OOAK Table Tennis Forum

I play a guy who has an extremely fast top/side spin pendulum serve which kicks hard and to the outside of my backhand. I struggle with that one.

I know it's coming yet it's still quite difficult to deal with. I figure I'm just not good enough on my backhand side to handle it yet.

Some serves like that are very frustrating because I don't get to practice against them (typically these players treat them like trade secrets) and my robot can't really reproduce it.

My low level responses to some of the issues you guys bring up...

1. You are supposed to wait to return serves. Jumping on them is what causes 90% of the problems you are experiencing and jumping on them is okay when you know what's on the serve. Otherwise , practice returning serves while taking the ball after the top of the bounce unless the serve is ridiculous high. Learning to contact the ball on the side helps with this a lot. If you let the ball kick and then attack it from a lower height you will hit the ball long less often even if it is topspin.

2. When serving heavy topspin try to push your legs downwards while pulling your wrist and body upwards. This will give the ball a more forward trajectory in part because you are contacting the ball lower and this will help with your ball height and deception as people will read the lower trajectory as backspin if your backspin serve is similar.

3. It's not just the amount of spin but the amount of spin you expect from the motion. This is why learning to read when a motion is imparting heavy amounts of spin relative to the speed of the ball is important. If you expect the ball to kick on these serves, you have won 90% of the battle. It's when you act like the ball shouldn't kick and it does that bad things happen.

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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've had two lessons with a coach just serving at me 100s of times, and he said the same thing, wait a little longer to read the spin and length before reacting. The problem I have is with short heavy backspin I would like to push short. Can't wait on those - have to catch the ball quickly off the bounce. So my only option is to be late and push long. That or jump in on long serves and get eaten up.

Watching pro players they seem to jump in for a short receive before the server even makes contact. But they are playing a different game from me so waiting longer is probably still the best thing to do at my level. But it's not a free lunch. If the opponent mixes long and short serves well, waiting will be wrong (yield sub-optimal results) a lot of the time.

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

Yoko Ono

I know this goes into tactics a bit more but I'd say a quality long push isn't a death sentence for that point and might end up being a reasonable tactic until that player starts using the short serve more. I think pros tend to jump on the short serve so much is because the long serve isn't used. I actually think this is a mistake on by the pros and we've seen some success when players add more long serves but that is a different discussion.

I personally have more issues with long serves to my backhand. Ones that hit near or on the end line really give me trouble. I think this is because I don't practice shots at that depth enough. On the forehand while still difficult we can lean and twist to buy a little more time.

A decent long push is def better than my short, high, not-spinny short push. That really is a death sentence.

And my long push has improved more than my short push ever did, in a fraction of the practice time. Now I need to work on my Amy-Wang-$tyle bh sidespin punchblock. That's my favorite shot in all of tt, and made to kill spinny slow loops after a deep push.

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

Yoko Ono

Thanks,
I remember tip from #1 about half the time.
I’ll try #2, it took me a second to visualize that.
I totally agree on #3 and struggle with that a lot less now than I used too.
Now once I recognize the kick serve, I just wait a fraction of a second and just topspin it.

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Viscaria
FH: H3 Provincial Blue sponge
BH: Omega VII Pro

You establish your footwork sequences and adjustments while thinking about how best to adjust to the ball over years of training. The pros don't jump in before reading the serve, they get their body moving before the serve is hit in order to reduce inertia and to be in motion throughout the point.

The first bounce of the serve dictates the length so at this point you have an idea of whether to take the ball short or long. If your spin read is good you can take the ball early but you don't have to take the ball early to keep the ball short and you don't have to keep the ball short to make a quality return (more important IMO to keep the ball low at levels below world class).

My point thought is that unless your opponent needs to be rushed and even them you have to balance the loss of control with taking the ball early with the deception that can be gained by waiting and watching the opponent, you can wait and still play a reasonable shot unless the serve is obviously slow heavy backspin.

In any case if no one jumps on every serve even the top pros. I think one of the reasons why Chinese players use tacky rubber on forehand is that it helps with late short pushes.

_________________
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

But if one attempts to make short push late, it can be short, but it will be 100% too high.

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Tactics Enthusiast

As a general rule, Yes, especially for people using Euro rubbers and taking the ball far from the net and still trying to keep the ball short with little if any practice, but not as a fact. Before I was unable to practice, I was working on taking the ball late while keeping it relatively low and short with spin. It's something you can practice and work on if you are willing to adjust. It actually requires a more positive stroke with quicker hands to find the right balance. Needs some sidespin as well.

_________________
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

My little TT technique 'story' for last week.

It all started with the backhand flick. When you are over the table you must create lots of racket head speed to get the ball up and over the net and back down. This requires the wrist to bend back then explode (but relaxed) on to the top/back/side of the ball. Last Monday I played a couple of fun matches where I won points doing this - but I had not been practicing it as so it just happened. Maybe watching FZD recently in the Asian champs got into my brain? Went home that night and did some more backhand flicks against the robot. I could get some crazy spin on the ball if I timed it right and really bent my wrist back to get enough speed.

On Wednesday I played again and I did more flicks, some were wildly off the mark and some were just pure gold. I remember one that I hit - it went so high up in the air and then came back down with tremendous spin. I smiled as I watched my opponent stand there watch it come down and touch it with his paddle. I had to jump a little to grab the ball out of the air after it kicked out. That night again used the robot to practice them more. My arm was pretty tired at this point - new muscles were being used and things were being stretched out.

On Friday is when things got weird. My brain had decided since backhand flicks have so much top spin and can create winners that ALL backhands should be like backhand flicks. This happened in the middle of some more fun matches. Suddenly I was taking my wrist much further back and contacting the ball later. I was even stopping my backhand sooner and still creating considerably more spin. I will admit it was not entirely successful and I wasn't even aware of what I was doing at the time until after I had time to think about it. Went home on the robot and just started hitting top spin/no spin balls and iron out what was going on with this backhand. Very interesting. This is where the robot really comes in handy for me.

So on Saturday doing my usual multi-ball practice I did some backhands against the best blocker we have (not great but good enough) and he was having heaps of trouble with this spiny backhand. The spin was really catching him off guard. I was also able to slow down the technique enough to make it consistent but it feels entirely natural. My backhand is now much closer to: "LTT78 - Learning table tennis part 78 - Modernizing Ben's Backhand".

On Sunday I watched a recent Timo Boll match where his opponent was having so much trouble with the amount of spin Timo was putting on the ball. The other guy just wasn't used to it. At one point Timo was crushing the forehand and it clicked for me: the same bat speed and similar angle to the backhand side for those backhand flicks! I did a little testing with the robot and was able to create deeper more powerful forehands yet with heaps of spin.

I guess the moral of the story is....you never know where you will gain understanding. I could have watched LTT78 a hundred times and still have not ended up with fully grasping it. However it was in the back of my mind and was an obvious watch once I started doing my backhand differently.

Try new things out and maybe one of them will click for you.
Now I have lots of practice to do

Russ,

Once you take responsibility for your technique, many such epiphanies (some genuine like yours and some fools hold, like my trying to use the body to hit a forehand like Brett demonstrated on the backhand) will show up and you just do the best you can. But the worst thing is the person who is over 25 and wants the coach to show him everything. That person has no future.

_________________
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've never made a highlights video, but I was watching my matches from a tournament yesterday and figured the six points to start this game are about as good as I can play. The technique has a lot of flaws but the results are still good. https://youtu.be/kZziwztLEy4

The shot I'm happiest with in hindsight is the half-long ball fh that he blocked way long. The shot I liked in the moment was the fade fh off his bh line. I hit a couple of those in an earlier doubles match and kind of fell in love with it for the rest of the day. But my shot selection reach exceeded my grasp a few times afterwards.

The one miss was on a freebie, a high short popup receive. I miss a lot of these, possibly because I'm too far from the ball. I guess I should come around the table more to get an angle off the side, but I'm slow reacting. I should start coming in when I see my opponent commit to push the side-top serve.

Anyway that error cost me, in a set I lost 12-10, on the way to a 3-0 match loss. My opponent is better than me, but far from unbeatable. But the level of these six points has to become average for me before that will routinely happen.

Overall it was a fun day. I'll post a different full match in my thread when I get it edited.

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

Yoko Ono

I love it when my epiphanies occurs. I just got the timing of the bow up movemennt to a simple backhand block shot right. The tiny delay in bow out to arm action supports a little whip action on the block and for me makes all the difference.

The half long return that you looped close to the table was really solid.

I think you could benefit from using a little bit of side spin to get more meat on those backspin forehands. Like the one you missed, just come around it a little. I think you were in position but maybe a bit too slow to react. Gosh I would love to play that guy if he's going to return that serve like that!

Here's a full match from yesterday. This guy is a level or two above me. But I served at 1-1, 8-8, so I was definitely in the match at that point. Things kind of went to hell after that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n-JIKKbl00

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

Yoko Ono