Simple game-winning hacks that nobody tells you

[JJ Ng]

The single biggest advice I could give to anyone is to GO IN DEPTH.
Meaning dig deep into 1 part of the game.
Become your own sort of master at that part.
The more you do it, the better you get at it, the more fun and enjoyable the process becomes and the more you do of it ... .
Once you do that, your understanding and thoughts about the game overall will drastically go up.
You will be able to transfer knowledge and skills to other parts of the game.
It goes beyond just:
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
For TT:
“I fear not the man who has practiced FH, BH Loop, flip, block, serve and smash 100 times each, but I fear the man who has practiced one his pendulum serves 10,000 times, and is now able to apply his deep knowledge and advanced skills into his game."
By practicing 1 kick - or serve variation or whatever you wanna put here - 10,000 times, you gain something invaluable and irreplaceable, something that the "normal" person doesnt gain.

Serves are the easiest to practice 10000 times, as they require no help and barely and setup.
To practice Forehand Loops 10000 times you need some more things.

For me it was also serves and pushes and overall playing with (under-)spin, much more than the others did.
My level of pendulum serves, underspin gameplay and its variations is quite high ( relatively speaking), especially compared to my other skills and those of my partners and competitors.
Right now I wanna go in-depth on Forehand Loop, so that I can do it as well as or even better than my serves and pushes ( which is hard ).
The more I train it, the more I realize what there is still to learn.

Most people, and especially younger players wanna do a lot of things, and get "good" at them.
That leads to being 30% good at everything and thinking youre at 80%.

So again:
Go In-Depth in your TT Aspect of your choice.
Go and do "Deep Work" on it.
You will be greatly rewarded.

I agree with that. When you serve 10,000 times, you do not need a practice partner and honestly no one will be bothering you when you practice serve at the corner of the club.

Recently in doubles, I have been practicing pushing heavy backspin to the corners. That seems to be helpful.

I only started flipping short serves in the last year or so. Honestly flipping short serves is so much easier now with 40+mm plastic ball. there is practically no spin on most of the balls! When I was growing up, my playing level was not good enough and the 38mm celluloid ball had so much spin on it, practicing how to flip serve was not on my mind at al.

 

[songdavid98]

So many people are criticizing each other's tips and hacks.

Everyone should realize that each tip is a "hack" for a range of levels. And it even has nuance past that too.

Serving long wide sidespin is a "hack" against newer players, but won't work once people learn about looping those hard as punishment. Then it is no longer a hack. Until you learn how to deal with the punishment He Zhiwen style, then it becomes a hack again. Or if you serving short 8 times in a row, having the 9th be long wide sidespin can be the hack.

As for this thread, I see some arguments, I see some hacks that are mostly well-known, but not really anything that "nobody tells you". I'll share a game hack that I've pretty never heard:

This is a mindset trick for people who suffer from self-doubt.

Outside of a match, you are allowed to critique your skills and your technique. In a match, when you lose a point, you should never critique yourself or doubt yourself. Always blame your opponent, and then do something about it right away.

For example, your opponent pushed and you looped it out. You should blame your opponent for having less backspin than you thought. What you do is be on the lookout for less backspin on their push and prepare for it with a slightly higher backswing.

This does a couple of things:

1. Prevents self-doubt and negativity. Self-doubt can cripple your power and decision making

2. Attaches respect to your opponent. This helps you give it your all. Also creates sportsmanship. I've seen players not want to shake hands, shitting on themselves and their opponents (myself included).

3. Creates a mental routine where you are immediately trying to find solutions right away. There's not much time between points, so use this time to fix issues ASAP.

4. If you have a coach, the conversation becomes you + the coach VS the problem. I've seen so many interactions that are student VS the coach. That's so stupid.

 

[Lazer]

And above all, “he who gives away the least easy points usually wins”…

Cheers
L-zr

 

[blahness]

I have a hack recently. I realised that a lot of people don't really go into detail in spin reading, not just off the receive but on all balls. Mostly due to laziness. And they always try to use one contact method to deal with all types of spins. And when they miss, they blame their technique or lack of training, but even if you have the best loop structure and do not read the spin properly, you're gonna suffer 1001 "unforced" errors against someone who is deft at varying spin.

If you know exactly what spin is on the ball and know what the best contact method is for that kind of spin, you will simply stop missing that much on all shots.

For eg a simple example, you serve FH pendulum and the opponent pushes it long. A lot of ppl simply think: oh this is just a standard loop against underspin right? Wrong... it's nowhere as simple as that.

1) did the opponent go with or against the sidespin? If they went with the spin it will be straight or curving towards your BH, otherwise it will be curving towards your FH.

2) did they accelerate the push with the wrist or fingers? If yes then it will be very spinny, otherwise it won't be. Or did they just kill the spin on the ball with a bump? In which case it will be almost no spin

3) did they use their body or mostly use their arm? If yes the push spin quality is going to be significantly greater.

4) did they lift the ball or go forward with their push? If they went forward it will be a lot faster, if they lifted the ball it will be shorter and more floaty.

.... and dealing with all these different types of pushes requires slight adjustments to the loop to maintain consistency, which you should have already stored in your head.

Do not leave anything to "chance" or the "auto adjustment" capabilities of the brain - as it is easily fooled.

Fang Bo said something very enlightening in his advanced class - if you had to choose between technique vs ball feeling to execute a shot, always choose technique, because ball feeling is unreliable - sometimes you have it and sometimes you dont. You have to first understand the methods and concepts deeply in your head.

Recently I'm starting to miss a lot less, even against pips, because I am actively classifying the incoming spin in detail, not just "topspin or backspin", and reacting accordingly.

And now after knowing the ball feeling crowd who don't really think, sometimes just varying serve and push spin is already sufficient to win against them while they commit 1001 unforced errors lol, simply because they are way too lazy at reading spin.

 

[blahness]

Basically for all techniques (loops, pushes, sideswipes, flicks, etc...) you need to know exactly what to do and how to vary your technique against all 7 types of spin (pendulum sideunder, sidetop, reverse pendulum sideunder, sidetop, pure backspin, no spin, topspin). And then you simply select the contact type that fits the incoming spin, and you should be able to adjust perfectly to the ball.

Of course there's also footwork to get into position, but even without the best footwork if you know the precise contact type you can land the shot if you are slightly out of position.

 

[JeffreyMG]

Switch to Penhold with Hurricane 3 and just fill forehands.