So, I know a bunch of people who play out this outdoor location. When you play outdoors your rubbers wear out faster because of the sunlight and the changing temperatures. Now, all of these guys have bad equipment. Even the ones who have "good" equipment, after a few weeks of playing outside, it is bad. But they play pretty well with it. All of them have rubbers that are totally dead and more than just totally dead.
Part of why these guys play well with the dead rubbers they have is because they might not know it, but their rubbers have turned into ANTI-SPIN rubbers. And, without knowing exactly what they are doing, they have learned to play an interesting Anti-Spin game.
It is really funny to play one of the guys who has two year old Tenergy that has been used outdoors for...well....two years, and now functions entirely as ANTI-SPIN.
The advantages are exactly the same as anti-spin. Easy to return serves, easy to push anything. You don't really have to read the spin. If someone gives you backspin it is easy to attack and you don't need good technique. If someone pushes to you and pushes back, it is quite likely that the opponent will misread the spin, (you will be pushing back mild topspin with a stroke that would have normally produced backspin).
There is a reason why anti-spin is easy to use. But there is a real downside to using rubber that is so dead it is functioning like anti-spin. You will not develop good technique even if you can develop "effective" game skills. For some people this will actually get them to a higher game skill level. But if your goal is to learn good technique in looping, then you want to:
1) learn how to REALLY loop as soon as you can. What do I mean by "REALLY loop"? I mean to really get a ton of SPIN.
2) You need to learn to really loop backspin, heavy backspin.
The sooner you learn those skills well, the sooner you will have no question about when your rubber is done and you need to get new rubber.
If your goal is to learn good technique and get better at the art that allows you to hit a sidespin loop that curves 4 feet towards your opponent's forehand and drops hard onto the table and accelerates a crazy amount off the bounce, then you want to use fresh rubbers and learn to loop, counterloop and loop backspin well as soon as possible.
This is the key to getting your technique and your level higher and this is thing thing that is hardest for some people--especially people trying to learn to play as adults--to learn.
So, if you want to learn bad technique and sneaky game skills and become an anti-spin player--and there is nothing wrong with that--then just get anti-spin and bypass the period of having to wait for the rubber to be dead beyond dead. But if you want to learn higher level technique, then you don't want to use your rubbers till the point where they are dead.
A simple test, if you take a ball and gently press it against the topsheet, just a little, not enough to push into the sponge, if the topsheet grabs the ball, then it is good. If the ball slides on the topsheet and the topsheet doesn't grab till you push fully into the sponge, then the rubber is dead. When I get a chance I look for a video that has another way of testing the grip of the rubber.
By the way, I have a feeling that the scenario I described with guys using rubbers so long that the topsheet has as much grip as ice, is probably how they got the idea for anti-spin.
Sent from Deep Space by Abacus