OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Here is my last set of serve practice drills. It was mostly me trying to feel out my new rubbers/setup.

First drill is me doing multiple serves and playing out the point. If you can find anyone to return your serves on a regular basis, this should be one of your most dominant forms of practice, no matter the rating of the returner, as different returners bring different things.

Next drill is me serving short backspin or no spin to the short forehand for my partner to flick.

The drill after that is my partner serving to my forehand. I am quick to use my backhand all over the table. Not sure how to fix this but trusting my forehand control is a step in the right direction. I don't move close enough to the ball for real control, but I will work on that over time. That's just one of the annoying things about having crappy knees.

Comments welcome.

_________________
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

Have been busy with family and nursing injuries from starring in Getting Lower Pt 10mm and 1. I keep on trying and hoping something will change (and nothing has). What I think it does is make it clear that I will be mostly fast blocking close to the table and them take a step back to loop and exchange. With that, I am going to try using an ALC blade extensively given the power demands from greater distance. My touch and short game will suffer, obviously, but I will give the experience a real shot for the rest of the year (unless I play so badly that I find another excuse).

Brett was very unimpressed with the progress I had made on my serves and in truth, I think I don't quite know where to go with them. I mean, players under 1800 miss a LOT of my serves now - this wasn't happening before. IT's getting 2000+ players to regularly miss my serves that is the issue and that would easily get me an extra 100 to 200 rating points.

Because of this, I am now regularly serving to club members trying to get my serve motion faster and faster. It doesn't deceive them after the first few as they read it better and adjust, or stop trying crazy returns (which means it wasn't deception but the crazy returns that they were missing).

Any recommendations to improve the serves are welcome. I have a technical problem with the elbow position which I will resolve in my next few practice sessions but I am thinking about the serve deception.

This is mostly a mixture of pendulum side backspin and sidespin with some other things tossed in to keep both of us from falling asleep. I am fairly sure my partner could rip these serves down the line if he wanted to.

_________________
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'm not a 2000+ level player yet but I've been working on keeping my serve motion more or less identical for backspin, side/backspin, and no-spin serves. Since my side/backspin serve ends with a wrist flip, I try to end my backspin and no-spin serves the same way. Seems to net me a few free points.

The higher level the opponent, the less you will be able to get them to miss the serve. If you're already varying the speed, spin, and placement, then the best thing you can hope for is a predictable return to set up your third ball attack. But I thought you already knew that.

Yes, that was my original response to Brett, but again, there is still room for improvement clearly. There must be things that make serves harder to read (other than hiding them) that I am not doing.

_________________
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

This was largely the serve I was using, by the way. I am rebuilding my reverse pendulum right now and I am going to make it look much more like Brett's.

_________________
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 edited my previous post with what I'm doing - deceptive motion. You could give that a try. Xu Xin does the wrist flip thing.

I don't know if it's possible to make a serve harder to read for a higher level opponent - sidespin serves always break, you can see the label on less/no-spin serves, and backspin serves tend to float. Having said that, I think the easiest deceptive serves are the backspin/no-spin serve combinations.

Went back to TTEdge and Brett's main point was to focus on making the serves look as similar as possible. So I guess I will tape myself from the side and make sure I look the same when contacting the ball.

_________________
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

Hi NL, Watched that first video with the high ranked young player and he is a beast. Pretty much everything you did he attacked and that put pressure on you to attack balls you probably aren't comfortable attacking.

It also seemed like his serve got him a ton of free points. Must have been interesting/frustrating to return serves that well placed and spun.

I stopped worrying about hiding serves so much because I was not good enough with the motion to generate enough spin and pace. So while I can pendulum 3 spins with the same motion, I found that I can do more spins with better pace and placement using a simple backhand serve motion. The advise I was told was to use the proper motion that is most natural for maximum spin generation. Once I did this I was able to get free points off higher level players again, but the best I play is 1900 right now.

_________________
Appelgren Allplay Flared FH Rhyzm Max BH Rhyzm Max

Hiding serves is illegal. I don't do it and I don't expect my opponents to. If they do, I tend to fight through it only because I know it is practiced even more at higher levels and I don't believe that my current playing level is my ceiling so I keep looking at what happens at the next level. Maybe in another 200 pts or so, I will start being more vocal about it.

As for Jack Wang -well, when the rating disparity is as severe as that (and trust me, while the gap between me and you is greater in USATT rating numbers than the gap between him and me, the playing level difference between me and him is greater than that between me and you), nothing is frustrating. You just accept the lesson/match as a gift and a way to test the quality of your game. I can give players 1600 and under a very similar experience if I play them with a certain mindset. And if I let them survive the first 4 shots, then they get a better idea of what parts of their game are consistently okay and what parts are generally inferior. The problem though is that surviving/winning in the first four shots is table tennis in a nutshell. This is obscured from some players by how much time amateurs use to practice their rally shots, but the players who improve the quickest are the ones who practice serve, serve return, third ball and fourth ball.

You can see when a player isn't tournament experienced or just not a good player - he just rolls the ball over the net and expects to get into a rally. He is taking the long path to table tennis improvement. My second coach helped me realize this indirectly by having me do 3rd ball drills since I was about 1400 or so (in other words, since I started working with him). Those drills, probably more than anything else in my game, helped me because as a blocker, I already had decent rally skills. Being able to shorten a few points is valuable even when you don't realize the value of it. And it grows with you as you grow as a player.

Free points off spin generation at your level tends to happen because the higher rated player doesn't have an idea of how much spin you can generate in the beginning. Over time though, they adapt so the real key is being able to either have a motion that generates heavy spin but doesn't look like it will do so, or to be able to vary spins and/or degrees of spin with similar looking motions. Of course, the ball has to be relatively fast or the returner will have too much time to read it. I Say relative because it is hard/impossible to keep a short serve short and make it go very fast. But there are faster short serves than others. The faster ones give the opponent less time to read the ball and have a few other good qualities, while the slower ones, while deemed suboptimal, do have value if they are extremely short at some players have trouble approaching those balls in some contexts.

_________________
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

Bad wording, I just meant disguising the paddle motion, nothing illegal.

_________________
Appelgren Allplay Flared FH Rhyzm Max BH Rhyzm Max

Oh, all serves should have a pendulum orientation. That's sufficient disguise for someone who is not paying attention. You can have deceptive follow throughs but they are ideally worked on after you have developed good spin on the serve and not before. Most/many good servers have no deceptive follow throughs at the highest levels and those who do build it into their recovery.

In the beginning, most people can't get spin with a pendulum orientation (or any orientation). The way out is to practice floor serve and bed serves and get feedback on how brushing the ball with your serving motion increases the spin. When that contact is unconscious, then you take it to the table.

People who do most of their serving practice at the table never develop really good serves. They are so caught up with making the serve that they can't just serve unconsciously with spin. Learning to brush the ball with spin away from the table is one of the most valuable learning drills in table tennis.

_________________
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

Serving article by Han Xiao
http://butterflyonline.com/getting-more-spin-on-your-serves/

Agree. I serve at home every day on the carpet for at least 15 minutes. I focus on where I contact the ball and notice in matchplay that my contact gets finer and finer.

I just beat a better payer than me finally because of this and improved footwork that I had been working on as well.

_________________
Appelgren Allplay Flared FH Rhyzm Max BH Rhyzm Max

I used this serve on match point in a critical match on Sunday - probably the most heartwarming win of my life. Still needs work, but good to know that it has its customers. I also do a few serves standing straight with straight backspin but from the forehand side because I use that serve a lot but it drifts on me more than I would like. My experience with BH serving and talking to Brett has taught me that it is very important to have serves that you recover from fast. It puts more pressure on the opponent because they know you are ready for what comes over the net and sometimes take more risk with their returns.





I also did some forehand push practice. When a ball is spinning really heavily with backspin, just brush the very bottom of the ball heavily and at a height above the net as backspin tends to go straight. That's what I learned from this practice.

In the first short push drills, many of my pushes aren't short - well, I tried. It will get better with time. I don't get traditionally low but I tried a bit too - I realize that I will never be able to consistently bend my knees and the pain is not worth it. Also, the serve to the short forehand with reverse sidespin annoys me a little so I have to try harder to return it and experiment more.

_________________
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

Watching your service practice NL, it looks very hurried and no time allowed between them. Would you benefit more from drilling the whole routine..... setting yourself (one ball only in your hand), execute and recover to ready position. Reflect on the serve and then start again. Does that make sense? It is not that I am suggesting anything wrong with any serve, but it appears quantity over quality and not the full routine that you can port into match situations.

_________________
Timo Boll ALC ST
FH Tibhar Evolution MX-P Max
BH Tibhar Evolution FX-S 1.8
185g