Keeping it friendly guys....oh and NL, with your bad knees I suggest you change to long pips

Ok, that was something of a joke, but in all seriousness, if your knees are really that bad then they will only get worse over time and a good pip game (which will allow good short drops) would support you well into the future. Looping and counter looping wont keep you playing in the mid to late 60's.

See, I was being serious, and now you said the same thing right at the end of that last post.

The best easiest fastest way to improve your counterlooping is to get weaker opens from your opponents. Your self-described weakness is reading spin. So put more energy and your OCD to work on receive quality and less on countering. Do multiball receive, where you play out the points but use an entire box of balls so 99.5% of time is play and virtually none picking up. You can get hundreds more receive reps that way than playing matches. If you, or more likely your opponent, wants to keep score, still let him serve every point. You get plenty of work on your serves already, try to get as many reps on receive. Then after your receives are at least as good as your serves maybe counterloop will be the best opportunity remaining. But it doesn't sound from your posts like that is really the case now.

A couple of comments based on the work you've been doing with Brett. First, note the difference between the effectiveness of your serves when you do it Brett's way and when you just serve a half long backhand into his hitting zone. Second, on service return, note the difference between the effectiveness of your topspin backhand rather than just pushing long (and often high). Didn't you have a thread about improving your short game?

you need to mix the placement of the serves more...you are serving just to serve, without a plan behind it...you have a good set of different serves and you are not using them enough...
and dont try to attack every ball from every position...when the game opens up, i think he have the upper edge...you need to close the game more, with short serves, strong underspin pushes to his weaker side or the elbow, and a good block...
because of you weak knees, you also need to preemptively move little quicker around the table (ie when u push with BH to his FH, move to the middle of the table before he even touches the ball in the anticipation of a spin to your FH)

To be perfectly honest, I've never totally understood why you have this desire to develop a counterlooping game. If I were in your position and I had limited mobility, my entire game would revolve around strong serves and third ball attacks, consistent drop shots against short backspin serves, a strong ability to read spin and place my receive to difficult areas, etc. Virtually everything about my game would center around the idea of preventing my opponent from attacking strongly and always giving me the opportunity to attack first. Counterlooping, by it's very nature, implies that you are at least content with allowing your opponent to attack first. And regardless of how good you become at reading the game, I think the idea that you are going to allow 2200-2300 loopers to open up against you consistently and still win to be very unlikely.

Make better returns.

Okay NL, I will try to make sure all of my comments fall within the specific context of the match from now on, even though I believe this entire thread is typical "How Do I Beat This Guy?!?!" non-sensical thinking usually seen in Tactics Junkies that does essentially nothing but stunt our development. I'm sorry you did not find my advice to be particularly useful. I find you to be one of the most generous and insightful posters here, but believe it or not I do not find every single one of your posts to be always useful or even relevant either. So I would appreciate it if you would not respond to my advice with "No sh*t, Sherlock" and accuse me of trolling when all I was doing was trying to help.

Honestly, you are not good enough at table tennis to talk down to other players like that. You're just not.

Thanks for the kind words, and I will say that I found your original post that I quoted largely a put down of how I play with no acknowledgement or serious understanding of how I play or why I play that way - maybe you were trying to help, but it rubbed me the wrong way completely. I was just showing you the same amount of respect you showed me in your comments.

I'm sorry you feel that way and I apologize that what I wrote in my original post rubbed you the wrong way. The last thing I would want to do is insinuate that you need to completely revamp your game, because that would be foolish. I think that the way you constructed your game on the way to 2000 was essentially perfect given some of your limitations, so I would never want to put down your game. I was just trying to make some suggestions that I felt would allow some of the strengths in your game to flourish and present themselves more often in matches. I should not have said that everything about your game should be centered around the idea of finishing the point quickly, because that is not a good idea nor is it a good reflection of your philosphy on table tennis for amateur adult players. What I meant was that I would like to see improvements in your return of serve and short game play, which would give you more opportunities to initiate the first attack with a loop against backspin from either wing (one of your strengths) rather than being forced to make a decision between a low percentage counterloop or a blocking style. If you feel that is not good advice or demonstrates a poor understanding of your play, then that's fine. But again, I apologize if you saw my original post as a put down of your game or a suggestion to completely revamp everything, because that was not my intention.

I tend to agree with Ringer and BRS here NL, you really should face your weaknesses head on. You fear pushing short in case it goes half-long...so up the ante on your pushing and short game (which is a way of totally controlling loopers if you are good at it). You struggle reading spin on serve, put your training efforts toward that more. If its your eyes causing problems, look into getting glasses to help. You've built a solid game, build on it further. Not saying what you're doing is useless, cos its all building...but don't ignore where your game has come from and filling the holes that developed along the way. Everyones game has holes, but if you are going to train as much as you seem to be doing you may as well improve your known weaknesses.

I just watched most of your match. You were frustrated from the get-go and not competing well. That doesn't matter too much in a one-sided match like this, but could come back to haunt you if you let it be a habit.

Obviously his serves killed you. It looked like he did a great job of changing speeds, not just spins, and that left you swinging too soon, awkwardly, or hitting edges.

In a few matches I have seen you put the rubber out dead flat and let the serve react off it. Are you doing that deliberately to learn the spin, or is it a kind a surrender? Remember your own advice to use spin strokes vs spin serves, and judging by the action off your bat, this guy had spin on his.

The only path vs him is to cause as many errors with your serve as he does with his, or be able to get to the rally even 90% of the time. You did fine in the rallies despite missing sometimes more out of distraction with the overall playstyle as the difficulty of that particular ball.