December 3, 2015

Ma Long's Serve and Other Top Ten Players
In my blog on Nov. 24, I pointed out how blatantly illegal world champion Ma Long's serve was, and in particular how he illegally hid it with his head so the opponent couldn't see contact. (Here's the five-picture sequence.) This is now mostly the norm at the world-class level. However, since that time several questions keep coming up, both in online forums and via email. Specifically, some have argued:

  1. This was a fast, down-the-line serve, and so isn't his normal serve, and so doesn't show that he hides his serve normally.
  2. That he only occasionally hides his serve.
  3. That when he hides his serve, he usually does it with his arm, not his head.

So let's look at the video and see what's really happening. For this, we'll use the video of the Men's Singles Final (12:47, with time between points removed) earlier this year when he became World Champion. We'll only use pictures and video in the three games where he's on the far side (where it can be clearly seen). The video sometimes zooms in from the side when he's serving, and so you can't see clearly if he's hiding the serve on those point, so I've skipped those serves. In the end, there were exactly 21 serves on the far side where you could see whether he was hiding the ball or not. Below are links to all 21, both the video and a still image.

So what do we learn by watching the video? 

  1. In 20 of the 21 serves he clearly hid the ball with his head. The only exception was his very last serve, when he was leading 10-3 championship point, where the serve was borderline hidden, but not clearly hidden.
  2. In all 21 serves his arm was out of the way before contact. He never hid the ball with his arm, though he did not remove it immediately after tossing the ball up as the rules required. (He and others do this as a distraction to the umpire to pull attention away from the actual hiding of the ball with the head.)
  3. If you watch the points that are shown from the side, or the ones when he's serving on the near side, you can see he's using the same motion – they are almost for certain also all hidden with the head.

Conclusions? Ma Long illegally hides the ball with his head essentially every point, but apparently never with his arm, which is pulled out of the way before contact, though not always immediately after tossing the ball up.

Here are the 21 serves. In each case there is a frozen image of the serve where the ball is either hidden behind his head, or (in a few cases) is seen falling behind or from behind his head. They are listed by and linked directly to the time on the video when the serve occurred.

The next question is whether other world-class players hide their serve in this way. Here's the top ten men in the world, with a still image and video, showing that all but Boll regularly hide their serve illegally, and none were called for it in these matches that I saw. All of these are from the 2015 World Championships except the one of Chuang Chih-Yuan, which is from the 2015 Men's World Cup. (Couldn't find one of him at the Worlds.)

The following eight players hid the ball over and over with their heads: Ma Long, Fan Zhendong, Dimitrij Ovtcharov, Zhang Jike, Jun Mizutani, Marcos Frietas, Chuang Chih, and Fang Bo. Freitas also hid the ball with his arm. Xu Xin hid the ball with his body and arm. Ovtcharov sometimes serves backhand, and those serves aren't hidden. Only Timo Boll didn't seem to hide his serve, but they were mostly borderline, with the ball traveling just in front of his face. Most of Fang Bo's serves seemed borderline, but some were obviously hidden. About half of Fan Zhendong's serves seemed borderline visible. (These players sometimes have different serving motions, so you can't get final conclusions from one serve, so I invite others to do their own investigations – but the below is a good representation and shows that nine of the ten hide their serves, mostly using the head to do so.)  

  1. Ma Long: picture video
  2. Fan Zhendong picture video
  3. Xu Xin: picture video - his serve was hidden by entire body and arm.
  4. Dimitrij Ovtcharov: picture video
  5. Zhang Jike: picture video
  6. Jun Mizutani: picture video
  7. Timo Boll: picture video - his serves were all borderline hidden by his head, but none were clearly hidden.
  8. Marcos Freitas: picture video - he hid it with both head and arm.
  9. Chuang Chih-Yuan: picture video
  10. Fang Bo: picture video

Conclusion: The top ten players in the world overwhelmingly hide their serves illegally, almost always with their heads, and aren't called on it. Few hide it with their arms, though few pull their arms out immediately, as the rules require, instead pulling it out as the ball comes down. As I've shown in my Net Visibility Rule Proposal, this serving motion where you hide the ball with the head, with the free arm pulled out as the ball comes down as a distraction (but not actually used to hide the ball) has spread worldwide, and nearly all of the top cadet (under 15) boys in the U.S. now use this illegal serve – yes, coaches are forced to teach them to cheat if they want to compete without being at a large disadvantage.

World Junior Championships
They are taking place right now in Vendée, FRA, Nov. 29 - Dec. 6. USA already has the bronze in Junior Girls' Teams (Coach Lily Yip, and players Prachi Jha, Amy Wang, Crystal Wang and Grace Yang), while the Junior Boys' Team (Coach Shigang Yang, and players Sharon Alguetti, Krish Avvari, Kanak Jha, and Jack Wang) came in #13. They are now they are playing singles and doubles. Here are some links:

Jean-Michel Saive Announces Retirement
Here's the ITTF article about the former world #1.

Ask the Coach Show
Episode #198 (29:03) - Receiving serves in the "old days" (and other segments).

Junior Table Tennis Physical Training
Here's the video (51 sec) – I think this is in Germany.

High Performance Committee Minutes
Here are two recent reports from the USATT Minutes & Actions Page

The Winning Edge
Here's Issue Two of the new magazine of Table Tennis England. Here's Issue One.

Nathan Hsu Crashes Through Barriers
Here's the video (35 sec, shown from two angles). This happened this past weekend at the North American Teams.

On the Floor and on the Run
Here's the video (38 sec, including slow motion replay) of this great junior rally.

Gandalf Fights a Ping-Pong Ball
Here's the picture from the movie. "When Gandalf has his big stand-off scene with the Balrog, Ian McKellen is actually acting to a ping pong ball." Alas, the original image, with actual ping-pong ball, doesn't seem to be available. (Of course, Frodo was Lord of the Ping.)

Foot Pong
Here's the video (8 sec).

Water Pong
Here's the picture. (Here's the non-Facebook version.)

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mjamja Thu, 12/03/2015 - 21:06

Larry,

In the last picture in the "five picture sequence" of Ma Long  it appears that the ball does reappear below his head before he makes contact.  If that is the case then the racket contact with the ball should be visible. 

With that in mind, is the receiver better off watching the ball during the toss until contact or does he get a better read if he ignores the ball and focuses on the point where the racket will emerge from behind the body before contact?

If a server is not hiding the ball, but is hiding the racket until just before contact should the receiver follow the ball or focus on picking up the racket as it comes out from behind the body?

Mark

 

 

Profile picture for user Larry Hodges
Larry Hodges Fri, 12/04/2015 - 03:16

>In the last picture in the "five picture sequence" of Ma Long  it appears that the ball does reappear below his head before he makes contact.  If that is the case then the racket contact with the ball should be visible. 

In the last picture he's already contacted the ball with a forehand pendulum serve - contact was behind the head, roughly around photos 3-4. (It's hard to know exactly when because that's the point - it's hidden.) That's his racket following through toward his body in photo 5, but with a short motion. 

If someone does hide the racket but not the ball, then follow the ball until you see the racket. In this case it'll throw you off at first since you aren't used to it, but you'll get used to it. It's still tricky as you are used to seeing the ball all the way to the ball. If you can't see the direction of the racket before contact, or until the split second before contact, it's hard to react properly to it. Hope this helps!