BRS,

No, it is not. A banana flicker for example sometimes wants to borrow the pace of the incoming serve for his stroke. When forced to do all the generation vs. heavy backspin over the table vs a low serve with a little distance to clear the net, ugly things can happen to the flicker's confidence. Even a short push sometimes hates taking a serve that isn't going to rebound of his paddle off the bounce.

There is no one-size fits formula when it comes to serving. There is a generally optimal formula, then there is the cool ability to adapt a variety of things to the player you are facing.

January 5th

5-10 mins with a very strong player, serving through my repertoire to see which are too easy to attack

Answer: most of them.

However, he reckons just a few tweaks - lower over the net, a bit shorter, and a bit more variation will make most of the "short" serves solid.

My long serves just aren't fast enough against a player who reads and moves well.

Tried to use the magic pattern, and think it helped especially with pure sidespin serves.


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I think since you are using pips, you may need some high tosses like He Zhi When or Xiona Shan.

Are you using the magic pattern?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Duv4HS2TUvs

Question,

In the video of the "Magic Pattern" (funny name) I see that you are whipping ala Brett Clarke's method of generating whip. In some of the movements you come to a sudden halt. In others you seem to follow through. Are you doing that to demonstrate the correct (Sudden halt) and incorrect (Follow thorugh) methods? By correct and incorrect, I'm referencing one of TTedge's tutorials where he mentions that element.

I don't pendulum serve much, but the whip and mechanics are relevenat for other serves.

I would like to see a magic pattern for tomahawk (TH) and backhand (BH). TTedge has some vids for those but I didn't find them particularly helpful for me. I think I get good whip and spin on the TH serve, but so-so for the BH serve. On the backhand serve I almost always try to deceive and place rather than create huge spin. With the TH I'm always going for spin, as I find it hard to deceive except by changing angles with the bat while the ball is tossed...which is risky.

Anyway, I practiced both of those serves for 20 minutes each yesterday at home. I tried to focus on spin with the BH serve, and what I found is that i have to really wrist it on contact. I tried to mimick the pedulum serve magic pattern by gripping the blade differently, ala pinching the rubbers and not over-gripping the handle. That really seemed to help in generating spin, but I was terrible with control, which could be just a practice thing. I sometimes really put too much pace on the ball and didn't brush enough. Sometimes I brushed far too much. I also had a hard time controlling the bat angle because of my lack of grip.

For the TH serve: When I watch vids of pros on videos, it seems that most of them focus on arm speed rather than wrist speed, which is different than how I do it. Kenta for example really whips through the serve and follows through.