So,
i ran away from my country TT forum because of not understanding and not appreciated players with lp and antis and found myself a new home here, in this wonderful ooak community with all of you guys...
There is no better place than here to start my TT blog which i postponed so long...the reason i am starting it now is that i finally have a video in good enough quality of me playing to show you guys...and i need your view on it and tips for improvement...
but before that, i want to share with you something personal about myself, my life so far and my tt career...it is kinda important because it will clarify my today stile and choice of rubbers, but who dont like to read wall of text can easily skip it and go straight to the video at the bottom, no harm feeling
i am from Zagreb, Croatia, 43 years old, playing in 1st Zagreb Amateur TT League called SOKAZ (short word for Zagreb Amateur TT players association). It has 1300 players and at their highest level many former professional players like Dragutin Surbek, his son and many others...for anyone interested, here is our website. Without false modesty i can safely say it have the best database with past games and results for any of its players that i have ever seen...like this...
i was playing tt all my life because i had tt table in my backyard but it was on a real amateur level...my serious start in tt water began when i had 20 years old, so really late, when i started playing SOKAZ with 2 of my friends, from the last league (at that time there were 18 with 12 teams in each and now we have 22 with 14 teams in each).
that 1st season i had 26 wins and 7 defeats in the last league, so nobody expected anything special from me in the foreseeable tt future...but me and my friends trained a lot and had a real passion for tt, so we were constantly moving up toward better leagues until we finally reached the 1st (without a single defeat in 5 years it took
) where i am playing since...at the time i was a typical double inverted attacker/blocker close to the table with fh opening spiny not so fast loop and a firm flat hit and bh block...i was in the top 10-20 players in the league and won a few local tournaments...and only sky was the limit because i was better and better year by year...
and then, how it often goes, life happened...
(disclaimer: for readers that have difficulty reading about illness and misfortune skip this part)in the process discussed for some other blog, i got diagnosed with a brain tumor and within a week, at age of 27, i had a difficult semi successful operation...i say semi because i survived
but since the tumor was behind my left eye and the operation was performed through an opening on the left eyebrow, they permanently damaged my left eye... 
i remember that time like it was yesterday...my only concern was not if i live or die but would i still be able to play table tennis or not... so, to cut the long story short, after another radiation gamma knife surgery in Vienna, Austria and an eye surgery in Giessen, Germany, after about 2 years, i was out of recovery and could start playing tt again...
(end of disclaimer, you can start reading again
)but since my left eye was damaged in a way that i could not play with it (i have double vision with both eyes open) i needed to close it with an eye patch and play with only right eye...and that was my second tt beginning...
as you can imagine, i could not put the ball over the net more than couple of times over the net at first...i dropped 2 leagues and started to experiment with different techniques and tt equipment that would enable me to get back into highest level of our amateur competition...since i had real difficulties reading the spin and returning the serves i tried all the different material on my bh finally settling with thin 0.5mm custom sponged globe 999 which i effectively used for a short under/over spin in the opponent fh giving me opening for my fh loop...and since i could not put more that couple of balls over the table without making a mistake, i needed to cut my points short, so i trained my fh to become really fast and strong so when i hit it the opponent could not return it...
with all that happening, in 2 years i got back to the 1st league and was even a number 3 player on the yearly rank list of all the SOKAZ players...
so i played like that for 12 years...and than a funny thing happened...i went to tennis with a friend (i am also playing tennis
) and we got to the tennis court to early so we started to pass the ball at the parking lot in front of the closed center, waiting for it to open...and i felt stupid and little uncomfortable putting the eyepatch there on a parking lot in front of all the people passing by, so for about half an hour, for the first time in 15 years, i was playing tennis with my both eyes open...and it felt GREAT...that rare moments when both pictures i am seeing come to one and i hit the ball was like a little miracles...later that day, i played whole match (tennis) without a patch not much worse than with the patch the day before, but much much happier and with the smile on my face whole of the time...it seems that in all that years, my brain got better, not my eye, in processing that double picture i have...at that moment i said i will never put eyepatch again, even if it means i will never play tt again and continue to play only tennis, because i was not sure how will it work with smaller and faster ball...but it was good...that 1st season that i played without eyepatch i had the same score like the season before...and there comes my 3rd tt beginning...i started to experiment with lp on bh...mostly thanks to a friend of mine who put a bug in my ear telling me that someone with my fh and good enough play with lp would be a real deadly combination...but since i cant get away from the table because of the eyes, my idea was to become chopblocker close to the table...after trying 5-6 different types of lp i settled with ox DG which had best spin reversal on chop blocks...
there was a lot od skepticism and disapproval around me because of that decision, but with losts od video watching and training, i soon became one of the best lp players in my league...after 1.5 years i was even nr. 1 of us 1300 on the yearly ranking list...
but soon, DG had shown to be a very poor quality made lp, with pimples braking after already couple weeks of play, so i was searching for a substitute...after hellfire, CC, dragon talon, dragon talon national, easy p, viper, viper soft (so much money spent
) i was so pissed that i am not happy with neither that when that frictionless anti Beast from DMS came out i said, lets switch to that and have some closure...but, as all of you who tried to play with flanti know, it was far from perfect...very difficult to play with movements totally different from lp, ie when the ball has more spin you need to open the blade more for block to go over the net on the table...and also lots of money spent...i bought carbonado 190, dms destroyer, beast, transformer 1.5, 1.0, 0.6, 1.5 again...and now ordered megablock anti and revolution blade...
but i am determined to stay with flanti so far and learn to play with it better...i was even on a 2 day weekend course in Vienna over the summer where AA taught us how to play with it (here is the link with exercises for a quick reference)
and here we came to the present day and a video i finally have because a friend of mine filmed me with his mobile phone...it is from a 1/2 final of a league championship this weekend which i played against my friend and training partner from my club...so the worst possible opponent for me, because he know all of my weaknesses and how to exploit them...which is fine because you will see all of my bad sides and a few good ones...
all comments are not welcomed but WANTED, and they are a reason for this blog in the 1st place...so dont be shy, i am not easily offended...
i would particularly welcome any tips related to play with the flanti, then the serve, and then fh, in that order
when i see the video and then compare it with AA videos, i see that i am doing everything wrong...i am doing that downward motion on contact with my hand which is a legacy of my old lp move i cant get rid off...
so, kudos to few of you that had the patience to read it all, tap yourself on the back
for the rest: TL;DR: here is the video, tips for improving anti play pretty pls!
when blocking you should avoid any motion, you chop here too sometimes. the fast loops sometimes fly over the table because you are not standing infront of the ball!
