high throw is the enemy

[UpSideDownCarl]

When you are thinking about a specific rubber whether low or high throw, and testing whether it would be good for your game, one of the questions you may need to ask is, do I have to adjust my technique in a way that makes the technique suboptimal.

For instance, one of the reasons a high throw rubber like T05 is so good for so many high level players is it allows them to make a stroke with much more forward and less up trajectory. This gives more efficiency to the power of the topspin stroke: more power from less effort.

With T25 the sacrifice of control close to the table is that your stroke needs to go too much down-to-up by the time you are at mid-distance for it to be effective at the ideal distance for power looping.

Overall, will the change in equipment help you do what you do better, or not? There will always be a tradeoff. A rubber that does one thing better will do something else worse.

And the OP had an idea of this when he first posted and thought, how can I mess with these guys heads. [emoji2]

So if you play like UpSideDownCarl, you may just be better off playing with the old hardbat Marty Reisman gave you that has been hanging on your wall. And if you play like Sebas, a fakey JM SZLC for you to sit in a chair 10 feet back from the table and loop only with the wrist while drinking some Quilmes may just be optimal.


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[Baal]

Does anybody actually use T25?

 

[James Livesey]

The amount of throw is far less important than the amount of grip and how reactive the sponge is. Most beginners at my club use 5£ palio rubbers. They're medium soft hardness and don't have much grip. Thus they are low throw, but more importantly, they are less reactive to spin. You can return spinny serves much more easily, block loops and keep the ball short due to the suboptimal sponge. Even though you can't get huge amounts of spin, due to the crap sponge you can drive and loop quite hard and still safely land decent shots. All of this is great for a beginner, but I think this is a bad move for anything over a couple months. You start to develop bad habits, and cannot impart large amounts of spin yourself. If you're practicing serves, you'll have to relearn everything once you upgrade the rubbers. Only once you've developed your strokes a bit should you experiment with varying throws.

 

[Baal]

If you change rubbers and/or blades a lot you will constantly be worrying about things like "throw angle". Pick something reasonable and stick with it and it becomes much more instinctive. There are so many good rubbers and blades these days that it is not hard to find something reasonable.

More importantly, if you never practice intently on drills where you have to move to get to the ball, you will more frequently make mistakes that you attribute to your equipment being too much "this" or too much "that".

The OP does not care about any of this though, the whole point of this thread was an excuse to troll people. Really bizarre.

 

[yoass]

Does anybody actually use T25?

Never seen anybody use it, even though I've been looking out for it; when I still played T05 I wondered if it would be T05's cousin slanted a bit more towards blocking and direct hits. Still, never seen it; still a bit curious.

It's too meagerly available (few stores only) and too expensive to make it an impulse buy, just to get a feel of it.

 

[UpSideDownCarl]

Never seen anybody use it, even though I've been looking out for it; when I still played T05 I wondered if it would be T05's cousin slanted a bit more towards blocking and direct hits. Still, never seen it; still a bit curious.

It's too meagerly available (few stores only) and too expensive to make it an impulse buy, just to get a feel of it.

Trust in this. There is a reason why so few people, aside from PNut use it.


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[fais]

given that low throw makes it easier to
-serve
-push
-chop
-block
-hit flat

and that high throw makes it easier to
-loop

shall we conclude that low throw is best for amateur players?

Not only is your conclusion false but so is your premise.

 

[talbon]

when I still played T05 I wondered if it would be T05's cousin slanted a bit more towards blocking and direct hits. Still, never seen it; still a bit curious.

Yes, kind of. It feels more comfy to block, punch, drive and push but logically not as spinny as T05 for brush loops. The tensor characteristics are less striking than with other tenergy rubbers (more linear / easier to handle). Very good rubber, just like the rest of tenergy rubbers. Not sure why it is not used by more people, maybe chance or a marketing error.