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I wanna play with the big boys!
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Hard disagree with LPs not superior to inverted in serve return. This is precisely the main reason why they are used, and the main advantage they give. Especially in short serves, LPs have a hard advantage there. With long serves I think it's equal because inverted players can develop very powerful loops against long serves which LPs just don't have the same threat level. LPs are much less spin sensitive for sure. Inverted players have to read the spin and placement very carefully to guarantee success rates. I would love having a 3rd side of the bat to use just to confuse the shit out of my opponents on the serve receive lol, and then just use double inverted after that.
Chopblocking with LP is also much easier compared to inverted.
Dont think LP players are as smart as inverted players when they didnt have to invest the sheer amount of time in spin reading. They just play a shit ton which allows them to accumulate "touch" which has nothing to do with actual technique.
This is why most ppl hate LP players and honestly ITTF didn't go far enough to nerf them (more aspect ratio + friction limits, including antispin too). It is in the same spirit as banning hidden serves and going to the plastic ball - a fairer and more enjoyable game for all.
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Not at the initial stages (long pips won't work on a beginner), but at the stage when you start finding the spin on the ball that inverted produces to be an expectation and your spin to be significant. This usually begins at somewhere around the level Gozo is, which is why learning to play against pips earlier will reward you as you get better. The people who run into the most trouble are people who didnt get exposed early and are forced to adapt against equal level players later. But the ones that are athletes still do it, often by starting out against choppers and then working with flat hitters or push blockers.
While we can obviously ban pips (or ban inverted for that matter), I am okay with reminding people that it is always your responsibility to read the spin on the ball and to keep the ball on the table.
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Maybe you have this perspective because of who you play with but that is not my perspective at all. LPs cant produce much variation on serve return and if you lock into the ball, you can attack it almost every time. Of course the inordinate amount of practice against inverted makes this feel different but it isnt. Again, many of the issues that Gozo is facing would be exactly the same if he used someone with very basic slow and lightly tacky inverted. Or even sometimes thin sponge. It is interesting how people can talk about all the benefits of using extremely boosted and fast equipment designed to enable the power rloopong game and then complaing repeatedly about equipment that enables a certain blocking game because it doesnt require the person to run around and do all the thing they do their head to use inverted.
Then again, I played Rich DeWitt so I know the fiction.
Thats not what I said. You can't just slap on LP and expect easy returns etc without skill. Without skill you will get a pretty obvious return that's actually attackable.
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Obviously it takes some skill, but nowhere near the skill that inverted players have to acquire. I've used LPs before and yes it has a huge advantage there.
At least with LPs you land the return on the table and won't miss it. With inverted it is way harder because you actually have to read the spin precisely. I have very tricky spinny serves and I frequently just flat out serve lower level inverted players off the table, but it is way more difficult to do that against LP users. My LP practice partner almost always relies on his LPs to receive my serves.
When LP players reach higher levels they obviously get access to the more advanced strokes which allows them a lot more spin variation on the receive (and even attack them), similar to inverted.
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You seem to think most skill is athletic. Do you really believe a long pips push is more devastating than a banana flick or a short push?
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Yes due to the stability of the receive. You have to adjust a lot more vs incoming spin with the chiquita / short push, whereas the LP pusher can read the spin wrong and still land the shot brainlessly. Landing %s is a huge thing in table tennis.
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So the supposed stability of the receive makes it more devastating? It's almost like you believe your arguments to the point you really believe a long pips return puts more pressure on a server than a Chiquita.
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Yes, you have to take landing %s into account in terms of threat level. If I land a super fast and spinny chiquita 100% of the time, sure the chiquita is way more devastating than your LP push, but if the landing rate drops to 50% nobody cares how fast it is, it is still a bad receive.
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Yes, but you also have to balance that with how likely the return is to win the point when it lands. Since you went there, finish the analysis. Anyone who lives in a world where Lp returns serves 100% of the time is playing at a really low level.
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You also have to take into account the difficulty of the chiquita compared to a LP push. You actually have to use the body, fingers, arm properly for the chiquita and there are actually different ways of brushing the ball depending on whether you're facing pendulum or reverse pendulum or straight heavy underspin/no spin, whereas it's not a requirement for the LP push because the rubber is really insensitive to spin variations.
This is what i was referring to as actual technique, not just touch. How many % of amateur inverted players have developed a good chiquita vs % of amateur LP players who have very usable LP pushes regardless of whatever weird technique they use.
For sure when the serves are read correctly the chiquita is way more dangerous as a receive and has much higher point winning percentages which places a lot of stress for the server. So the upper limit is higher which I agree with you.
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The difficulty of the chiquita is built into the level, risk and reward. The most effective short serve returners are not pips players, maybe in your world they are, but in reality, none of the pips players are considered threatening because of their pips.
You can put the ball on the table more easily agsinst some serves with pips. But are these really threatening returns? You have danced around the answer forever to arrive at your answer. Doing anything with pips that is really threatening requires the same amount of insane practice as inverted does and with a lower ceiling. And at the beginning intermediate levels, it is really the inability to read the ball that causes the problems. It is often driven by lack of practice but it is also driven by a refusal to believe the physics until they are forced to accept that what the ball does is a function of the surface, the stroke and the incoming ball.
But rather than accept this, we are stuck trying to make long pips far more threatening than they really are.
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Yes, the most effective serve return players are inverted players simply because the skill ceiling is way higher. I wouldn't ever switch to LP for eg personally because the chiquita is such a strong weapon that I spent so much time on developing, giving it up would be stupid. Even spin variation in pushing can be achieved at a higher level with inverted than LPs.
But your logic is the same stuff that game developers do claiming that "the game is balanced at the highest levels" and pay no attention to strategies that are imbalanced at certain levels which make it unfun. For eg at Gozo's level where I would say a vast majority of the active player base is at. At that level, yes LPs are far more threatening than inverted.
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No, my logic isn't, and no your conclusion gives too much credit to players who are adapting to players they play repeatedly and not going out of their way to compete and challenge themselves. I have seen many 1200 players beat pips players of equivalent level. If the return was as devastating as you make out, this would not be the case. The real issue has nothing to do with devastating returns but more to do with actual practice dealing with and adjusting to spin judgments that are not intuitive to you if all you do is read the stroke and fail to consider other factors. It really is that simple, please kill this devastating return stuff. You are beginning to sound like one of my old club mates who used to claim that his long pips chop block was impossible to reloop consistently. Sure, if you refused to open your paddle...
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Yes the problem is that they create a lot of problems to solve for the opposing player while not needing to "adapt" themselves. You see how you're giving the burden of spin judgment always to the inverted players and not the LP players themselves. So in a sense you're actually supporting my reasoning lol.
Not sure how the 2nd point is related but obviously there are other problems which matter a lot for eg length and placement of the chopblock. If the guy can double bounce the chopblock with a huge amount of spin reversal + good height, it cannot be relooped. Even pros like Fang Bo can't do it all the time, see below:
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I didnt give the burden of judgment to the LP players because like lefties, the lp players are the minority so they don't have to adjust to the majority the same way the majority has to adjust to the minority. How does that support your argument again? And since their effectiveness is entirely reliant on the minority status, why is this evidence of devastation?
It is hard to loop any short ball that will double bounce, the point is that such a boast pretends it is the stroke causing the devastation and not the cooperation with the incoming ball to form a dance and that looping is not about adjusting to the ball. The inability to loop a short ball is table tennis, does a low short push have to be heavy to avoid relooping? And if the ball comes long, it can be relooped, whether it should be be done with Fang Bo"s macho approach is a separate issue entirely.
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I briefly looked this OP's posts.
I don't see a single video of him playing.
Please post a video.
If you don't, we can only guess and give generic advice.
It's much better to get advice that specific to you, but we cannot do that without information about how you play.
Maybe we can find a big weakness that if you fix, will launch you into 1500 right away.
There's only 2 specific advice I can give you is from the data I gathered from reading your past posts:
Nearly every single post that you write is about equipment. Stop it.
You have 0 posts that have a video of you playing. Post 1, or a lot of videos. More is better.
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Spin and more spin.
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As far as the digression on LP, it is interesting to me that so much time has been spent on that subject; also interesting that something that limits a player's ability to make offensive shots would be presented as a devastating weapon, and the idea that the LP player does not need to know how to read spin to return the ball and get it on the table. I have seen players who know how to play vs LP make the LP player put the ball into the net, pop the ball up, and also force the LP player to give an easy ball to crush and end the point.
If a player can't handle short game....this is not an issue with pips, it points out a weakness in the person's game skills....short game is often overlooked by lower level players but it is of great importance to your overall level. If you can't handle short game, it would be hard to get higher than a certain level of play that is, actually, a fairly low standard.
There are many ways to respond in short game. Someone who is stuck with only one option is also demonstrating limitations in skills. If you can't read the spin on a short ball, regardless of what kind of playing surface the ball came off (LP, SP, Anti or Smooth) then, that also shows an area that the player needs to work on. As has been pointed out, someone using smooth rubber can also serve up weird balls....things that look like a push but are dead or have topspin are totally possible from smooth rubbers. (I use dead and topspin "pushes" often when playing people who don't read the ball well in short game).
What we are talking about are fundamental skills of the game. There is nothing wrong with not being great at the short game. But to know that is a weakness in your skill set and to do nothing about it and blame the equipment of others seems a bit unfortunate to me.
Probably, the people complaining about the "fairness" of LP should do as much practice against LP as possible; perhaps even practice with as well to better understand ways in which LP can be used to kill spin, to increase spin, or to just give back what was already on the ball (which often gets called spin reversal but is really spin-continuance: if topspin is coming at your opponent and the ball gets sent back to you without any altering of the spin, when the topspin ball is going the other way, it is backspin: the spin is the same; the direction of the flight of the ball is what has been reversed but the spin....it has not been altered).
When you get used to what can come back and learn how to read the spin from the trajectory and bounce of the ball (instead of being fooled by what the racket does) LP stops being the issue some are making it out to be. That being said, as you get better, and you play higher level LP players, they will give you problems to solve that are more challenging than lower level LP players. To me, this seems obvious. They are higher level for a reason. And part of being higher level is being used to higher quality shots with higher levels of spin on them.
It might be true that, some 1300 level players, if they just put LP on one side, will end up being able to play better vs some 1500 level players; but they also may play worse against some 1100 level players if all they have done is put LP on their racket and not done anything or learned anything. But to believe that just by putting LP on and not doing anything or learning anything, you will automatically be a better player (or be able to beat higher level players) seems to ignore that the LP players who are actually also good, high level players, have done something to learn how to use that equipment. And not everyone would be able to, or even want to play the way you would need to play if you were using LP.
So, I would say, if you are playing smooth, and you are complaining that LP are not fair, but you are not playing with them, then you should consider why you have made the choice of not switching to LP. And if it is because you don't want to play the way you would have to with LP, then, you should just learn how to play against LP and stop blaming equipment for weaknesses in your game that the equipment choice of LP would allow an opponent to exploit. Emphasis: a weakness in your game that LP would allow an opponent to exploit. A productive response might be to thank the LP players for pointing you towards aspects of your game that need to be improved.
As far as the burden of learning being put on any one kind of player: for anyone to actually improve their level of play, learning the skills of reading spin, being able to see the spin from how the ball bounces, how it curves in the air, how it arcs or does not arc, or how much spin you can see is on the ball, those are skills that are needed by ANY player who wants to increase his level of play because, when you play higher level players, whether LP, SP, MP, Smooth, Loopers, choppers, blockers, chop blockers.....when you are playing at higher levels, you WILL BE exposed to higher levels of spin. You can't get to those levels if you can't read and respond to that spin. If you generate more spin, more spin will likely come back.
Table Tennis skills are so much about learning to generate spin, to read spin, to learn how to counter and otherwise handle incoming spin. To ignore this, is to ignore what makes this sport what it is and if LP forces certain players to assess their weaknesses and improve certain skills that would make their overall skill set improve, then LP should be seen for what they are and welcomed.
If a player can't handle short game....this is not an issue with pips, it points out a weakness in the person's game skills....short game is often overlooked by lower level players but it is of great importance to your overall level. If you can't handle short game, it would be hard to get higher than a certain level of play that is, actually, a fairly low standard.
There are many ways to respond in short game. Someone who is stuck with only one option is also demonstrating limitations in skills. If you can't read the spin on a short ball, regardless of what kind of playing surface the ball came off (LP, SP, Anti or Smooth) then, that also shows an area that the player needs to work on. As has been pointed out, someone using smooth rubber can also serve up weird balls....things that look like a push but are dead or have topspin are totally possible from smooth rubbers. (I use dead and topspin "pushes" often when playing people who don't read the ball well in short game).
What we are talking about are fundamental skills of the game. There is nothing wrong with not being great at the short game. But to know that is a weakness in your skill set and to do nothing about it and blame the equipment of others seems a bit unfortunate to me.
Probably, the people complaining about the "fairness" of LP should do as much practice against LP as possible; perhaps even practice with as well to better understand ways in which LP can be used to kill spin, to increase spin, or to just give back what was already on the ball (which often gets called spin reversal but is really spin-continuance: if topspin is coming at your opponent and the ball gets sent back to you without any altering of the spin, when the topspin ball is going the other way, it is backspin: the spin is the same; the direction of the flight of the ball is what has been reversed but the spin....it has not been altered).
When you get used to what can come back and learn how to read the spin from the trajectory and bounce of the ball (instead of being fooled by what the racket does) LP stops being the issue some are making it out to be. That being said, as you get better, and you play higher level LP players, they will give you problems to solve that are more challenging than lower level LP players. To me, this seems obvious. They are higher level for a reason. And part of being higher level is being used to higher quality shots with higher levels of spin on them.
It might be true that, some 1300 level players, if they just put LP on one side, will end up being able to play better vs some 1500 level players; but they also may play worse against some 1100 level players if all they have done is put LP on their racket and not done anything or learned anything. But to believe that just by putting LP on and not doing anything or learning anything, you will automatically be a better player (or be able to beat higher level players) seems to ignore that the LP players who are actually also good, high level players, have done something to learn how to use that equipment. And not everyone would be able to, or even want to play the way you would need to play if you were using LP.
So, I would say, if you are playing smooth, and you are complaining that LP are not fair, but you are not playing with them, then you should consider why you have made the choice of not switching to LP. And if it is because you don't want to play the way you would have to with LP, then, you should just learn how to play against LP and stop blaming equipment for weaknesses in your game that the equipment choice of LP would allow an opponent to exploit. Emphasis: a weakness in your game that LP would allow an opponent to exploit. A productive response might be to thank the LP players for pointing you towards aspects of your game that need to be improved.
As far as the burden of learning being put on any one kind of player: for anyone to actually improve their level of play, learning the skills of reading spin, being able to see the spin from how the ball bounces, how it curves in the air, how it arcs or does not arc, or how much spin you can see is on the ball, those are skills that are needed by ANY player who wants to increase his level of play because, when you play higher level players, whether LP, SP, MP, Smooth, Loopers, choppers, blockers, chop blockers.....when you are playing at higher levels, you WILL BE exposed to higher levels of spin. You can't get to those levels if you can't read and respond to that spin. If you generate more spin, more spin will likely come back.
Table Tennis skills are so much about learning to generate spin, to read spin, to learn how to counter and otherwise handle incoming spin. To ignore this, is to ignore what makes this sport what it is and if LP forces certain players to assess their weaknesses and improve certain skills that would make their overall skill set improve, then LP should be seen for what they are and welcomed.
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To me, it would be interesting to hear, from an experienced and decently high level LP player how different kinds of contact using LP would create different effects, different kinds of spin. And to hear what kinds of things you need to learn and get good at to be effective using LP.
People who play with smooth and want to play an aggressive offensive style while looping from both wings know what they have done to improve and develop their games. I have a feeling that hearing about the development of skills to become a higher level LP player, from a decent level LP player would be quite educational for members of the forum.
People who play with smooth and want to play an aggressive offensive style while looping from both wings know what they have done to improve and develop their games. I have a feeling that hearing about the development of skills to become a higher level LP player, from a decent level LP player would be quite educational for members of the forum.
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