Top 5 annoying practice partners

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What are your top 5 annoying partners?

1) cant hit fh to fh. Today I played a guy who kept spraying his fh wildly all over the table. I told him just hit fh to fh to warm up. He kept spraying. I told him again, fh to fh. He hit wildly to my bh, even though I was positioning on the fh side. As i instinctively reacted and crossed over to my deep bh corner, i cut my thumb on my left hand nail. I stopped playing him after that. Thanks for nothing

2) hits much harder than they can control. Even when you tell them to play easier, they smash wildly and out of control. 80% of time is picking up the ball, 20% is actual practice.

3)plays with pips but purposely avoids using their pips side with you so you dont learn how it functions.

4) plays with 20 year old inverted rubber and basically plays like antispin.

5) guys trying too hard to do a shot they aren't ready for. Like chopping with tension rubber
 
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says Making a beautiful shot is most important; winning is...
says Making a beautiful shot is most important; winning is...
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Dude who plays randomly to BH or FH side and when I protest, he will say, but in real game the ball will come to either side, so why are you complaining?

Talk about not understanding the fundamental concept.
 
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i have seen 1, 2 and 4 definitely.
For 1 i think they are simply not table tennis players, they are hobby players at best. For them the game is simply a intuitive reaction game. They have ingrained exactly one response to an incoming ball and they can not place the ball at will, but rather have this one odd stroke for a given ball that will bring the ball over somehow. These might even be people playing for 20 or more years, but they basically never learned to position the ball where the want and they simply react to balls how they learned to without a clue or strategy.

For 2 i dont have much issues with this, if i know i will play a game against that opponent. I unfortunately have such a guy as doubles partner and when warming up with the opponent he blasts the ball quite often. In warm up he even has a 60% success ratio, but i tell him to calm down and leave these balls for the actual match, because nobody is helped by collecting the ball half of the playing time.

For 4 i have a few training opponents that have such rubbers. They dont even need to be a decade old but poor or not cleaning and mishandling (probably leaving it out open in the sun) can have very weird effects.
Like side topspin serves being "returned" with an open blade and 50% of the time they will bounce high off like you would expect to if the receive does a push motion and other times it jumps down and sideways (so sidespin applies, but topspin somehow does not). I think this is a good motivation to raise above the lowest level of league play because the higher you reach the less you will face these.

I actually played a match against a proper antispin opponent who kept chop blocking the whole table with his backhand. It was actually quite nice, because you could attack all of the returning balls, because there was nearly no spin in it and you always could loop forward.
 
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says Pimples Schmimples
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Dude who plays randomly to BH or FH side and when I protest, he will say, but in real game the ball will come to either side, so why are you complaining?

Talk about not understanding the fundamental concept.
Yeah, I still don't get why people keep hitting to random corners during matches!
I'm like "Guys! Come on, this isn't what we practiced!!"
 
says Pimples Schmimples
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Yeah, it becomes like well, lets just play a match anyways, you clearly don't want to warm me up...
Yup, this!
Someone in here wrote recently that after just one kill shot from opponent in a warmup they go for their towel and say 'lets play'.
It'd a good policy and I have also adopted it
 
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I rarely deal with these annoying types.

Since the covid days, I always arrange with a partner before going to the club and will hit with other non annoying people who happen to be there.

If I am paying $15 for table time, I am not wasting it on goofs.
 
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This is my main motivation to improve, so to get better training partners.

But I feel some people behave like they don’t want practice at all, whether they are better or worse.
Not they want just hitting hard or expecting from you, everything ordinary just boring for them.
 
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I rarely deal with these annoying types.

Since the covid days, I always arrange with a partner before going to the club and will hit with other non annoying people who happen to be there.

If I am paying $15 for table time, I am not wasting it on goofs.
90% of the time I arrange beforehand a partner to play with to avoid these annoying situations.
 
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