OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Yours entertainment?

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Tactics Enthusiast

The most valuable serve is the one your opponent hates. I have a reasonably good short backspin serve and a very meh tomahawk. But if my opponent touches my backspin short and flails at my tomahawk, the meh one is more valuable.

I find it quite easy to change the spin on the tomahawk. I learned it off a young chinese woman on YT, which I never learn anything from YT. Like the other day I tried to learn VLOOKUP in Excel on YT, and I watched about five videos while following the instructions and got nowhere. But the tomahawk serve actually seemed relatively easy to keep short and to vary spin. It should be very obvious bc the orientation of my blade is in a range of maybe 60 degrees from sidetop to sideback. But a lot of people around 2000 clearly have no idea what spin it is.

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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 think you are right. Tennis players use the Tomahawk and not the Punch.

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Lots of truth to this BRS. Your opponents will definitely like some serves more than others.

I was talking about one's serve in a vacuum.

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Of course.

If I can teach you some tt too, that's a bonus.

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There is a thing that bothers me a bit. I am a "slow" player: I can play well against slow balls. I can loop a slow push or a medium speed topspin ball. But once the game speeds up, I am at a big disadvantage. On the other hand, some players of comparable level are extremely good at playing superfast bang-bang. How can I become better at playing faster rallies too? Is it actually a goal worth pursuing?

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Tactics Enthusiast

I bet 1200s think you play fast.

I think expanding the range of balls you have an answer for is always worth doing. But I don't think you should try to play faster, if your main idea of how you want to play isn't that. It would be working on reducing or jeutralizing tue disadvantage that you feel vs someone who orefers that tempo. Also how to force the play to be at the tempp you like, not what they like.

So the main thing I would try to learn is to take a fast hit ball and play a slow spin from it.

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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

Once I was practicing with a friend and we were both trying to take the ball early. And he kept getting annoyed when he missed (even though I was probably missing more than he was) and I said I couldn't take the negativity, that even Timo Boll would miss if he worked on what we were doing against an opponent with a similar level.

Pros tend to back up to a point where they can see the ball and expand the time they have to play and place the ball. It is why with their footwork, if they get into position, the opening shot can be so devastating. They tend to just put the ball where you are not and the fact that you have to move and they step back a little gives them time to see what is happening next.

IF people are overpowering you with speed, investigate your playing distance and ball quality. Even with the plastic ball, it is hard to slap low balls, and it is hard to slap anything you need to really move to to slap it.

Playing faster rallies is partly about anticipation and practice but it is really about ball quality - if your ball is well placed and restricts the opponent's options, it is much easier to figure out where the ball should come to next. If the ball is slow or low quality, the opponent has many options.

I think you will naturally get faster as you play faster players. Nothing to stress about. But you can get low and play close to the table counterhitting for practice just to experience it. Not as major practice but just to experience it. Refuse to back up and just take the ball early. The same way I back up and lob/fish just to experience it.

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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 am mostly asking on how should I organize my training to be better at open rallies. A year ago I started doing some 3rd ball sequences where I served some junk and counterattacked a flick or a weak loop. I also did a gigantic load of "classic" footwork drills. I think all those had a very marginal effect. What seems to have better result is doing DTT29-like stuff where my partner is looping backspin and I counterloop. The question is how much I should do it and whether it is going to help me.

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Tactics Enthusiast

Okay. First of all, rallying is overrated.

Once you get that out of the way, the first thing is to learn how to enter the rally. The first step is usually to play a long push and block the first topspin or to play the first topspin. Then you get to your preferred rally distance and start hitting shots from there.

In my experience it is better unless you have a good reason (opponent used pips so the ball drops short or opponent keeps the ball deep so you can't stay comfortably at the table) to play as much as possible from your preferred rally distance and just get good at playing there. Optimize everything to support it.

I think Henzell had a drill in his TTEDGE videos where he had one player do a long backspin serve to simulate a long push and then the other player would open, the first player would block and then free play. The goal was to get you open play and let you practice without too artificial a set up and too many mistakes.

It is a good idea to respond to ball depth and speed by moving back to a depth where you can play full strokes. The advice to stay close to the table is good but you have to realize that even the top women players are at least 3 feet back when rallying. Close to the table is relative.

Learning to play shots that keep the time your opponent has to hit the ball reasonable for you is also important. It is hard to hit the ball past someone who has stepped back. It is a better to just play a shot that limits their options and allows you to read where they are going to put the next ball I'd they get it back.

When I used to block very close to the table, I found high arcing topspin a nightmare to deal with off the bounce if I was too close to the table. It is one of the reasons I tell people to practice taking the ball early but to find a reasonable distance to play at as well. Remember that your opponent cannot hit the ball before it gets to them. The ball doesn't have to be fast to have quality. Spin plays a role as well. The ball does have to be powerful though or well placed.

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Cobra Kai TT Exponent (Mercy effs up your Game)
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Lumberjack TT Exponent

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

Get someone to block anywhere and make sure you hit at least 5 balls on every rally. This is the answer you are looking for.

Doing DTT29 type stuff is fun and valuable. DTT29 has a big downside though. Actually, it has a massive downside and I know you understand it based on your posts here. The downside is, it leaves holes your game and it makes you worse in rallies. So there are other types of training you need to do, as per my first sentence in this post.

Every exercise you do has a downside. For example, just practicing your serve has problems. Just standing there with a bucket of ball and serving has very little to do with playing a match. It doesn't mean serve training has no value and you just need to understand what you are doing it for.

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Yes, makes sense.

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Tactics Enthusiast

It seems that my total focus on winning by attacking first made me a very imbalanced player. It is not that I have to block often in matches, it just lack of practice against fast balls hurts my anticipation skills.

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Tactics Enthusiast

Everyone's game develops at an uneven pace. We are all imbalanced players in some way or the other, especially at the lower levels. Even 2300 players have gaps in their game. Even Dima has gaps in his game at his level. You are doing the right things because you are focusing on the things that happen early in the point, just like Dima did. IF your serve, serve return, third ball and fourth ball are effective, then the rally is an after thought. When players force you to rally, then you get exposed, but that part of your game will grow as well. But the earlier parts influence that 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