OOAK Table Tennis Forum

I've been able to play for the last few weeks, as I have a table of my own, in a large, well-ventilated space.

I've played with four different players, a good number of times:

- Player One: Decent lower-division local league player
- Player Two: Decent upper-division local league player
- Player Three: Lower-half of top local league player
- Player Four: Solid nationally ranked player (300-400)

Having done an audit of my equipment, and also a tot up of how much I'd spent on rubbers in the last few years, I thought I'd do a little experiment. I bought some Friendship 729 Super FX for inverted, some Friendship 802, for SP purposes, and some Friendship 755 for LP purposes. I think they were about 10 pounds each. I put them on three identical blades, in various orders (double inverted, inverted/lp, sp/lp), and then also on a few other blades, for interest's sake.

These replaced Hellfire, or Dornenglanz or Dtecs (which I've used in varying degrees on the BH), and Tenergy or Donic/Andro Tensor on the FH.

I've played a large number of matches, and also done various drills against these four players, using just the cheap rubbers - nothing else. My results have been pretty much unchanged against when I used more expensive stuff, and against the top player, actually slightly better:

- vs Player One: unbeaten; lost a few when I have them a 5 or 6 point head start
- vs Player Two: unbeaten
- vs Player Three: unbeaten
- vs Player Four: getting one or two games out of five (ie lose 3-2, 3-1, but not won yet)

I'm now quite happy with 755 and 802, and really, I can't see any reason why I would change, unless purely for the fun of it...

Imagine how much more coaching, or how good a robot, or trips to residential camps I could have had over the last ... 8 years(!) I could have enjoyed if on day one I'd decided to stick with generic Friendship inverted/sp/lp, through thick and thin, and how familiar I'd be with exactly how it plays?

Food for thought.

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Yasaka Sweden Classic | 802 OX | C8 OX
Check out my blog - LordCope's Latest Learning Log - 10+ years of accumulate mistakes!

Hallelujah!

I've been mostly playing with a blade from a premade "bat" for the last 2 years. EJ didn't stop, but I still haven't found anything better.