OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Won the first game easily, but could not do much once my opponent adapted to my serve and spin levels

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Tactics Enthusiast

A few suggestions if you are interested:

1. Ready position: I like how your overall ready position is for receiving serves, but you quickly get up straight right after. Your are a tall guy so bending down might not be comfortable. But I found that if I conciously keep my eye level just slightly higher than the net, my shots are instantly more precise and I miss less even on the defensive. Stay low and keep low. Aim for contact point at roughly chest level, you are hitting around the waist now and any lower body force is wasted. But comparatively, you are doing this much better than your opponent .

2. You are leaning back during the swing. This eats away at your impact force and can be responsible for a lot of the long balls. Keep leaning forward during and through the stroke.

3. Your follow-through is too long or you are not bringing your arm down fast enough. I see a good bit of you following up a loop with a block. Get ready faster. I find the "stay low" principle actually helps with swing speed and recovery too.

4. You are giving up the table too easily. I can understand if you feel more comfortable with a few extra miliseconds. But I also see you immediately back off after a successful attack. The idea is to press the momentum, you already have the attacking initiative. Working on your stay low and faster recovery will help a lot in this department.

Basically, stay low

I think this view is too simple. There were patterns to the kinds of errors you made. And your opponent was just making shots he missed earlier which can happen in any match and he wasn't making them that much better.

Your strokes do need some work. Your contact needs to be better and the use of the torso and hips needs to be better on the forehand. The arm does too much work.

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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

The training yesterday at ZBTT wasn't anything special. But after i got my friends to play king of the table and the coach joined in. (For any who don't know k of the t is for when you have three people. One is king and serves. The others take turns receiving. If receiver wins two he or she becomes king. If you lose a point switch receivers. So the receivers change every point or two.)

So I guess the coach was having fun bc after my friends got tired he played sets with me for 30 or 40 minutes. Six or seven sets with a 2400 was worth the orice of admission by itself.

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Smile in the mirror. Do that every morning and you'll start to see a big difference in your life.

Yoko Ono

Yes, staying low is my long-standing issue. The reason I back up from the table is that my first topspin is usually a high-arcing one with the emphasis on spin. As the result, very often the blocked ball is kicking at me and I get suffocated. So I got used to taking a step back anticipating this.

What I am mostly concerned about is how to avoid the situation when my spinny opener gets smashed (e.g. last two points of the match).

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Tactics Enthusiast

Open to the backhand or the middle. The placement on both those loops was awful, straight into your opponent's fh power zone.

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Smile in the mirror. Do that every morning and you'll start to see a big difference in your life.

Yoko Ono

After the camp, I see so many things that are wrong. I'm not saying I've mastered them myself, but I see them now.

Hopefully this week I'll get to working through some stuff I have that will help you.

I see why Brett wanted to do the camp now. He literally couldn't take our crap play on video anymore and needed to show us some things before he could rest in p...India.

Yeah, I had a long post written out then realized it would miss the mark. Then settled on a shorter post that probably still did. And yes the longer post mentioned camp, lol. But no need for time travel and it was unavoidable.

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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 actually think there was a mix of strategy errors. The first thing is that too many balls go cross court. It gets too predictable. The second thing is that in general, there is no calculated effort to move the opponent. Finally if you don't want your opponent to smash your ball, keep it low. Looping upwards generates high balls. There has to be a forward and downward component after the lift.

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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 is a very funny post because there is some truth to it.

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ttEDGE.com Professional online coaching

There is some truth in here too.

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ttEDGE.com Professional online coaching

All I can say is...

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Tactics Enthusiast

As I've mentioned before, I always like to consider the player's level of experience. For example, this guy has clearly represented Russia before!

pgpg sees thing from the opponent's perspective and, because he is the smartest guy on the forum (except he is horrible with a TV remote), we must at least try to think like Peter a little. If an opponent has more experience, it's going to make the game tough.

Of course the opponent is going to adjust a little to your game, although I think your game deteriorated slightly throughout the match. Also, your readiness to play the next ball is an issue. After serving a reverse, you must be ready to make a topspin. After the opponent blocks the topspin, you must be ready to make 3 more.

Okay, the guy smashed a few loops to finish off the match. He also missed 10 heavy loops by a few feet. The opponent finished with 2 smashes but that wasn't the reason you lost the match. You actually served more faults than that and you missed a lot of random pushes.

I believe the reason you lost the match is you aren't ready to play the next shot. In a very decent post above, you were advised to stay lower during the point. I believe you are aren't staying low because you are waiting for your opponent to miss...at least to some extent. I'm also going to give your opponent some credit for pgpg. He played better as the match went on and he forced your into some worse play.

I think Russ/wilkinru is about to tell you to turn and move at the same time by showing your some camp video. I could be wrong. Turning and moving gives a player extra time and you need to do it more as that will solve some of the problems others are talking about.

Keep playing matches fastmover. You are getting better.

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I think the main reason why I am not ready is that I am very, very bad at anticipation. I don't see anything. When the ball is coming back, it is already too late for me to do anything. Hoping for the opponent to miss could be a part of the issue.

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Tactics Enthusiast

This makes sense.

In one of the Inner Game of Tennis books (there are 2), the author, Gallwey, talks about the value of tracking your own shot. When I was playing I found that tracking the flight of my own serve improved my 3rd ball. It helps because if you become too involved in the technique, you tend to lose adequate focus on the ball. In other words, if you focus a lot on technique, the world becomes blurry and you don't see enough ball and opponent cues. The result is clearly poor anticipation.

There are disadvantages in deliberately watching the ball and I've written about some in this thread. I believe I understand this topic at a few levels above what I can write. That said, try tracking the flight of your serve for a while and take some of the advantages.

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