I still don't understand why the "increased tackiness" was beneficial for you. The only real advantage I see is immense grip, but modern less-tacky Hurricanes also have incredible grip and allow you to lift underspin from the floor. All of my 5 sheets of H3N I had from late 2023 to 2024 (2 commercial, 1 orange provincial, and 2 blue national) had less tackiness, but all of them gripped the ball like crazy even in humid environments.
For me, tackiness is crucial on modern European rubbers like Glazyer 09C or Hybrid K3. After they lost their semi-tackiness after several weeks/months, the grip was gone too.
For Hurricanes, there is no such issue. In fact, a less tacky H3 means you can send rockets during attacks and have a resemblance of block/flat hits.
I apologize if I did not make my point more clear.
Let us say, on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being very very tacky. The previous version of Hurricane 3 is like 13 out of 10 in terms of tackiness when it is straight out of the box. Then once you play with it for a few hours (I have even heard of people scrubbing new balls on the top sheet and not clean the rubber to intentionally bring down the tackiness a bit when it is straight out of the box but I never did that; I just played it to break the rubber in), the tackiness goes down to 10.
The modern day version of H3 and various hybrids I have tried (i.e. K3 or Dignics 09c) is more like 6 out of 10 in terms of tackiness, straight out of the box.
The difference between 6 v.s. 10 in terms of tackiness is quite big.
When the H3 (old version) gets to 10 out of 10 in terms of tackiness, it stays that way for a year! The only thing I did was just, after each session, use water and sponge to wipe the top sheet. I have never used protective sheets or anything.
So with that amount of tackiness I could score 3-4 points off my serve each game. But nowadays with H3 provincial blue sponge, I might be able to score only 1-2 points straight off my serve nowadays. With each game going up to 11 points only (not 21, like the old days), a couple free points off serve plays a huge difference.
Then with the current version of hurricane, that 6 out of 10 tackiness wears off within 2-3 months at most so nowadays I have to upgrade to provincial blue sponge just to get some decent tackiness in the top sheet but yet I have to change the rubber after 2-3 months as opposed to once a year with the old version.
With 10 out of 10 tackiness, it was also easier to play the short game better and easier to loop just using the top sheet to scoop the ball off the end of the table. So everything about hurricane before was perfect. You get to boost the heck out of the orange sponge and you get to just rely on the top sheet of tackiness to play the ball in certain ways/techniques. It is just a lot harder to execute those shots with barely tacky surface nowadays.
I was also trained in the celluloid 38mm days so my favorite technique is to open the rally (usually on the third ball) with a slow, high arcing spinny loop. That kind of loop is just not as deadly with the new plastic ball and the new "tackless" hurricane. Hence my rant.
