It's almost a cliché. I hand someone a box of balls to practice their serves. They grab a ball and serve, grab a ball and serve, grab a ball and serve, and so on, all done with the speed and thoughtfulness of firing a machine gun. Then they wonder why their serves aren't any good. There's a lot more to developing great serves than rapid-fire serve practice, where the goal seems to be to empty the box of balls as rapidly as possible. So what should you do differently?

First and foremost, learn the proper way to execute great serves. You can do this by watching players with great serves, or a coach or top player can show you. It's pointless to practice your serves if you don't know how to do them properly.

Once you have at least some idea of what you need to practice, get that box of balls and go to the table. It's generally best done alone; having someone return your serve can be a distraction, especially when you are learning a new serve. (But sometimes you want someone to return your serves, so you can get feedback, and to see how much difficulty they have.)

Grab a ball and get ready to start. You might want to first hold a ball in your fingers (tightly) and practice the actual contact you are going to make with the ball. (But don't rub the sponge into the held ball too hard or you'll damage your sponge.)

Now go into your serving position, and come to a complete stop. The rules actually state that you must start the serve with the ball resting freely on the palm of your stationary free hand--but there's a more important reason to do this than complying with the rules.

This is where you visualize the serve in your head. Don't just grab a ball and mechanically serve it; from now on, never serve a ball without first seeing it done exactly as you want it done, in your head. This is what the top players do. Visualization is one of the best tools in sports, and for serving, it's especially good since there are no outside influences--it's just you and the ball. In your head, see how you swing at the ball, the contact, and the entire trajectory of the serve as you want it.

After you've visualized the serve in your head, go ahead and serve. Don't try to guide it; let the subconscious take over. (You should do this for all table tennis shots.) Let go; you're just an observer. Watch the ball as it leaves your racket. Did it bounce on each side of the table at the spot as you visualized? Did it bounce low to the net as you visualized? Did it go at the speed you visualized? Did it have the spin you visualized? Did it go short or long as you visualized? Am I emphasizing the word visualize enough for you to make clear its importance?

Now visualize the next serve, making corrections for what went wrong in the previous one, and emphasizing the aspects that went right. You are now well on your way to developing great serves. You should also be tired and sweaty pretty soon--serving is a very physical motion. You can't make the ball spin at extremely high speeds if you can't get your racket moving at extremely high speeds, like a whip.

Does any of this sound boring? It shouldn't. If you just grab a ball and serve, grab a ball and serve, grab a ball and serve, that's like working an assembly line at a factory. That's boring. But serving is the trick part of table tennis, and practicing your serves, and all the tricky, deceptive things you can do with them, while revving up and varying the spin, is like practicing a magic trick. That's not boring, and neither should practicing serves. 

(This is an excerpt from "Table Tennis Tactics for Thinkers.")

This grip was named for and popularized by five-time U.S. Men’s Singles Champion Dan Seemiller, who was ranked in the top thirty in the world in the late 1970s. He was followed by Eric Boggan, who reached top twenty in the world. No other U.S.-trained player has come close to these rankings in the sponge era (since the 1950s). Four of the five U.S. team members at the 1983 World Championships used this grip - Dan Seemiller, his brother Rick Seemiller, Eric Boggan, and 1983 Pan Am Men’s Singles Gold Medalist Brian Masters. (All four are in the U.S. Table Tennis Hall of Fame.) The grip is sometimes called the American grip, but is more commonly called the Seemiller grip. (Here's a video of Dan Seemiller, the lefty, in the final of the 1989 LA. Open.) 

The grip is sort of a variation of the shakehands grip, with the top of the racket rotated to the left so that the index finger curls around the side of the racket. The forehand is played about the same, but on the backhand the arm rotates about so that the same side is used on the forehand and backhand. Despite its promising start, the grip never came close to the popularity of shakehands or penhold, and in recent years fewer and fewer players use the grip. However, you will face these players in tournaments (especially in the northeast U.S.) and need to be ready.

Like shakehands and penhold, the Seemiller grip also has its backhand and forehand variations, except here it is more extreme. If the top of the racket is rotated to the left, it is a backhand grip, as used by Eric Boggan and Brian Masters, which weakens the forehand loop. If the racket is rotated to the right (almost becoming a regular shakehands grip), it is a forehand grip, as used by Dan and Rick Seemiller, which weakens the backhand.

The Seemiller grip has four major advantages. It is probably the best grip for blocking, especially on the backhand. There is very little weakness in the middle - in fact, the grip is at its best there. It gives a very natural wrist snap on forehand loops against backspin. And since only one side of the racket is used, and because the racket is easy to flip with this grip, it allows a player to have an off-surface on selected shots, usually antispin, though some use long pips. A player with this grip can flip to use that side as a variation, and then flip back to the regular surface, usually inverted. (All four of the U.S. team members mentioned above used antispin on the reverse side, inverted on the other.)

The disadvantages are that the wrist can make it difficult to play the corners (and so players with this grip often have trouble with players who play to the wide corners); it limits the backhand mostly to close-to-the-table blocking and hitting, with a very limited backhand loop; and it can be difficult to counterloop with this grip.

Because of the lack of a strong backhand loop, deep serves and pushes to the backhand can give this grip problems, unless the player has very fast footwork and can play the forehand from the backhand over and over. (Others, like Eric Boggan, learned to hit backspin serves with his antispin side, and then flipped back to inverted for the next shot.)

Some players with the Seemiller grip can be absolute walls on the backhand, and it makes no sense trying to overpower that side - but if you attack the forehand side first (and perhaps force them a step off the table) and then come back to the backhand, then the backhand wall might crumble. The grip is weaker from off the table, and like most shots, is less consistent when you have to move.

Most players with the Seemiller grip use the off surface to return serves, especially short ones. Some have the ability to quickly judge the depth of the incoming serve, and use anti against short serves, inverted to loop or otherwise attack long serves. If they use the anti to return most serves, serve deep, and you should get a relatively weak return or an erratic anti attack. Often a deep serve to the forehand is especially effective. If they try to flip the racket based on the depth of your serve, mix in short spinny serves and fast, long serves, and watch them struggle to flip their racket appropriately - it’s not easy! It is very important not to telegraph your serves - players like this are very good at picking up small cues, so try to use the exact same motion for both short and long serves, at least until contact.

How do you get maximum power on your shots? Many players at the beginning/intermediate levels might say "swing hard!" But that's the worst thing you can do. Until your muscles are trained properly, swinging hard means spastically using a few muscles but not all of them. It also means putting less weight into the shot. Both cases result in either wimpy shots that any well-trained kid would laugh at, or sometimes powerful shots with no control.

Watch a baseball pitcher with a good fastball. (You can find many at Youtube.com) Many of them can break 100mph, and nearly all are in the 90s. Watch these flamethrowers; are they swinging hard, or are they swinging smart? I think you can see the answer; the most powerful throwers don't seem to put full effort into their pitch; in fact, their throws seem effortless. And they're able to hit a rather small target from over 60 feet away.

Now watch the top table tennis players, and you'll see the same. The shots of the most powerful players often seem effortless. Meanwhile, watch some intermediate players as they swing as hard as they can, usually with less power and always with less consistency. Many spastically use one or two muscles at full power while losing the power of everything else, including their body weight rotating into the shot. Their shots spray all over the court as you cannot control a muscle spastically contracting at full power.

A key here is that these baseball pitchers and table tennis players not only have power, but they have control. How do they do it? The secret is they use their full bodies in a fluid motion that rotates everything smoothly into the shot, leading to power and control. It starts from the legs, then the hips, then the waist, then the shoulders, then the arm, and finally the wrist, which effortlessly snaps into the ball like the tip of a whip. All these muscles are engaged as the player accelerates into the shot, creating the seemingly effortless power of a pitcher or top table tennis player.

It is the addition of all these smooth muscle contractions and rotations, in the proper sequence (from bottom to top, and roughly from big muscles to small) that gives great power and control. So here's a good rule: never swing at 100%. Swing smoothly, using the full body, at perhaps 70-80% full power, and watch the power and control shot way up. 

Backswing, forward swing . . . backswing, forward swing . . . backswing, forward swing . . . when hitting forehand to forehand or backhand to backhand, how many of you get into this pattern, whether hitting or looping? The problem is you are doing something you should never do in a match, so why would you want to practice it? There are three parts to a swing: Backswing, forward swing, and the often forgotten return to ready position. A player would almost never go directly from his follow through to backswinging. 

Beginners and even relatively advanced players often warm up and practice as if there were only two parts to the swing, and it often costs them when it becomes habit. Often in real rallies they are set only for forehand or backhand, not both, because of this lack of return to ready position. If they don't do it in practice, why would they do it in a match? In reality, these players do tend to sort of return to ready after each shot, but either more slowly or not all the way, and so they often aren't ready for the next shot. For example, they'll hit or loop a backhand, and automatically bring their racket back after the follow through as if they were going to play another backhand, when of course they might be playing a forehand. And vice versa for forehands. 

Instead, make a practice of returning to ready after each shot when practicing. On both forehands and backhands, this basically means the racket goes through a triangle, starting from the ready position: Backswing (bring racket back); forward swing (bring racket forward and up), and return to ready position (racket drops down and back to where it started, ready for the next shot). Usually these are essentially continuous, so there might not be any stop at the ready position; you go straight through the triangle, with the move to the ready position essentially the first half of the backswing, though it could continue into a backswing for either forehand or backhand. So drop the linear strokes and learn the triangle!

These days it seems like everyone's trying to be like everyone else. That's a pretty successful way of getting good, if you copy the top players. But many are missing the benefits of doing something different. Give your opponent a different look, at least on some shots, and guess what? He might begin to struggle. This doesn't mean changing your whole game to some unorthodox mess; it means developing certain "pet shots" that are different than the norm. They give you more variation on certain shots than if you only have "orthodox" shots.

For example, a few years ago penholder Wang Hao and shakehanders Ma Long and Zhang Jike, all from China, showed up on the world scene flipping short serves to their forehands with their backhands (with banana flips, i.e. mini backhand loops over the table with topspin and sidespin), and all three reached #1 in the world. Few had done this before, and now seemingly everyone at the higher levels is doing it. Or check out videos of Dimitrij Ovtcharov of Germany, world #6 and the #1 European, and his unorthodox backhand serve from the middle of the table. Or former world #1 Timo Boll, also of Germany, who often switches to a forehand grip for looping with extreme inside-out sidespin loops.  

Some, of course, naturally do something different, by having a non-inverted surface, a different grip (Seemiller grip, or even penhold grip for some, since many aren't used to playing that), an unorthodox stroke (not usually good unless it's just as a variation), or even something as simple as being left-handed. But for most players, you'll want to do something "different" while sticking to your normal shakehands inverted on both sides game. And there are lots of ways. Below are ten examples - and I do all of these on occasion, though less now than when I was an active tournament player and honed these variations by actually using them regularly. Pick out one or two, and give them a try!

1. Serve from forehand side. Nearly everyone serves from the backhand corner these days, with a few tomahawk serves from the forehand. Throw in a few forehand pendulum or backhand serves from the forehand side. The surprise factor will often make up for your starting a bit out of position.
2. Serve short sidespin to the forehand. So many players serve over and Over and OVER to the middle and backhand it's almost silly, and when they do serve short to the forehand, it's a simple backspin ball. Instead, learn to serve short to the forehand with sidespin that pulls the ball toward your forehand, making it awkward for the opponent to return the ball down the line. You can do this with a backhand serve, a reverse pendulum serve, or a forehand tomahawk serve. Or do it with a regular forehand pendulum serve.
3. Slow, spinny loop. Most people these days loop either hard or harder. Try letting the ball drop a bit more, and go for a super-spinny slow one. If it goes deep, it'll drive blockers crazy. If it lands short, it'll drive counter-loopers crazy.
4. Dead loop. Fake spin, and instead give a dead loop. You sell this by using an exaggerated follow-through right after contact (including a big wrist snap), making it seem spinny.
5. Dead push. Push without spin, but with an exaggerated follow through to fake spin.
6. Sidespin push. Come across the ball as you push. This is especially easy on the backhand, with a right-to-left motion (for righties), with the ball breaking to the right. It's especially effective wide to the right, breaking into a righty's opponent's backhand.
7. Ginzo push. Most players push to keep the ball in play. Throw in a few super-ginzo (i.e. extremely heavy) pushes, and watch opponents struggle. It's easier if you take the ball a little later for this, but advanced players can do this quick off the bounce.
8. Dead block. Block it dead, chop block, sidespin block - these will frustrate many opponents and set you up for a conventional attack. They are especially effective and easy on the backhand side.
9. Countering change-of-pace. Rather than bang every ball in a fast counter-hitting rally, sometimes hit one soft. Either keep it low and short to the net, or deep on the table.
10. Flatter flip. Most players flip short balls with topspin. (It's called a flick in Europe.) Sometimes try a flatter one. Hit it a bit softer since you don't have topspin to pull it down, but not too soft. (Recently I've seen a number of top players experimenting with this variation.)