OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Where ye at, skilles_slapper and Snowman?

Just a quick update about life and TT. Let's start with life. I took two exams the last month - I'm following an education in ICT - and both went great. I was fired from my job, though. I couldn't deal with the unexpected open office aspect of the job: I don't function in those kind of environments. It's a pity to lose the job, but in the end it's nothing more than a bump in the road to something greater.

Table tennis. I'm playing with my ordinary setup again: Joo blade, Hurricane 3-50 soft and P1-R. I trained against a decent looper T. (USATT 1800-1900) and won three games against him: 3-1, 3-1 and 3-0. Playing pure defense was quite hard, but when I started to attack with the pips during the first set of the first game, he started to doubt - literally. I won that set and from then on he never could dominate the game - unless I made the mistakes, both attacking and defending, myself. Because he played more passive from then on I had to play more aggressive. It worked. I also started to see playing patterns again. That's literally more than a year ago I experienced that.

Accepting long pips again as part of me as a player feels so good. It just feels natural, who I am. I think I tried SP to overcome the misery I experienced in the club, to show them I'm more than a LP player, to get accepted again by being more like them. However, I started to realize being a LP player doesn't mean I'm less than them. If anything their view of me suggests the opposite. I really start to realize I was never accepted in that club in the first place, although I was literally their best player for three years and was - among other things - the mastermind and decisive factor in promoting to a higher division. It's a poisonous environment from which I'll depart in the coming months, certainly in part (I still have real friends there), but it also might be a complete departure.

Hey, has anyone tried nittaku do knuckle medium pips? Heard Hitomi Sato uses it. I might give it a go soon.

No, horizontal is not going to have any deception with sponge that thick. It's a workhorse kind of rubber - get out what you put in. I use it on OX for chopping, but also at the table hitting. It sends back dead balls or some with very slight reversal. It wouldn't give anyone trouble with the passive block, unless they suck against no spins. I use it for more aggressive hitting, where you combine the knuckle effect with speed.

fl3, curl p4, and horizontal are right at the line when it comes to short vs long pips. All of them are grippy enough to where you must use actual strokes, not much different from short pips other than a bit more forgiving since they impart less spin.

From the sound of how your style is shaping up, I would lean more toward the security side of things. I would have to imagine overall, you'd win more from the consistency + FH finish than you would from drawing out the occasional error from a slightly more frictioned long pip - at least not enough to outweigh the misses. You can change the spin some, but against knowledgeable players I think that aspect of p4 or H55 is a pretty moot point and you'd be relying on consistency anyway. Only with a guaranteed slightly heavier back spin ball, regardless of incoming spin.

For my tournament action... had some good, some good but more importantly -- many excuses!

I started off doing the chopping + looping game, since my first events were in doubles. Those went well enough, and we beat all of the teams in our division for 1st place. After that the singles started, where I chose to use the OX LP blocking setup in order to give myself a real test with it. Games started out well enough! I beat the top seed a few games, but he adjusted soon thereafter and proved why he was the top! Thrashing me quite heavily in the last closing games. I felt good, knowing that I could compete against them on that level even if it was rather short lived... I played by going HAM with the forehand, and probably won around 70% of my points with a FH finish. The pips were just for consistency and an error now and then. I didn't feel confident in attacking with them yet (regretfully in hindsight), so it was a purely passive side. During the last game of my ass wooping, I decided to play as a chopper just for the hell of it. Seemed I did pretty well there also, at least not any worse. Later on I played an extremely good dynamo of a player from vietnam. Using the block style against him, he just massacred me. From either side. WAM BAM. That little demon treated my pips like a candy-filled pinata and just beat the crap out of them/me. However, I kept joking with him so over the final games he lightened up (after asserting his dominance ) and we had fun doing long rallies with me chopping or lobbing. His shots were so awesome! First time he sent a ball wizzing past me on a perfect angle, I called it outright luck. Then... he did it again to the opposite side right after! Luck again! But sure enough, his next one WAM! Same thing happened. Over and over. I told him if it weren't for those 10 lucky shots he hit on me in that game, I would have easily destroyed him

That final game gave me the notion to play the remaining games as a chopper against the other players. I continued doing so, leveraging the FH quite heavily and winning the majority of my points with the loop. Chopping away from the table and running in to land a killer. Problem soon became... my back began flaring up and essentially prevented me from attacking or moving a whole lot. That was the story of my other matches. I decided to play the first game with as much intensity as I could, more just to prove to myself that I could beat them with my actual skill set - physical fatigue aside. Those were easily won, usually around 11-3 in my favor. But after that I was not able to perform very well and lost a number of them in the 5th, using pretty much 0 attacks. Or a half hearted swing, being too conscious of my spine, and hitting it straight into the net. My last match was against a much lower rated player... that I lost to! Could not move at all, just stood flatfooted at the table and to his credit he saw I wasn't attacking so played very safe and took no risks. I was scheduled for more matches in that round, but opted to leave early not wanting to really injure my back. I think it would've been smart to leave 1 match earlier than I did, but oh well.

Overall I felt great about the tournament, even with the losses. The games reinforced in me that I could compete and win against the "higher rated" players - though it also came with some depressing thoughts... that I can win with the skills I have, yet I'm not able to maintain those skills long enough to actually play hard and beat down the competition throughout the events. So unless I play 1 set showdowns! Or limit my events to maybe 1 per day (though seems like a waste of a drive to me ), I'm not sure the current style is sustainable and that I might be better off focusing on one that I can scale with, all things considered. I'll have to do some testing to confirm, because my mid-back issue didn't arise until I started chopping AND looping. The right hip problem wasn't too present during my block/loop games so perhaps my body is acclimating itself to that stress. I don't mind the muscular soreness at all, it's the herniated disc area being re-injured that worries me... meaning I might have to give up the chop game for good and cement myself at the table as a blocking/looper. An annoying thought, since I've spent the better part of the last 2 years training chopping almost exclusively. I think I play better as the attacking chopper currently, from the angles to the distance and everything that goes with it - other than the spine issue, and perhaps not being able to scale as high against those electrifying players like the vietnamese guy I played.

**reflecting back again, will hold off judgement on any particular style until actually testing out the moves and trying to pinpoint which ones cause the flare ups