Serving to Backhand

I am always amazed at how many players do the same type of serve over and Over and OVER - a serve from the backhand side crosscourt to the receiver's backhand. Watching this it also becomes obvious that receivers are so used to this type of serve that they have little trouble returning it. Why don't servers challenge the receiver with more variations?

First, there are good reasons to serve from the backhand side to the receiver's backhand. Here are a few:

1. By serving from the backhand side, it allows the server to follow-up against a weak return with his forehand.
2. Many players can't serve short effectively, and if they serve to the forehand, the serve will likely be looped. Most players loop better on the forehand than on the backhand.
3.  If they serve short to the forehand, they have to guard against a wide forehand angled receive, which leaves them open on the backhand side to a down-the-line receive.
4. Players have less reach on the backhand, and a breaking serve to the backhand can make them reach for the ball.

These are good reasons. However, they forget the most important goal of serving - to mess the opponent up. And you don't do that by giving him what he's used to over and over. Variation is key. You can serve crosscourt to the backhand with varying spin, but that's just one type of variation. Serving from and to different parts of the table are other ways of varying the serve to mess up an opponent.

Perhaps most important of all, most players have great difficulty returning short serves to the forehand effectively, and many have the same trouble with deep ones. Why not develop these serves and take advantage of this? Every opponent is different, so go in there armed with whatever might be needed.

Tip of the Week

Serving Short to Forehand and Long to Backhand.

JOOLA North American Teams

I spent the weekend mostly coaching at the Teams in Baltimore. Since my family lives on the west coast (Oregon and California), I spent my third straight Thanksgiving with Tong Tong Gong and his family - they served a vintage Thanksgiving meal with turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, green beans, cranberry juice, an incredibly good bread that's a family recipe, and a number of other items, including a few Chinese dishes. (They also had 17 relatives over.) I ate more at that meal than I have at any meal in years - and I mean this literally. Since they live only 20 minutes from the playing hall, I stayed at their house for the weekend, as I did the last two years. (I live an hour away.)

The number of teams was down a bit, from last year's 196 to 158. Part of this is because of the new Butterfly Teams in Columbus - see segment below. Some have written that that tournament had no effect on the Teams in Baltimore, but that's absurd - I know of at least 10-12 teams that regularly play in Baltimore that went to Columbus this year, and that's just the ones I know. I'd guess they lost at least 20 or more teams to Columbus. At $800/team, that's at least $16,000 in lost revenue.

While I'm never happy playing on cement, as most matches at the Teams (both Baltimore and Columbus), Open, and Nationals are played on, there's not a lot that can be done about that. However, I was happy to see (yes, that's a pun) that the lighting was greatly improved this year, as part of a renovation at the Baltimore Convention Center. The tournament ran on time, with two tables assigned to every team match we played. They also had much better prizes this year, giving out nice crystal prizes to the division winners that the players seemed happy with.

Teams Aftermath

It's official: I have a cold. I spent the last three days mostly coaching kids at the North American Teams, and somewhere along the way probably got exposed. I've been doing this blog for almost two years, and except for major holidays and when I'm out of town, I don't think I've missed a day. But since I normally take holidays off, and yet I did a blog on Thanksgiving, I'm taking today off both as a sick day and as my unofficial Thanksgiving holiday. I'll have turkey soup for lunch. (The Tip of the Week will also go up tomorrow.)

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Send us your own coaching news!

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

See my Thanksgiving links at the end of this blog.

Malware warnings all gone

It took a while, and I had to hire Sucuri Securities, but all the problems are over with Google blacklisting the site for malware that was long gone. Our long national nightmare is over. Or at least mine is. (One complication - apparently you might get a false malware warning if you visited the site recently. If so, clear your cache - sorry! - and it'll go away. That's what happened to me.)

No Blog Friday

I'll be coaching (and playing part-time) Fri-Sun at the North American Team Championships. Here's a preview picture!

Crystal Wang Enters the Stratosphere

Crystal Wang, age 10, is now rated 2245. This is by far the highest rating ever achieved by a girl at that age, and the second highest for anyone that age, boys or girls. The highest rating ever achieved by a 10-year-old is Kanak Jha two years ago at 2265. (And Crystal still has three months to gain 20+ points before she turns 11.) No one else has even been close to breaking 2200 at that age. For perspective, Ariel Hsing's highest rating as a 10-year-old was 2066, and Lily Zhang's was 1887 - and these two are now both our best junior girls and our best women as well.

Quick Note on Malware

Most or all of the malware warning problems I blogged about previously seem to be gone, but there might still be some traces left of whatever got the site blacklisted on Google. If you are reading this, you arrived here successfully, so all's well with the world.

Merit Badges for Table Tennis?

As noted in my blog on Monday, there's a great proposal on the USATT web page (by Diego Schaaf and Wei Wang) to award "merit badges" for achieving various rating levels. Read it over and see what you think.

I've always argued that players take ratings way too seriously, and that they are, in general, a very bad thing for junior players. (Here's my article Juniors and Ratings.) Because of ratings players (especially juniors) tend to focus on immediate results instead of long-term improvement; it makes them nervous when they play as they worry about their rating (and this nervousness becomes a habit); and it often causes them not to play tournaments so they can protect their rating (thereby losing valuable tournament experience and so falling behind their peers).

I've always found the bridge system to be intriguing. In bridge, you cannot go down in rating; you only go up. This gives incentive to play more as you try to go up. It's not as accurate a system, but it incentive to compete. Given a choice between an inaccurate system with zillions of players (such as the American Contract Bridge League with 160,000 members), or a more accurate one with 8000 (USATT says hi), I have 152,000 reasons to go with the less accurate system. (This is a simplistic version of a more complex argument I won't go into here.)

Malware Update

I got up early this morning so I could get the blog done and go straight to work on the U.S. Hall of Fame Program, with the hope that I could finish that soon and go back to work on the page layouts of "Table Tennis Tactics for Thinkers." The first thing I found was an email from Sucuri Securities that the site was now not only malware free, but was no longer blacklisted by Google. Yippee!!! Life was good again. I could go back to focusing on table tennis rather than various painful deaths for malware developers. 

So I clicked on the link I have that says "New blog entry," and immediately received a malware warning. (This was in Chrome.) After some checking, I found the malware warnings are erratic. On the main links to the left only "Chat room" gets a malware warning. (And I've never even used the chat room - I'll probably remove it soon.) When I do a search of the site (see field on top left) I get a malware warning. And of course if I try to do a new blog entry (like this one), I get a malware warning. I also can't seem to call the blog up at all in Explorer. (If you are reading this in Explorer, could you let me know?)

But there's apparently no malware, just the warnings from Google due to the blacklisting that seemingly won't go away. And yesterday there were a lot fewer reads than usual - obviously a lot of people are getting these false malware warnings. 

So I'm going to skip the blog today, and discuss the situation with Sucuri Securities. 

Tip of the Week

Backhand and Forehand Playing Distance.

Malware and Spammers and Hall of Fame Program, Oh My!
(And update on "Table Tennis Tactics for Thinkers")

I was really hoping to finish the page layouts before Thanksgiving for my new book, "Table Tennis Tactics for Thinkers" (previously titled "Table Tennis Tactics: A Thinker's Guide.") However, I'm in an ongoing battle with false malware warnings and spammers, plus I'm doing the USATT Hall of Fame Program booklet for the upcoming inductions at the USA Nationals. Plus, of course, the usual coaching duties, this blog, and little things like eating and sleeping and seeing the dentist this afternoon. (Pause for dramatic cringing.) So it's probably not going to happen. There's still a small chance it'll be done in time so I'll have copies for the Nationals, but probably not. (It's looking like it'll be about 240 pages and right about 100,000 words.)

Regarding the malware problem, the site has been scanned over and Over and OVER, and no spam has been found. You can scan it yourself in seconds at Sucuri Securities, and it comes up clean. (It's the removal that takes time, not the scanning.) The problem, as noted previously, is that there seems to be ongoing vestigial remnants of past malware warnings from a malware problem from over a month ago. The problem comes from Google, and it mostly affects the 40% of viewers who use Google Chrome as their browser. Some Chrome users have said they aren't having problems, and there have been some reports of warnings from Firefox, but none from those using Explorer. You should be able to just ignore the warnings.

We're undergoing problems with malware attacks. Three or four weeks ago the site was infected, but it was cleaned out, as verified by our server and Google itself. However, since then there were vestigial false reports of the malware problem somewhere in Google that caused Chrome to falsely list this site as malware infected. (If it had been infected, then other browsers would have picked up on it as well. The site was clean last night, and the problems with Google and Chrome a thing of the past (we thought), but this morning it's getting more malware reports. I'm not sure if it's actual malware or just more false reports. Until this is fixed, I'm going to skip the blog and work to resolve this problem. Have a good weekend; I have a feeling I won't. 

ADDENDUM - I'm still getting malware warnings on Chrome, but according to the Sucuri scanner, the site is malware free. See for yourself:

http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/

Incentive Table Tennis

Yesterday I made use of the infamous snickers bar incentive to help kids achieve specific goals. (Fun-size only.) 

The first was a 7-year-old girl, Linda. She's hit hundreds of forehands and backhands in a row, and can loop from both sides, but yesterday I challenged her to do something seemingly simple: hit 50 forehands in a row while moving side to side, covering about half the table. (That's a lot of table when you're seven.) She's done this before with multiball, but now we were going to do it live, where the ball doesn't come out exactly the same every time, and at a pretty good pace.

She struggled at first, kept missing in the 20s. (She does like to go fast!) Seeing her frustration, I told her I had a snickers bar in my playing bag that was hers if she could get 50. (I also made it clear it was a one-time offer.) Her eyes lit up, and she went at it again. Unfortunately, twice she made it to the 40s - once to 48 - and missed! Now she was too frustrated to concentrate. So I went to my bag and brought out the snickers bar, and put it on the table by the net. Her eyes went wide as she stared at the prize.

I said, "At the end of this session, one of us is going to eat that snickers bar right in front of the other. Which one of us is going to do that?" Having the candy bar right in front of her had a way of focusing her attention. She got 54 on her very next try. (Would have gotten more but the instant she reached 50 she was too excited to keep going much longer.)

Looping or Handling the Loop?

Is your game centered around looping or handling the loop? At the intermediate and advanced levels, the game is dominated by looping. Most players center their games around looping. But some take the reverse approach, and center their game around handling the loop. This includes both defensive players (choppers, fisher/lobbers, and blockers) as well as hitters.

Often players who center their games around handling the opponent's loop (or simply not letting him loop, at least not effectively) make the mistake of going too far, and never developing their own loop. Even if looping will never be their strength, it's a great variation at minimum, forcing the opponent to deal with one more thing. It's almost always the best way to deal with a deep backspin ball. Even players with short pips and hardbat can loop against backspin, and if the opponent has to adjust to both your drive and loop against backspin, he's got a lot to deal with.

Players who do loop often make the mistake of also going too far, centering their game around looping but not learning to deal with the opponent's loop very well, both in terms of keeping him from doing it (or doing it effectively) and from dealing with it when the opponent does loop. It always amazes me how many players with strong loops will serve or push long over and over, letting the opponent loop rather than serve or push short to set up their own loop.