OOAK Table Tennis Forum

What does 'A heavy dead ball' mean?

Imagine you hit hard a big balloon ball, no spin imparted, intentionally.

The ball shall deccellerate rapidly mid air, and,

After used up it forward momentum,

Just fall near vertical due to gravity. It may swerve to either right or left due to multiple causes like atmosphere and initial spin.

The same happen to table tennis ball, and looper very much hate this kind of return.

Sadly, this effect is not as prominent as in 38 mm ball era.

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I have heard this in reference to 2 types of balls.

A spin motion that looks like heavy spin, but contains no-spin, aka deception. Usually used when commenting about serves, but I've heard this in reference to fake topspin loops as well.

I have also heard this in reference to flat no-spin hits that are fast but no spin, like SP and Anti hitters.

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A lot of high standard LP players (and also some Anti players) will return a very heavy dead ball from their pips, or may even serve it. A lot of players will find this ball difficult to lift back over the net. It may be either due to lack of understanding as to how much lift it requires due to not understanding the lack of spin on the ball, or because they over-estimate the speed on the ball and don't provide enough force to carry the distance to the net (or a combination of both causes). In my experience, most players learn to overcome this if they face it often enough.

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One thing I've learned over many years of participating in table tennis forums is that loosely defined terms are very common. What any one person might mean might be totally different than what the next person might mean. "Heavy" usually means one of two things when used in the context of table tennis shots - one is "a lot of spin", as in the case of old style brush loops, the other is for shots that are difficult to lift, meaning "lots of backspin". I can't say I have ever heard of a "heavy dead ball", that would be an oxymoron given that a "dead" ball in most cases means no spin. If someone were to use it, however, you couldn't tell them they're wrong, of course, since anyone can use whatever terms they want to use and no one will raise a fuss most of the time. What they MEAN is another issue, of course. My guess in this case is that "dead ball" means something else here - it probably has something to do with the ball's trajectory rather than lack of spin. But that's just a guess - it might be right in one instance and wrong in the next.

Iskandar

My experience is "heavy dead ball" is meant as humor. As when the opponent dumps a return of a no spin serve or some spinless floating ball into the net. In a club situation, the player creating the dead ball might say with a wink "Don't worry about it, nobody could return that, that was my super heavy dead ball".

Players can get used to automatically having a closed racket angle because the usual ball has some topspin. When they don't see the spin on the ball and use that closed racket on a perfectly dead ball it doesn't grab, goes down, and gives the feedback impression of being "heavy" as if it had chop even though it has nothing on it.

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I dunno about heavy but dead ball usually a return with enough spin+speed to carry the ball to the very edge and just drop on the edge or just off the edge. I've used such serves and returns but only am able to do it with the new plastic ball. It sort of dies sooo suddenly and abruptly. But the old celluloid balls never dropped like that and it was very hard to do no-spin or dead with deception.

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