CoachMcAfee wrote: Our club uses the Joola Prime ABS 3-star balls and they are well liked. Not really seen the issues you are having. In fact, we put out about 30 balls per table and mix the Prime 3-star with the Joola Magic ABS Training Balls almost no one looks at which ball they are using.
I did have one bad box of balls from Joola but that turned out to be my own fault as I left the box in the car for a few hours on a hot day. The balls actually expanded in size and were unplayable.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you guys are sponsored by Joola, are you not? With that in mind, and in light of the near-universal opinion of those balls I've heard from players at a variety of levels, I find it hard to believe that the Joola ABS balls are "well liked." Neither I nor any of the other members of my club have any particular reason to like or dislike these balls, other than their actual playing characteristics, and their playing characteristics have been discussed widely. There is only one player I know of in my club who actually likes those balls, and he only likes them in comparison to the XuShaoFa balls that he believes were more inconsistent in quality. The Joola balls may be more consistent than XuShaoFa, but they are consistently awful. I've described their precise playing characteristics in this thread above. The upshot is that, on the one hand, it's too easy to hit through their spin (they have this part in common with other ABS balls), but on the other hand (and this is the part that's distinct and distinctly bad), they lurch wildly in response to imparted spin, even when it's not actually that much spin, shooting downward on both topspin and underspin and shooting off to the side on sidespin. They do this much more than any other balls I've ever played with. I have never seen so many players flat-out miss the ball or have it hit their racket's bottom or side edge because they expected the ball to bounce higher or stay on a straighter trajectory than it did. The highest rated player at my club (2500+) simply refuses to play with them and uses the much better Nittaku ABS ball. The owner of the club, a former national champion in his country, also hates the balls. Another player with whom I've taken lessons sometimes, who is himself around 2300, has said on many occasions that these Joola balls make him think about stopping table tennis. And, of all the players around my level (around 2000) or a bit above or below, as I said, I know only one who likes the Joola balls, though even he thinks the Nittaku balls are much better.
iskandar taib wrote: So you are NOT using the training balls from Amazon, that posted by the initial poster?
No, definitely not.
iskandar taib wrote: The balls which had a strong tendency to bounce sideways with sidespin were actually the seamless ones (XuShaofa and the brands it OEMed for).
Never found that to be the case. With XuShaoFa, the quality control was not always great, so what you might've been experiencing is some of the asymmetrical balls behaving asymmetrically. But I've NEVER missed so many sidespin balls as I've missed after we started playing with Joola. There are at least two players at the club who, noticing the crazy response of these Joola balls to sidespin, have adapted their game and started incorporating a lot more sidespin in their loops and even thrown in more sidespin lobs. They never did this with the XuShaoFa ball. I also notice that when I do sideswipes with my long pips against these balls, I generate a LOT more misses (air-balls) on the ensuing loop attempts.
I have no ax to grind with Joola, have happily used some of their equipment (like the Joola Badman OX) in the past with great success, enjoy their annual teams tournament and generally don't have any issue with the company, but I do think Joola should be absolutely embarrassed in selling a shoddy product like this.
iskandar taib wrote: There are two manufacturers in China who make ABS balls - DHS and Double Fish (and one, maybe two in Japan). Joola doesn't make their own balls. So I find it hard to believe the Joola balls are so different from the other ABS balls.
I don't know the ins and outs of the manufacturing process, but the other ABS balls I've played with extensively are the DHS ABS ball and the Nittaku ABS ball. I don't have these issues with those balls. Perhaps there are other balls that play just like the Joola. If so, they should also be pulled from the market and replaced with something a bit more "professional."
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(Those look like the old 3 star celluloid balls... the REAL ones... there are people on this forum who'd prefer to play with those rather than with plastic balls...)