Is my strength also my biggest weakness?

[blahness]

main thing is serve/receive like what you identified, especially with your deep BH. He has more advanced serves than the last opponent (i can see hook + pendulum already and he varies his serve positioning quite a bit).

This guy has a relatively good BH and a terrible FH (look at the amount of mistakes) - tbh you had the right idea of trying to exploiting that but he was already tying you up in the deep BH by simply serving or pushing long to your BH and you couldn't get out of it. This is a strategy I like to use too - simply serve fast long to BH to force the mistake out - if he doesn't make the opening loop mistake i'm gonna defend it easily and go into an open rally. If the guy stands a bit farther away just serve short (especially useful with sidetopspin) - he won't be able to produce any high quality shot with it and I get an easily attackable 3rd ball.

I think your issue is that your opening loop against long serves and pushes takes up too much energy and positioning (mostly because of suboptimal ways of contacting the ball) - it needs to be a lot physically easier for you so that you don't make a lot of mistakes just trying to get the ball over (not even trying to powerloop the ball). This is also related to how you brush the ball - it is pretty much a thin brush (because you're afraid of making mistakes) at the moment which is really easy to mistime and miss the ball completely ironically. I think the easier way is to hit the ball on different parts of the ball depending on incoming spin and then add the brush later - this makes it more of a thick brush. For e.g. against long fast hook strong sideunderspin, simply hitting the ball upwards at around 7 o'clock position will give you reasonably good results most of the time.

With this philosophy you can hit against any kind of spin on the BH with relative ease. One way to train this easily is just to ask the other player to serve fast long to your BH and then you try to hit the ball (not thin brush loop it) and land it. Start with just single serve types, then upgrade to the harder variants where your practice partner is allowed to serve with whatever spin he wants to. After that just add the spin with your wrist/fingers with your usual method.

 

[TensorBackhand]

Today i played a 2000 player and won 3-2. Two of the sets i had to battle back from 3-9 and 5-9 down. I also had a chance at 2-1 up, serving 10-8. But i blew that lead and it went to game 5.

The biggest thing is I executed the first 3 balls quite well. On my serve, I was able to utilize the 3rd ball attack to very good effect. On receive, i was able to loop most of his serves and that put me in a good position.

I think I need to keep going with this, but this match gave me some confidence that I can improve my execution of the first 3 balls from here. The first 3 balls really feel so important when playing higher level players. It actually seems like 80% of the match is decided from the first 3 shots.