OOAK Table Tennis Forum

I can read the direction of a side-spin serve & know where the ball will go if I hypothetically met the ball with racket-face parallel to net & vertical to ground (like the ball bouncing off a wall) and which angle I should angle my racket to counter the side-spin. But when these side-spins are combined with back-spin or top-spin, that is when I have trouble measuring the amount of top-spin or back-spin on the ball. I can return Pro level serves mostly because I have long-pips but I have great trouble returning using the spinny inverted side of my racket. I just step around even for the incoming serve very short and wide to my forehand & use my long-pips and this drives my opponents furious if they hate long-pips & they make me laugh with their reactions.

But I am amazed at how the pros seemingly effortlessly & seamlessly deal with any side-spin & overpower it regardless whatever else topspin or backspin and however heavy. If the ball comes long they just seem to loop the crap out of the ball both reversing opponents super-heavy side-spins or adding to it & also seemingly placing it whereever the hell on the table they want to place their returns. Even short balls they simply banana loop it.

How do they do this ? What are the secrets ?

Because in today's game if you just return the ball safely especially with your inverted side, you are basically dead meat. I want to be able to attack at least some these side-spin serves if not all of them.

No big secret, really. The reason they are pros and we aren't is not only can they serve serves that most of us can't read (yes, I have had firsthand experience.. ), they're also very good at reading spin that most of us can't read as well.

Iskandar

Practice.

The most difficult skill in table tennis is serve receive.

It is also the skill that the average player spends the least time practicing.

One thing I don't see enough is this type of serve. When I run into it...things get ugly for me quickly. Specifically pure side or side+top.

At first I want to destroy the ball, but my return goes really long. Then I back off but still want to attack aggressively, it still goes long.
Then I decide I want to just put the ball on the table, but then I don't do enough and it goes out to the side.
Then I decide to just control the ball and put it on the table, but then my opponent finishes with his 3rd ball attack and worse, half the time I mess this up by going in the net or long still. There is a sweet spot in dealing with these balls.

It can really become a disaster for me. It's for sure one thing that has lagged in my progression and will continue to keep me down the old rankings.

I accept I'm better at it than I was before but just how often does one really get to see these types of balls? Also extremely hard to recreate the slow ball with heavy spin with a robot, so my chance to drill it to death goes down.

I need to practice many many more of these. I've decided that I need to get someone to feed me them at least 1 hour a week.

One of the regulars at Weekend Social Doubles plays Chinese penhold. (He also learned many years ago, and still plays with bare wood on the back, which is ten times worse than the most reversal-ly long pips, but that's a different story... ) He's got some rather wicked side-plus-top-or-backspin serves, in both directions - easy to do with wrist movements in penhold. We've played against him for a while now so everyone's gotten more used to his serves (not to mention that 3 or 4 of the players now use long pips, which helps) but he still manages to bamboozle most of us. Except I've had VERY good luck in returning his serves. Not really sure how I do it, my returns are rarely fast or ultra short, but I seem to return most of his spin. Which causes problems - lots of problems - for his doubles partner. One thing he HASN'T learned is to NOT use those serves against long pips players, for the same reason he shouldn't use them against me.. Since I have to play against him fairly often I haven't told him about it, either..

None of this might have any bearing at the higher levels of table tennis - as a group we're playing U-1400 level table tennis. It's actually improved - I think the general level was around 1100-1200 3-4 years ago. These days we actually have some fast topspin rallies, all fairy close to the table because we've got space limitations.

Iskandar