to be. And the main useful thing in Amateur space is being able to control the ball when you're NOT in proper position.

Funny also how there are different philosophies, essentially just based on whatever the player feels comfortable with. Talked a bit with @NextLevel about this, and he feels comfortable being able to put quality and speed on the ball, taking over the attack, powering through the opponent (without necessarily applying all that much physical power). This comes at the cost of pretty much not playing balls short except for some serves, but it works great for his game.

Personally, I have always been about control-first. I have also played those setups that make it feel incredibly easy to attack the ball and I get it. It just feels too scary to let go of the safety net of having a stable, controlled, easy placement option. Takes a leap of faith, really, as well as practicing exactly that, of course.
The local club environment honestly isn't all that rewarding to players that want to learn to attack basically any ball. People will straight up say to not take the risk. But then, when you chug on and start hitting like faster BH openers more reliably, people do get impressed


Where did I want to go with this? I guess mostly saying that the experience of being around completely different players, with different ideas, and re-evaluating some basics has seemed to have opened the door for more (controlled) offensive playing, and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna need to build on that in order to make more progress. Being able to access these things honestly makes me feel that there's more headroom in me than I figured, and it makes me positive about what I can achieve in the current season.

 

[Archosaurus]

And the main useful thing in Amateur space is being able to control the ball when you're NOT in proper position.

From what I can see a lot of elite training is also focused around playing quality in non-perfect conditions, although the conditions occur due to different reasons.

 

[NextLevel]

Focusing on the weight transfer, and using a stable pivot point trying not to buckle/collapse the knees has really brought back that feeling that in the end, equipment matters a lot less than some of us EJs make it out to be. And the main useful thing in Amateur space is being able to control the ball when you're NOT in proper position.

Funny also how there are different philosophies, essentially just based on whatever the player feels comfortable with. Talked a bit with @NextLevel about this, and he feels comfortable being able to put quality and speed on the ball, taking over the attack, powering through the opponent (without necessarily applying all that much physical power). This comes at the cost of pretty much not playing balls short except for some serves, but it works great for his game.

Personally, I have always been about control-first. I have also played those setups that make it feel incredibly easy to attack the ball and I get it. It just feels too scary to let go of the safety net of having a stable, controlled, easy placement option. Takes a leap of faith, really, as well as practicing exactly that, of course.
The local club environment honestly isn't all that rewarding to players that want to learn to attack basically any ball. People will straight up say to not take the risk. But then, when you chug on and start hitting like faster BH openers more reliably, people do get impressed


Where did I want to go with this? I guess mostly saying that the experience of being around completely different players, with different ideas, and re-evaluating some basics has seemed to have opened the door for more (controlled) offensive playing, and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna need to build on that in order to make more progress. Being able to access these things honestly makes me feel that there's more headroom in me than I figured, and it makes me positive about what I can achieve in the current season.

It was a conversation so it always doesn't convey the nuance. I think there is a big difference between what I am saying about equipment and what I am saying about how you should play.

The main thing behind my recommendation is that you shouldn't try to find control primarily in *equipment* as an offensive player. In my humble opinion, you should find it primarily in spin variation and generation. Of course this needs some training, but that is all about learning what your swing does and how to adjust it to create different ball quality. Yes, slower equipment gives you much more margin for putting the ball on the table, but when you play someone who knows what they are doing, it doesn't really protect you as their ability to hit the ball to where you don't like it will put you under pressure so you might need to step back or attack first. And when you do, you are stuck playing with a weapon that can't protect you after stepping back and the quality of your first attacks can be pretty limited in the absence of heavy spin.

The main thing behind my recommendation is not that you shouldn't have a control first philosophy - I think most people should have a control/consistency based approach. in fact, I have spent a long time having a spin as control philosophy relative to my level. It was actually a spin as weapon philosophy which became spin as control/consistency because of the new ball's inability to yield easy points to spinny winning attempts. It's part of the reason why my game is relatively immune to equipment switches as long as they are sufficiently spinny. Also as long as I am willing to do the work, I tend to do relatively well against lower rated players as I can keep the ball on the table. It's the better players I usually have to work harder to figure out what is possible if they put pressure on me with ball quality or consistency, especially because I am not mobile relative to my level.

So my game actually started out largely blocking and pushing. My offense came later. Partly because of bad early coaching, partly because I didn't have a philosophy for adjusting to balls. When I trained, I largely worked with better players so I learned how to return their balls (which put me in trouble when a player without topspin was my opponent lol). The offense came for a variety of reasons, but one of them was simply that it is easier to control the point if you are able to select when to play the first attack.

Keeping the ball truly short is an advanced skill, it is not something an amateur can do with inverted rubbers, it requires a lot of physical control and athleticism. One of the things my game is based around is the misconception from many amateurs that they are keeping the ball short and tight when they are not, most serves are long or drift long if you have the patience to wait, especially if they are topspin serves, and just as importantly, if they are down the line. Keeping the ball short becomes more important when your opponent is putting pressure on you and it is only a realistic weapon on serve or serve receive at my level, beyond that, you need a level of athleticism and practice that usually only exists at the professional level and even they tend to only keep the ball short vs straight backspin more than once, anything else tends to get sent long very quickly. This is not me speaking, this was an insight gained from working with a high level coach that helped me change my approach to table tennis in general. So if you practice playing the first attack against long and half-long serves, you have automatically improved your ability to threaten 50% or more of players out there with ease. Because very few people serve short with quality.

Other than on the forehand side maybe, @just_one_more_chop was using a faster setup than mine. If I coached him, I would not get him to change it, I would get him to drill with it until he got comfortable doing difficult things with it. People often overestimate the impact of what you do with equipment immediately and underestimate the impact of what you can do with equipment if you adapt to it. That is the main point I try to get amateurs to understand. I get that this advice has limitations, but I want people to be exposed to it because the old wisdom of using slow dead material forever still lives in many training circles, especially in the plastic ball era.

 

[Archosaurus]

So if you practice playing the first attack against long and half-long serves, you have automatically improved your ability to threaten 50% or more of players out there with ease. Because very few people serve short with quality.

It goes both ways too; apart from state (2200+?) and beyond players, I haven't found anyone in a club here who can actually deal with a good short backspin serve unless it's a drill and I let them calibrate to it for half an hour.

95% of the time it gets netted from the first push, and I'll make it lighter or mix more side in and the next one will pop up, or if they're more advanced they will go in to flick it and slam it into the net. Even the state players will routinely flick it into the net or give me some bullshit high slow ball that I can attack. Some of them will just barely whiff the ball.

Short topspin that bounces 2nd bounce on the forehand corner? People will just miss the chance to hit it at all because they read it as long, because nobody serves short topspin at my level. Extra points if you've conditioned them to step around in response to the motion you're using to serve it.

Next time I film with my partner I'll see if I can't condition him to do most of these and bully him a bit for the camera.

 

[Haito]

The main thing behind my recommendation is not that you shouldn't have a control first philosophy - I think most people should have a control/consistency based approach. in fact, I have spent a long time having a spin as control philosophy relative to my level. It was actually a spin as weapon philosophy which became spin as control/consistency because of the new ball's inability to yield easy points to spinny winning attempts. It's part of the reason why my game is relatively immune to equipment switches as long as they are sufficiently spinny. Also as long as I am willing to do the work, I tend to do relatively well against lower rated players as I can keep the ball on the table. It's the better players I usually have to work harder to figure out what is possible if they put pressure on me with ball quality or consistency, especially because I am not mobile relative to my level.

----

Keeping the ball truly short is an advanced skill, it is not something an amateur can do with inverted rubbers, it requires a lot of physical control and athleticism. One of the things my game is based around is the misconception from many amateurs that they are keeping the ball short and tight when they are not, most serves are long or drift long if you have the patience to wait, especially if they are topspin serves, and just as importantly, if they are down the line. Keeping the ball short becomes more important when your opponent is putting pressure on you and it is only a realistic weapon on serve or serve receive at my level, beyond that, you need a level of athleticism and practice that usually only exists at the professional level and even they tend to only keep the ball short vs straight backspin more than once, anything else tends to get sent long very quickly. This is not me speaking, this was an insight gained from working with a high level coach that helped me change my approach to table tennis in general. So if you practice playing the first attack against long and half-long serves, you have automatically improved your ability to threaten 50% or more of players out there with ease. Because very few people serve short with quality.

I whole heartedly agree. Pushing with spin and keeping the ball short. Handling long serves. Serving over the edges of the table AND fast spinny serves. All of the above all the biggest point generators in amateur TT. Most of the short serves of amateurs I can either drop or smash. Most of the amateurs in my local leagues play stupid fast long serves. Most choppers you can out-push, they do not handle distance variation.

Other than on the forehand side maybe, @just_one_more_chop was using a faster setup than mine. If I coached him, I would not get him to change it, I would get him to drill with it until he got comfortable doing difficult things with it. People often overestimate the impact of what you do with equipment immediately and underestimate the impact of what you can do with equipment if you adapt to it. That is the main point I try to get amateurs to understand. I get that this advice has limitations, but I want people to be exposed to it because the old wisdom of using slow dead material forever still lives in many training circles, especially in the plastic ball era.

My observation is that a lot of people struggle to control depth of the ball in the rubber which greatly influences the first attack. When I played against @50hz, it was rather easy to lift spin, and counter, BECAUSE he produced a metric button of pace. All I had to do is brush lightly. He did win, but all the strokes against him were much easier than other guys, because I did not have to worry about making the ball go into the sponge and gripping. When you play against amateurs, very often you have to modify your strokes to penetrate the ball more to generate the pace. This obviously also works the other way. If you can kill the pace and leave only the spin, the ball is super hard to control on the other side. @NextLevel did this a lot with his BH. Took me long to adjust, nobody else in my circle does this kind of loop.

 

[50hz]

I think what you describes @Haito is, that it is much easier to deal with strokes which are heavy some kind of quality. Quality is always depending on the own skill level. For myself it is also more comfortable to play against same or higher level players. Of course, at one point there is a break even point, where the skill of the opponent is just overwhelming.

 

[Archosaurus]

I wonder how much of this discussion has to do with playstyle. I've always played in a very serve and forehand setup oriented way, imposing my playstyle on the opponent, and it works all the same vs a hobbyist and an expert. Of course vs the expert I have more ways to lose, while the hobbyist will need luck on his side so I whiff enough of my shots.

I will say it's easier to put quality on the ball if it comes back with some quality as opposed to being completely floaty, but the better player who can give you a quality return can probably also deal with your 3rd or 4th ball much easier than the worse player. The plastic ball has really forced me to stop playing in a 3rd ball mindset and think more about the 5th ball and try to win the point off that.

 

[Tyce]

I still crumble against people who give me dead balls. Even playing against classic rubbers I need to adjust, otherwise all of my blocks are going into the net because there's just no topspin on it.
But yeah, I could probably make my Fzd alc work once I have spent some more time getting that solid anchoring and pivoting down. It's really a gateway to easier, more fluent technique.
The Mrs will be away for most of the next two weeks, perhaps it's time to dust off the robot

 

[Archosaurus]

I still crumble against people who give me dead balls. Even playing against classic rubbers I need to adjust, otherwise all of my blocks are going into the net because there's just no topspin on it.
But yeah, I could probably make my Fzd alc work once I have spent some more time getting that solid anchoring and pivoting down. It's really a gateway to easier, more fluent technique.
The Mrs will be away for most of the next two weeks, perhaps it's time to dust off the robot

What are you doing blocking dead balls? *point*

 

[Tyce]

What are you doing blocking dead balls? *point*

Mainly because my instinctive reaction to someone making a loopy looking stroke is to block

 

[Archosaurus]

Mainly because my instinctive reaction to someone making a loopy looking stroke is to block

That's one of my weaknesses too, so I get it. You need to really pay attention to the impact sound and look at the arc. It's also just plain easier to see if there's arc or not if you're lower, closer to eye height with the arc. Obviously also the bounce off the table, but you're not gonna see that if you're blocking it off the bounce.

Against heavy hitters who hit really flat, I just take a step or two back and decide I'm not gonna block any of them and just spin them up a bit later, but with more power. Worked p. well against a 1500-1600~ old guy just the other day.

 

[kindof99]

Focusing on the weight transfer, and using a stable pivot point trying not to buckle/collapse the knees has really brought back that feeling that in the end, equipment matters a lot less than some of us EJs make it out to be. And the main useful thing in Amateur space is being able to control the ball when you're NOT in proper position.

Funny also how there are different philosophies, essentially just based on whatever the player feels comfortable with. Talked a bit with @NextLevel about this, and he feels comfortable being able to put quality and speed on the ball, taking over the attack, powering through the opponent (without necessarily applying all that much physical power). This comes at the cost of pretty much not playing balls short except for some serves, but it works great for his game.

Personally, I have always been about control-first. I have also played those setups that make it feel incredibly easy to attack the ball and I get it. It just feels too scary to let go of the safety net of having a stable, controlled, easy placement option. Takes a leap of faith, really, as well as practicing exactly that, of course.
The local club environment honestly isn't all that rewarding to players that want to learn to attack basically any ball. People will straight up say to not take the risk. But then, when you chug on and start hitting like faster BH openers more reliably, people do get impressed


Where did I want to go with this? I guess mostly saying that the experience of being around completely different players, with different ideas, and re-evaluating some basics has seemed to have opened the door for more (controlled) offensive playing, and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna need to build on that in order to make more progress. Being able to access these things honestly makes me feel that there's more headroom in me than I figured, and it makes me positive about what I can achieve in the current season.

Different playing styles suit different personalities. But even choppers attack a lot these days. And I also see a lot of amateurs attack cluelessly. So there is a balance and it is a learning process to become a better/winning player.

 

[Tyce]

Different playing styles suit different personalities. But even choppers attack a lot these days. And I also see a lot of amateurs attack cluelessly. So there is a balance and it is a learning process to become a better/winning player.

Whatever you end up with, being able to attack reliably is a skill any player needs. I have been developing, but the confidence isn't quite there yet. I think the point I consider to be the completion of this step is not having to doubt attacking an attackable ball 90%of the time

 

[Haito]

I think what you describes @Haito is, that it is much easier to deal with strokes which are heavy some kind of quality. Quality is always depending on the own skill level. For myself it is also more comfortable to play against same or higher level players. Of course, at one point there is a break even point, where the skill of the opponent is just overwhelming.

I completely agree with you! I just wanted to explain how.

I find this video quite informative, and I agree with what it states. The rubber sponge acts as a sponge and dampener in a car. If somebody gives you a drunken dead ball, it does not go into the sponge and the rubber does not produce rebound. In order for rubber to give you speed you have to make sure it goes into the sponge itself. If you have a hard rubber its very easy to just dump the ball in the net.

If I play against players who do not produce much speed, I need to get the ball through the sponge to generate speed and spin. If I play against somebody good, I can ignore this factor and focus on brushing. i.e. When I am playing against a dead ball I do brush through the ball.

When I am countering I change the angle of the brush / stroke, because I know the ball will go deep.

I still crumble against people who give me dead balls. Even playing against classic rubbers I need to adjust, otherwise all of my blocks are going into the net because there's just no topspin on it.
But yeah, I could probably make my Fzd alc work once I have spent some more time getting that solid anchoring and pivoting down. It's really a gateway to easier, more fluent technique.
The Mrs will be away for most of the next two weeks, perhaps it's time to dust off the robot

Are those balls slow, no spin, or both?

 

[kindof99]

Whatever you end up with, being able to attack reliably is a skill any player needs. I have been developing, but the confidence isn't quite there yet. I think the point I consider to be the completion of this step is not having to doubt attacking an attackable ball 90%of the time

To attack more confidently, you need to attack more consistently. And the key is to have a consistent loop/pace. So it is not just the mentality, but the technique is more important.

 

[Archosaurus]

To attack more confidently, you need to attack more consistently. And the key is to have a consistent loop/pace. So it is not just the mentality, but the technique is more important.

I agree with this but with a caveat from my own re-learning lately:

Attacking in a drill with a mellow intensity is not enough after a point. You need to get accustomed to using the power and footwork you will actually intend to use. It's probably good to start slow and smooth, but if that's not how you're attacking in the games, it might feel like you're making no progress, because you're not training the same thing.