March 6, 2013

How Many Serves Are There?

There are a lot of possible serves in table tennis. How many? Let's look at the ways to classify serves.

  1. Spin. There are 27 types of spin. These include topspin and backspin (they are opposites of each other), sidespin in both directions, corkscrewspin in both directions, and combinations of these. (Yes, you can serve three of these at once, such as a topspin-sidespin-corkscrewspin serve.) There is also no-spin, which counts as one of the 27. There are also all the variable amounts of spin, but we won't get into that here. (For more info on spin, including the 27 types of spin, see my article Everything You Wanted to Know About Spin - But Were Afraid to Ask.)
  2. Placement. You can serve wide to the forehand, wide to the backhand, to the middle, and everywhere else. However, we'll call it three locations, even though there are many more in reality.
  3. Depth. Most serves should go either very long (first bounce near the endline), half-long (so second bounce would be near the endline), short (so the second bounce would be over the table) or very short (so it would bounce more than three times on the table). We'll call it four depths.
  4. Serving Position. Most players serve from the backhand corner. However, there are also advantages to serving from the middle backhand (so to have a better angle short to the forehand), from the middle, and from the forehand side. We'll call it four places to serve from, although there are in reality an infinite number of places to serve from.  
  5. Serving Motion. There are many. Here are the main ones - and this doesn't take into account the huge number of deceptive motions that can be made before or after contact. But most serves come under one of these four categories, with which you can create any of the 27 spins:
  • Forehand Pendulum (including Reverse Pendulum)
  • Tomahawk (including Reverse Tomahawk)
  • Backhand (including Reverse Backhand)
  • Windshield Wiper (left or right)

So we have 27 types of spin, 3 placements, 4 depths, 4 serving positions, and 4 serving motions. This gives us 27 x 3 x 4 x 4 x 4 = 5184 types of serves. But we haven't even talked about speed (it complicates things, since you mostly vary the speed on long serves), not to mention the amount of spin, varying placements and serving positions, as well as all the deceptive service motions, as well as other serving motions not listed here. So there are in reality far more than 5184 types of serves - infinitely more. But if you serve an average of 20 times per match, this should last you about 2592 matches before you have to start recycling your serves. If you play ten matches per week, this'll last you 21.6 months. If you run out of serves, come see me on Christmas in 2014.

Snow and Local Schools

A big snowstorm hit us early this morning, closing all local schools and completely befuddling my dog, who still can't understand why the outside world sometimes chooses to be cold white stuff. It's supposed to snow most of the day, with up to 10 inches, though it looks like it'll be considerably less - we'll see. With schools closed, some of our local juniors may head off to the club later today. Perhaps I'll join them.

Table Tennis for Thinkers Ad

Here's the one-page color ad that will appear in the upcoming USA Table Tennis Magazine. Next step - finding someone to do a book review.

Book Signing

This Friday at 7PM I will be doing a book signing at the Maryland Table Tennis Center, in Germantown, MD, USA. I will be selling and signing four of my books - hope to see you there! All books will cost $15, with a Special - buy the Tactics book, get a copy of the Tales & Techniques book for only $5! Here's the info flyer. Below are the books - later I hope to go back to selling Steps to Success and Tales & Techniques online.

Table Tennista

Here are recent new articles there, some with video.

Joao Monteiro

Here's a video (1:40) showing Joao Monteiro of Brazil (world #62) in slow motion.

Racket Sports Juggler

Here's a video (2:06) of a juggler who specializes in racket sports juggling. He juggles balls and rackets from table tennis, tennis, badminton, and squash. Watch for his ping-pong paddle juggling, and his juggling with a ping-pong paddle vertically balanced on his head.

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I am very confused by this equation: 27 x 3 x 4x 4 x 7= 75,936 types of serves. How is it possible to get 27 different spins from all of the 7 serves? I mean with the tomahawk serves, is it even possible to do a serve considered a tomahawk that has the opposite type of sidespin? I thought that was what the reverse tomahawk serve was? Please explain.

In reply to by PipProdigy

Yikes! You are correct. I've fixed it, changing the serving motions into four main ones (combining forehand pendulum serve with reverse forehand pendulum serve, since they are just opposites of each other and you can do all 27 spins with one of these two motions). One coincidence - with the new numbers, you'll be able to serve new serves over and over until exactly Christmas 2014!