How to play against Hyper-Aggressive player?

[zeio]

Get some videos recorded. Timmy's game will be cracked in no time.

 

[Zwill]

How to play against Hyper-Aggressive player?​

Troll them. You can just "complain to yourself out loud" how the opponent's hits lack speed and power, it's like playing against 6-year-old kids. It might stroke his ego the wrong way and he will try to hit harder and miss. You'd be surprised how many times these kinds of mind tricks work.

 

[Musaab]

Today I played against a 2050-2100 USATT hyper-aggressive two-winged looper, lets call him Timmy. I was actually up 2-2, with match points at 10-8. He missed a loop, and that should've been match but he called a let saying something distracted him. So we replayed, and I ended up losing 13-11 or something.

I guess I can't be too disappointed in the score itself, as I was right there to win. But the thing is, the actual game style was heavily against me. Timmy is hyper-aggressive. He loops every 3rd ball, and he loops all of my long serves. I'm forced to serve short underspin to him literally every time. No variety at all. So I'm quite defensive on my own serve. I would say 90% of my points are won by either just blocking until he misses, or doing a good enough push that he misses the opening loop. However, every rally I am on the defensive. I think in 5 games, I only did 4 or 5 opening loops. All the rest was Timmy opening up on me. How can I change the tide more into my favor?

One more big factor, is he does this heavy hook serve. Similar to a reverse pendulum, but the motion is not so much with the wrist, more with the forearm. I can never read this serve. I don't know if its topspin or underspin. How do I read and return this serve.

You said it yourself, once you start to plat at higher level, you should serve mainly short, you only serve long for variation purposes, you always need to make a good push, so he either misses his loop or give a loop that you can counter. I would say you are on the right track if you are able to transform whatever you think/write into actual solutions to work on. To resume, you need to start serving short underspin body, you need to work on heavy pushes and you need to work on counter-top spin

 

[Nima Abadi]

Today I played against a 2050-2100 USATT hyper-aggressive two-winged looper, lets call him Timmy. I was actually up 2-2, with match points at 10-8. He missed a loop, and that should've been match but he called a let saying something distracted him. So we replayed, and I ended up losing 13-11 or something.

I guess I can't be too disappointed in the score itself, as I was right there to win. But the thing is, the actual game style was heavily against me. Timmy is hyper-aggressive. He loops every 3rd ball, and he loops all of my long serves. I'm forced to serve short underspin to him literally every time. No variety at all. So I'm quite defensive on my own serve. I would say 90% of my points are won by either just blocking until he misses, or doing a good enough push that he misses the opening loop. However, every rally I am on the defensive. I think in 5 games, I only did 4 or 5 opening loops. All the rest was Timmy opening up on me. How can I change the tide more into my favor?

One more big factor, is he does this heavy hook serve. Similar to a reverse pendulum, but the motion is not so much with the wrist, more with the forearm. I can never read this serve. I don't know if its topspin or underspin. How do I read and return this serve.

My serve receive is the weakest part of my game so here's what I do early on when I struggle against an opponent's serve when I can't read the spin.

If it's a mid/long serve then I pretend it's topspin and try to loop it as hard as I can with relatively closed angle. Usually (but not always) what this does is that the opponent avoids serving topspin/dead ball often and they tend to add a bit more backspin to make sure I can't loop their serves which in return makes it easier for me to read.

If it's short, then I push hard right off the bounce. If it's a dead ball or with little topspin then my heavy push will cause the ball to have heavy backspin which makes it harder to loop. If it has a decent amount of topspin then it's going to bounce up high but will still have heavy backspin and there's a good chance that the opponent might dump it into the net.

Does this work all the time, absolutely not but at least it puts pressure on the server.

 

[blahness]

My serve receive is the weakest part of my game so here's what I do early on when I struggle against an opponent's serve when I can't read the spin.

If it's a mid/long serve then I pretend it's topspin and try to loop it as hard as I can with relatively closed angle. Usually (but not always) what this does is that the opponent avoids serving topspin/dead ball often and they tend to add a bit more backspin to make sure I can't loop their serves which in return makes it easier for me to read.

If it's short, then I push hard right off the bounce. If it's a dead ball or with little topspin then my heavy push will cause the ball to have heavy backspin which makes it harder to loop. If it has a decent amount of topspin then it's going to bounce up high but will still have heavy backspin and there's a good chance that the opponent might dump it into the net.

Does this work all the time, absolutely not but at least it puts pressure on the server.

With this, you'll be screwed if your opponent serves long backspin and short topspin serves all day long....

 

[Nima Abadi]

With this, you'll be screwed if your opponent serves long backspin and short topspin serves all day long....

If your opponent serves one type of spin "all day long" then you don't have a problem anymore, it's the variation of the spin that causes problems.

If you constantly serve long for example with backspin disguised as top, I might get it wrong once or twice but if you don't vary the spin then I know that your long hook serve is always with backspin, problem solved.

Remember, you already are screwed when you can't read the spin but that's the whole point of this tactic. To commit and pressure your opponent early on to limit his variation and to make him exaggerate the effect to hopefully make it easier for you to read the spin and adapt.