OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Hi all,

When I play a forehand loop, if I've engaged the sponge well, my bat "clicks" a little.

Should the same happen on my forehand chop?

I've had one coach tell me that the noise should be dead, because that indicates I'm brushing the ball, and my current coach the opposite - he thinks my chop is much better when he hears the "click".

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If it clicks the contact time is probably to thick and you will most likely return a rather fast floater. That can be very tricky for your opponent. You need to hit the ball thinner, like a brush loop, to impart some back spin to the chop. It is all about timing and how fast incomming ball is.

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I propose you learn to do both.

If I am not mistaken, this is what Takashima Norio said in an interview about between classic chop (the brushing one) vs attacking chop (the click and float one)

You can have a friend feeds you about the same multi ball, and try to do
5 brush chop (bc), 5 click chop (cc), 5 bc, 5 cc...
4 bc, 4 cc, 4 bc, ...
All along until
1 bc, 1 cc, 1 cc, 1 bc, mix it up...

And you got one new way for being evil [insert evil smile here]

In my limited experience 'click' implies that I engaged the sponge instead of brushing and chopped ball comes back with limited, or no spin. It still might be unpleasant for my opponent, but if I was on the other side of the table, I would look for the sound cue to figure out what kind of ball is coming to me.

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USATT: 1807 | League: 1887

I'd follow Bego's advise. Both are important and I'd say the floater is even more important than the loaded one, because it stays low and most think there's backspin in it. Very nice change when you compare it with the ostensibly same ball coming from the LPs.

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Which produces more backspin? The more backspin (and the more forward speed) the flatter the path of the ball, since backspin produces lift.

Iskandar

Can't follow you here, iskandar. Can you explain what you're asking for?

Which produces more backspin - the brush stroke or the heavy stroke?

Iskandar

Normally the brushing stroke, but that depends on your hand speed and the rotation of the incoming ball.

And does the brushing stroke produce a faster ball, or is the ball from the heavy stroke faster? Or are both the same speed?

Iskandar

The heavy stroke produces the fastest ball of the two. In general: more backspin = less speed.

OK, here's what I'm getting at. It was mentioned that the heavy stroke flies flatter and goes lower over the net. I was trying to figure out why, since I was pretty sure it produced less backspin than did the brush stroke. As you know, backspin produces lift, making the ball's path flatter (lift is in the opposite direction to gravity, which is trying to bring the ball down). However, this lift also requires forward speed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_effect

The stroke that produces the faster ball will also produce more lift if backspin were equal (the contribution of angular velocity and forward velocity are equal, according to the equation, and the two terms multiply). So it turns out that the product (spin x forward velocity) is greater for the heavy stroke than for the brush stroke. Besides that, if two bodies fall at the same rate, the one travelling forward faster will have the flatter trajectory

Now, which is the better stroke? I'll leave that to others to decide - one must consider that the added backspin of the brush stroke will also affect the opposing player.

Iskandar

Iskandar right.

To add, in 38 mm era, or in golf, it actually possible to chop the ball so fast that the ball flew flat relative to ground, an lift after midflight, using spinny inverted.

Less common in current era.

About which chop better, I vote for none, flats kill by tempo, spinny kill by wrong estimation / reaction. [GRINNING FACE WITH SMILING EYES]