OOAK Table Tennis Forum

How do you vary spin in your returns for various strokes using different rubber types (Inverted, Anti, Short Pips, Long Pips) ?

What exactly do you do to achieve maximum spin variation ? What I mean is such as arm movement, wrist movement, body movement etc
How do you disguise it ?

Which type of rubber (Inverted, Anti, Short Pips, Long Pips) gives one the ability to create most spin variation ? Second most, third most & least and why ?

I play with inverted only, so I'll talk about that.

One way to vary spin is to vary the type of contact you make with the ball. Take the common topspin drive. With inverted sandwich you usually hit the ball with a closed racket (i.e. the face of the racket points down) while stroking upwards. You can put more spin on the ball by closing the racket more and swinging upwards more, while putting less pressure on the ball. The logical extreme of this would be the "slow loop" - the stroke would be almost upwards, the contact would be a light brush. This results in a slow, arcing ball that has so much topspin in jumps forward when it hits the table, and is almost impossible for a lower-ranked player to return. (By the same token, it's also very difficult to execute.) The opposite, to produce less spin, would be to hit the ball with a more open racket face, while stroking forwards, using a heavy contact. You can apply this principle to other strokes as well - you can produce heavy backspin with a very open racket face, a horizontal stroke and a brush contact under the ball, or you can produce lighter backspin by using a less open racket face and a heavier contact.

Another way to vary (and disguise) spin is to mix top OR backspin with heavy sidespin. This is most often used when serving, (and confuses the heck out of players rated below 1000 or so). The easiest way to do this is to swing the bat like a pendulum, and contact the ball with a pretty open face - if you're a right hander, you're swiping the bat from right to left. Whether the ball will end up with backspin or topspin depends on which point of the arc contact occurs - if it occurs early in the stroke, the bat is headed down, and you have side-backspin, while if you contact the ball late in the stroke you get side-topspin.

Iskandar