OOAK Table Tennis Forum

hi all!, i'm new here, a complete beginner compared to you pros, and not so good with english so please try to understand me...

I,m a 15 yr old high school student and a tt player. i've been playing ping pong since i was 9-10 yrs old and i got used to rbp grip style. and i do know how to use rbp.

I've been using a cheap butterfly racket back then, but a year ago i finally got a penhold racket that my mom bought for me online with these rubbers. memo 2 | hurricane 3. aaand a plain dhs penhold blade. (dhs x4006?) which i really like, because it fit in my hand very good and have that very tacky feel that was new for me.
Now i manage to beat some pro-ish players in the school intramurals that got me selected to play outside school for a competition for the first time, which we(the school team) managed to win so we got advanced to the next competition. its going to be my first time playing against experienced players, so i did some research, and i realize how newb i am.

questions:
which rubber should i use for the forehand and backhand?
is my racket good enough?
my hands get very sweaty while playing which make my grip slippery, what can i do about this?
most players kept telling me that my grip style is bad and should switch to the shakehand grip, which i don't know how to play. so it really bad? and should i switch?
the rubber is ripping off the foam, what alternative glue can i use to fix it?

If your grip the blade like Wang Hao, it's used almost exactly the same as shakehand. Unfortunately most converts from traditional penhold grip in a way that limits backhand flexibility.

> which rubber should i use for the forehand and backhand?

what you have now is good

> is my racket good enough?

yes

> my hands get very sweaty while playing which make my grip slippery, what can i do about this?

you can form more of a loop with your index finger against the thumb around the neck area and the racket shouldn't slip at all. Look at photos of wang hao for an idea of how. This should be easy, there's no need to grip tightly.

> the rubber is ripping off the foam, what alternative glue can i use to fix it?

rubber cement. It might be time to get new rubbers since they do degrade with time. If you have enough trouble getting the sponge off the blade as to be not worth the effort then just get any ALL blade with similar rubber to what you use now.

No, it is not really bad, just different. No, most likely you will not gain from switching to SH.
There may be a number of reasons why other players tell you that PH grip is bad. Some that I can think of:

• The reduced reach range means you are more dependent on good placement. (True, but may not be so important if you can move well.)
• It may be harder to find a coach who understands PH style. (True to some extent. Should not be a deciding factor.)
• Perhaps they tried themselves, and couldn't do it well, so they decide it must be bad. (simply stupid)
• They might find it difficult to play against (so they try to make you weaker). (simply bad)

Granted, PH has inherent weaknesses. It also has inherent strengths. Some of the best players in the world play PH.

I would suggest the Memo for BH and Hurricane FH, but it all depends on style. Not very different rubbers, IIRC (Memo softer and less tacky, right?). Try to test both sides in some drills against a strong player. Short game (control while pushing) and/or RPB attacks (loop strength) are perhaps the deciding factors.

There's a pretty big stylistic range for penhold. For example I play RPB exactly the same as I do SH (other than BH push with FH side), and skill level improvements when I happen to use one automatically extend to same shot for the other. This would be much harder if I used traditional BH blocking with emphasis on serve/return/3rd-ball.

But it's true a majority of penholders, esp. those who learn RPB halfway have pretty bad habits like rolling their wrist over and pushing/punching with the stroke. I've often pointed this out to them with limited success at affecting improvement. In that sense it might be better to just use SH if you want to have a BH attack.

I've known a few penhold players who have tried to switch to shakehand and it appears to be quite a long process. Personally I haven't seen any who have gotten better at sh than they were at penhold. If you're comfortable playing penhold then why not stay with it?

I know a few penholders who switched to shakehand and played better. The improved offensive backhand reduced the stress on their forehand. If you want to switch from PH to SH without learning real SH backhand strokes, don't bother.

_________________
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 vote against ph to sh change.

Just dont.

Ph and sh play demand very different skills and reflexes, which can hold you too long on transition, and sh no better than ph in practice

I'm surprised this is happening with top-quality DHS rubber in this day and age. It happened to me maybe 20 years ago with a sheet of PF4, I've never used any sort of DHS rubber since, but I've never seen it happen on anything other than rec rackets (where it happens a lot, even on Butterfly rec stuff such as the Addoy).

Most rubber is glued on so tight on the foam that you'd destroy the foam if you tried just ripping it off. There's no glue you can get that is this strong, from that video on YouTube about how Butterfly does it I suspect it's a hot melt of some sort. That said, you can buy sponge and topsheets separately and people who do this seem to have OK luck with plain old contact cements when bonding the two together.

As far as the sweaty hand thing is concerned - has anyone tried keeping a small tea towel in a pocket, or even wearing one loincloth-style like NFL quarterbacks do?

Iskandar