it will definitely be a good experience if you play in the league, but dont even let your performance against this guy fool you. There is still a lot of basic things to learn to become more well rounded. i would not focus on your forehand loops against topspin or regular drives, because that is tbh the most easy thing to do. In the league there will be players where you wont even be able to loop one ball. Looping is exciting, i get it, but the correct order of things would be to be able to properly receive backspin and sidespin serves in a controlled manner that does not invite your opponent to instantly smash your return. being able to survive the initial push rally and pick out the one good push that you can loop will be very important. you definitely want to focus on looping backspin balls. unfortunately somehow this is overlooked by beginners very often. i even know "juniors" like 19 year olds playing for more than 4 years and if you watch them in an open rally they look kind of decent. if i play against them and do a backspin serve it is basically 100% a point for me because they cant even push/lift a backspin ball if their life depended on it.
dont be that guy
You are at the beginning of your journey and you will learn this and it is fun to have topspin rallys, but dont forget the fundamentals. No point in having the best topspin forehand against empty balls, if this never happens in the game. This is of course just an assumption, because in the video i dont see any real backspin or chopped balls that you could have looped.
i had this annecdote yesterday in training. I young guy who plays for a few month and seemingly always has a odd racket. First when i saw him he had a regular rubber and antispin on the backhand. Yesterday he had short pips on one side and a spongeless antitop rubber on the other side. i played a few balls with him because he asked me to. with his antispin the ball consistently felt into the net (even when i only drove the ball to him) and with the pimples out the ball still kept flying off, when i topspin looped to him. Sometimes he had the odd ball where he would hold his racket with the rubber facing the ceiling (kind of like with a push), but the ball spat out downwards like a little smash floating either out or onto the edge of the table.
i saw that he basically did not know what he was doing and by using this odd setup would only get used to very odd strokes to somehow bring the ball back.
i told him that he will end up playing for 30 years and not being able to beat anybody that played for 6 month, because the material wont make him learn the game. I even offered him to put some old rubbers of mine onto one of his blades to properly learn table tennis. His reply was "but i have fun this way. its more fun with these rubbers". I said he can come back to me if he changes his mind.
I could not wrap my mind around somebody not being able to control anything and the ball bouncing off his bat in unexpected ways.
Then i sat down and watched this young guy go to the table with one of our choppers and suprisingly he was able to return 3 or 4 balls in a row by the chopper. That is probably why he thought his setup is good. He was able to return the chops by the chopper with his pimples out. So there was this one type of ball he could return with his bat. It's all fine to have fun, but tbh i think this is masking the issue and making him believe in his setup for the wrong reasons. Any other ball than a backspin ball would fly off uncontrollably.
Keep up the good work and i think your "open" game is good enough for the amount of time you play. Try to learn to improve the rest of your game, so you dont yourself in a rude awakening, when playing the league.
