OOAK Table Tennis Forum

BRS,

One thing I learned the hard way from my coaches is that it is best to do what the coach says if you trust the coach with your development as what happens is never fully predictable. You are taking a very narrow view of looping, IMO, and I am giving you drills to help you expand it. You may have a very different view of his smashes when you practice slow looping topspin because topspin is part of the looping contact continuum. I'd you start to see how contact points simply vary and how the stroke is largely the same, you may actually become a spinner of all balls, which is the ultimate destination (of course, you may need some flat variation but you get the idea). If you loop balls in the -2,0 and +2 range and learn to adapt your stroke to each ball but with a patient slow loop, you will learn how contact point varies with each stroke. And you may see that you can either loop no spin like backspin or like topspin!

In any case, just do the drills. If you don't do them, I won't harp on it but sometimes, it takes losing to see that you should have worked on something.

One thing he started doing was serving you fast serves with topspin. If you had practiced looping topspin balls short, you may not have felt the need to drive the ball and get into the smashing thing. Then there is the weird topspin/no spin ball that you get back when you serve backspin into pips. Another opportunity to slow loop topspin. You may also have found a different contact point on the ball that enables you to make him hesitate when he looks at your ball. I can only prescribe the drills and hope you learn from them some of the things I did as you try to loop different balls.

As an afterthought, I will add this story. People saw the kids that my coach works with counterlooping. Two of his prior adult students, including Breaking 2000, said that they were puzzled that my coach taught the kids to counterloop because they claimed he never taught them to counterloop. But the coach claims that he taught everyone to counterloop but when he showed the kids, in one lesson, they took very strongly to it and started pushing backspin serves back to the opponent so that the opponent could open and they could counterloop. According to my coach, this was what helped the kids break 2000 so rapidly, even more than any ability to loop backspin (one kid was good at this, the other mostly sucked at it and preferred to push serves). Kids try and take to counterlooping even when they are 1500, sometimes off the bounce, even before they learn to consistently loop backspin. And then when they outperform adults, adults use the excuse that those are kids and it is radically different. But it isn't always. Counterlooping is only a ridiculously high level skill if you think of it as one. People loop at you all the time so what prevents you from looping back if you know how? THat it's an advanced skill or that it's a skill that you haven't practiced? MY experience is that it is the latter. What Brett showed me was that all loops are the same stroke applied to different points on the ball through different stroke trajectories and possibly wrist/racket angle changes.

If Breaking 2000 and myself hadn't broken 2000, people would have hidden behind the excuse that only kids improve in my club forever. But the problem is that my coach has coached at least 4 adults from the 700-1400 range into the 1800-2100 range. So what he (and working with Brett have proven to me) are that if you have the right technique, over time you will develop the strength and timing to make the right shot repeatedly.

It's really no accident that since I bought a robot, my ability to read spin and counterloop has grown. IT's also no accident that all the loops/spin I practiced looping against (backspin, no-spin) I could do at a high level and could play pips player well, but the loops I didn't pratice (vs. topspin, vs sidespin) were the ones I struggled with so I always blocked. And is one of those loops inherently harder than the other? No! All that change as you get better is the level of opponent you have to do it against, which raises the spin, but that is compensated for by your improvement.

NL.

_________________
Cobra Kai TT Exponent (Mercy effs up your Game)
One-Loop Man: One Loop... Again????
Lumberjack TT Exponent

"We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training" - Archilochus

What makes you think I am not doing the drills? I post video almost every day. I'm hardly doing anything else. If after like three weeks you are frustrated that I haven't mastered the skills even in practice, to say nothing of to use in a match, that's more on you than me, IMO. I don't practice as much as you, although I do a lot for a normal working adult. Ask me in three months. This one match is also not my best effort, as I was very clear about. But I am willing to post bad performances, which a lot of people won't.

Also I have told you before about what it is like in a social, self-taught club. People don't loop at me all the time. There is one other double-inverted two-wing looper in this club, rated <1600. People loop at me when I drive to a remote club, or at tournaments, although half the players in my tournament bracket don't loop. It's not the every day all the time thing like it is at a proper club, MDTTC or TrolleyCar.

Last, I guess I made too strong a statement about counterlooping. If I have to choose which is more important to me, I want to be able to open vs underspin, because my opponents will never get a loop in. I will have control of the point. The objective against this particular guy, if trying to win, is not to counter his crazy flat smash. It's to stop him from ever getting the flat smash. Obviously I would like to have the skill to counterloop, but there is a long list of skills I don't have at an adequate level, like pushing and blocking. So everything has to get in line.

All that said, I am doing the four-ball random drills.

_________________
Smile in the mirror. Do that every morning and you'll start to see a big difference in your life.

Yoko Ono

Sorry. I wrote the initial post which you were quoting out of frustration with the fact that you think counterlooping is this magical high level thing that only really good players can do - I edited it but it seems like you read the original earlier but never caught the revised version. My frustration is really with the fact that you don't slow spin the +2 ball and that you think it is not worth trying because counterlooping is not your priority.

Counterlooping is not this high level thing that only high level players do - some kids do it all the time and they can't loop backspin at all. The problem is how to do it against high levels of spin, but that is just practice against higher levels of spin. Against a +2 spin ball, you should be able to loop it slowly. Your driving it kills the learning continuum for spin manipulation. You are a very good spinner, you just need to learn to use your strength more broadly and understand it more broadly.

My bigger point is that learning to loop against a wide range of spins improves your understanding of spin manipulation. Don't ask me why it happens, but it just does. There are many other drills I could prescribe to you (+2, 0, -2 drill, forehand and backhand, so you learn to read and adapt to backspin, topspin and nospin both sides and it gets interesting if you mix up the order as you will find some funny results about the strokes you use), but this particular one is to get your opening better.

The match results were fine. I was happy with them because you made more openers. But what I am saying is that somewhere in you is the ability to slow spin a topspin ball and it might have helped. Don't brush it off, find it. Don't say it is not important, but consider it as important as every other part of the drill because it is supposed to require a sidespin stroke just like every other stroke!

If you need to, make the topspin ball in the drill slower than the backspin balls or make it drop shorter.

_________________
Cobra Kai TT Exponent (Mercy effs up your Game)
One-Loop Man: One Loop... Again????
Lumberjack TT Exponent

"We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training" - Archilochus

In larrytt terms you are thinking strategically and i am thinking tactically. Maybe the balance is good.

As far as changing the feed i may have to set the topspin ball lower to match the others better. As it is i have to rise up a lot to meet it.

Training today i realized i don't know how to make sidespin. I am coming up the side of the ball and getting straight topspin that travels diagonally off my bat. I have hit with people who make sidespin so i know how it hooks, and i'm not really getting that.

So i have to figure out how to make sidespin at all, then try to apply it to the different incoming balls. I will post video late tonight, no time now.

_________________
Smile in the mirror. Do that every morning and you'll start to see a big difference in your life.

Yoko Ono

The exact wrist changes are helpful but not 100% necessary if you know what you are doing. That said, some kind of wrist change/action is necessary to make swinging easier. Avoid swinging shallow or you won't get any topspin along with the sidespin to bring the ball down, though sopme people get away with this when countering heavy topspin.

_________________
Cobra Kai TT Exponent (Mercy effs up your Game)
One-Loop Man: One Loop... Again????
Lumberjack TT Exponent

"We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training" - Archilochus

Here is the technique for slow high topspin:

_________________
Cobra Kai TT Exponent (Mercy effs up your Game)
One-Loop Man: One Loop... Again????
Lumberjack TT Exponent

"We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training" - Archilochus

I have cut back my practice because of some recurring shoulder irritation. If I used waist rotation, elbow, and wrist like I should, my shoulder would not even notice looping a few hundred balls in a row. But that's a long-term project.

Still I got in some practice yesterday and today. Yesterday was before I watched the Henzell video NL posted above. I was trying to get sidespin, but not really going around the ball. I also shortened the swing a lot, trying to just open and close my elbow as the entire stroke. Because the +2 ball comes out so much faster and higher than the underspin ones, I'm always behind and end up just hitting it full on. This all sounded good in theory but it didn't really succeed. I was still going straight up the side of the ball. And swinging much slower only seemed to generate less spin, although it was easier to angle the ball wide off the table using less pace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpa1GO3-8bM


So today I had watched the video and I experimented some with angling my wrist, and also trying to get the right contact points on the ball moving low to high around the outside. The camera angle is weird, and the results look pretty poor, but I thought there was more sidespin towards the end. Everything needs tons more work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTUAkyLDBrY


Tomorrow I go back to the club here, so I will post more match footage on Tuesday.

_________________
Smile in the mirror. Do that every morning and you'll start to see a big difference in your life.

Yoko Ono

With regards to serving...

When you are up or down a fair amount in a game, really go for your serves. Pressure is a little off and you can 'go for' that perfect practice serve.

I know what it's like - you have practice serves and then you have game serves. Game serves are never as good for me...but really going for them in a game helps. It builds confidence in that thinner brush and more risky placement.

Looping hard (as opposed to spinny) makes it harder to loop with sidespin as spin has a greater effect on the trajectory of slower balls in terms of the breaking path. It's why people get impressed by lobbed serves.

There are also two kinds of sidespin - one curves more in the air (true sidespin) while the other reacts more with the table (corkscrew). I tend to loop more with corkscrew (though many loops and serves have a bit of both) and my loops kick when they hit the table. Lower rated players whiff on my loops quite a bit in topspin vs topspin drills.

_________________
Cobra Kai TT Exponent (Mercy effs up your Game)
One-Loop Man: One Loop... Again????
Lumberjack TT Exponent

"We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training" - Archilochus

Both videos are similar and look fine but conservative. You don't seem to be cupping your wrist so you won't have a natural hook stroke. You do have some corkscrew and with the speed, the break is less than it would be if the ball was slower. But your shoulder pain may not do you any favors. That said, you need to shape the ball on contact and try to hold on to it a little longer. I would recommend starting with Henzell's exact grip and stroke if you are not satisfied with your current results then you can try to replicate it in other ways. Hitting angles is almost as valuable as hitting white lines and is a safe way to move people off the table.

_________________
Cobra Kai TT Exponent (Mercy effs up your Game)
One-Loop Man: One Loop... Again????
Lumberjack TT Exponent

"We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training" - Archilochus

Final comment - it is easier (and possible) to get sidespin with your regular stroke by taking the ball early or more usually late, which is one reason there is lots of sidespin in rallies.

_________________
Cobra Kai TT Exponent (Mercy effs up your Game)
One-Loop Man: One Loop... Again????
Lumberjack TT Exponent

"We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training" - Archilochus

To get corkscrew you are coming across the top of the ball sideways, is that right?

_________________
Smile in the mirror. Do that every morning and you'll start to see a big difference in your life.

Yoko Ono

Yes. You see your balls kick right (left from the bloopers view) when they hit the table in your video. That's that effect.

_________________
Cobra Kai TT Exponent (Mercy effs up your Game)
One-Loop Man: One Loop... Again????
Lumberjack TT Exponent

"We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training" - Archilochus

Thanks for watching. Sorry i skipped over this post at first.

That may be cause all my serves turn out the same LOL. I used mostly under spin and a few corkscrewspin serves, so they were almost all the same. I felt like i was getting easy third balls and just missing the attacks, so why change the serve. Vs this opponent i normally use about 50% tomahawk serves, but this time i wanted to try these goofy-stance serves so i didn't use anything else.

As far as blocking, i was much too slow reading the play to get in front of his smashes. On a good day i can move over to the fh corner where he always puts them and counterhit. He takes a big swing so has trouble recovering in time.

_________________
Smile in the mirror. Do that every morning and you'll start to see a big difference in your life.

Yoko Ono

This is a good idea. I do it sometimes when i am far ahead, but never when i am losing badly. There might be the least pressure and the best chance for a good serve then, when I have given up the game as lost already.

_________________
Smile in the mirror. Do that every morning and you'll start to see a big difference in your life.

Yoko Ono