OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Win or lose!!!

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Succinct

My two cents. Unless you're talking about outliers, or straying outside the realm of inverted sandwich rubber with thick sponge, the rubber really doesn't matter all that much. The differences between most sheets of inverted sandwich are subtle rather than glaring, if you mount two different rubbers on each side of a bat you'll often have to stop and think about what the difference between the two are. Some minor adjustment and you'd be able to make the same shots with either. You can tell they are different (one will likely be a little faster than the other), but if you had to write some sort of textual description about the differences, it's pretty hard. You might actually prefer one rubber over the other based on these subtle differences, but in terms of the actual points you win, as long as you're familiar with the rubber and have had time to adjust to the slight differences in speed, it won't make any difference. (Incidentally, Hurricane 3 is an outlier - even boosted, I find it too slow to use. Don't even mention Reactor Ckylin. )

Blades are a completely different matter. Changing blades (even within, say, all-wood five ply blades) will actually make you change the way you play, and you can immediately tell the difference between blades. There are some blades I have found impossible to use (mainly a weight issue).

Iskandar

What counts and can really wreck you game is having totally the wrong rubber for your blade, level and game style. E.g. trying to play an aggressive top spin game away from the table with a classic rubber on a slow blade, or a close to the table, push, block and hit style with a fast bouncy soft tensor on a springy fast blade.

I actually like to play “a close to the table, push, block and hit style with a fast bouncy soft tensor on a springy fast blade”. Give them less time to react to blocks and hits especially when doing left right placement. It’s different play style. For block chop/drop shot game/play style, slow setup would be preferable.

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My theory is a lot like iskandar's, that when you find equipment that is in the ball park for you, stick with it. That is what I do, a defender with a carbon blade, T05 Hard on one side and Rising Dragon on the other.

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Retriever (sometimes golden, but often leaden)
Moderator, Inverted Retriever Technique sub-forum - http://ooakforum.com/viewforum.php?f=74

And I think the blade matters a great deal more than the rubber does. Doesn't mean the rubber doesn't matter, but it's a great deal less important than many make it out to be, and even more so in the lower levels of the sport, where most (or pretty much all of us bar one or two) of us reside.

Again, a caveat - I'm talking about thick inverted rubbers here, not other stuff, which I honestly haven't had much experience with. Maybe one long pips really is ten times better than another for a particular purpose, but it would take some experience to figure this out.

Iskandar