Equipment (Racquets, Rubber, Tables, etc)
From TableTennisTraining
Contents |
Paddle/Racquets/Blades Types
Table tennis blades are made with a variety of different types of woods, carbon fibers, and other composite materials. The common handle styles include round, anatomic grip, and flared (this is the most commonly used grip). Before selecting a blade, you will need to decide how you want to grip your bat.
Shakehands Bats
Chinese Penholder Bats
These are similar to shakehands blades but with a shorter handle.
Japanese Penholder Bats
These blades are flatter and more square and there's often a raised piece of wood or cork for a finger rest.
Pistol-Grip Bat
A relatively new (and rare) style bat is the "pistol grip" blade that I've been playing with for just over a year now.
Rubber
There are a seemingly infinite number of brands of rubber for table tennis. Don't let all the brands confuse you, the most significant thing about rubber is which of the categories below that it belongs to. Within a given category, the differences are typically not that huge.
If you have the time and money, I recommend you try playing with all the major types of rubber below. Not only is it fun to play different styles, it will also give you a better understanding and appreciation of the techniques and skills required by each. Many players will disparage the less-commonly used, so-called "junk rubbers" such as long-pips and anti-spin, and these rubbers can wreak frightful havoc against a player who is not familiar with them, but they do require a fair amount of technique to use properly and trying to use them yourself will probably give you more respect for the players who choose to use them.
Inverted
This is the standard spinny rubber that is predominantly used in modern competitive table tennis. This type of rubber is often reverted to as "Inverted" because the pips side of the rubber is turned inwards towards the bat, resting on a thin layer of sponge, leaving a smooth top sheet with a high coefficient of friction. Be aware, however, that not all smooth top sheets are spinny: the cheap bats with rubber that come with "starter" table tennis sets generally do not enable strong spins to be generated and there also exist anti-spin rubbers that are nearly frictionless.
Inverted rubber is the preferred weapon of virtually all loopers, but it is also used by the majority of other styles of players. While it is possible to loop with other types of rubbers (e.g. long pips), it is difficult to generate the high levels of spin that make loops deadly.
Soft Spinny
Loopers (especially US and European players) tend to prefer soft, somewhat cushiony, rubbers that allow a long friction contact time and hence more control over spin and placement of loops.
Hard Spinny
These harder rubbers are generally used by players who prefer to counterhit or smash when possible instead of looping. They are typically of Chinese manufacture and more commonly used by players who like to play a close-to-the-table fast attack game (especially the traditional chinese penholder style).
Short Pips Out
Short pips rubbers are primarily for attack players who like to flat hit. They are especially good for flat hitting against balls with spin (either underspin or topspin). Short pips should generally be paired with a light offensive blade that allows for very quick attacks. Their biggest weakness is they cannot generate much spin, so it's nearly impossible to use short pips to attack any ball that is too low to have a straight-line shot to the other side of the table. So generally short-pips players will pick-hit attack with their short pips side and push or block with it at other times. Short pips play is very demanding physically, requiring fast footwork and fast hands. Most short-pips players stay close to the table where they can get good angles of attack and can catch the ball before it begins to drop due to gravity. One of the most common forms of short-pips player uses a traditional chinese penhold style and forehand flat kills nearly any ball that bounces even a hair too high.
Update: there are now some fairly spinny short pips rubbers on the market. These new short pips react like a slighly slower and less spinny version of an inverted rubber, allowing true loop strokes.
Medium Pips Out
As you might expect, medium pips fall somewhere between short pips and long pips in how they hit. They operate best in the hands of a "patient attacker" who is very comfortable keeping a rally going with good placement shots and then attacking when their opponent makes a mistake. They have some potential for spinning the ball, they counter pretty well, and blocking, pushing, and chopping with medium pips can throw off many opponent's timing.
Long Pips Out
These rubbers have longer, thinner pips that stick out from the surface of the rubber. Long pips are primarily used by defensive players to chop balls so that they are difficult to attack and to wear out their attacking opponent. The ITTF has placed some restrictions on the length of these pips relative to their thinness. For example, the longer the pip, the wider the radius of the pip has to be. The intent of these restrictions is to prevent the rubber from generating extremely random returns that are difficult to handle by the pip player's opponent. Most commonly, these rubbers are used on the backhand in conjunction with a smooth rubber on the forehand, but some players will twiddle their bat so that they can hit with either rubber on both forehand and backhand strokes.
Frictionless Long Pips Out
These rubbers were recently banned by the ITTF, so they are no longer allowed for ITTF and USATT sanctioned tournament play. The strong point of these rubbers is they allow a defensive player to place close to the table and utilize their opponent's strong spins against them (the frictionless tops of the pips create an Anti-Spin effect, similar to that of smooth anti-spin rubbers). Unlike smooth anti-spin rubbers, these rubbers have more ability to generate spin as the pips can be bent during a stroke to produce a friction contact with the ball.
Anti-Spin
The traditional anti-spin rubber is a nearly frictionless inverted (smooth surface) rubber. Therefore, it is nearly impossible to generate significant spin with these rubbers. However, since they are relatively frictionless, any existing spin on the ball from an opponent's shot will typically remain on the ball when returned to the opponent. These rubbers are called anti-spin because they return the opposite spin in this situation than is returned by the more standard Inverted spin rubbers. For example, when a topspin loop shot is returned by a inverted rubber, the return ball will come back to the looper as topspin (as the rotation of the ball was reversed by the spinny rubber). An anti-spin rubber, however, doesn't change the rotation of the ball, so the blocked topspin shot comes back to the looper as underspin. This can be very disconcerting when first encountered, and it generally takes some practice to adjust for this behavior. For this reason, if you're planning to play in tournaments, it's a good idea to find someone to practice against who uses an anti-spin rubber (the same goes for long-pips and short pips rubbers as well).
Many of anti-spin rubbers will also absorb a lot of the force of the ball, making it easier to perform soft blocks against strong attacks and to make soft drop shots and pushes. This is similar to the slow-down effect produced by pips-out rubbers.
Old Worn-Out Rubber
As rubber gets older, it starts to lose it's spin. So don't necessarily trust you know how your opponent's rubber will react just because you recognize the rubber type.
As an extreme version of this, rubber left out in the sun can harden and become nearly frictionless like anti-spin. According to recent rule changes, this is now an illegal rubber, since the original characteristics of the rubber have significantly changed, but in the heat of a match, this kind of thing can easily slip past you. So if you're in an important match and you're playing with an unfamiliar opponent, it's probably better to ask in a friendly way to test their rubber before you start the match.
Balls
Official table tennis balls must be 40mm in size, but for some reason the older 38mm balls are still available, so be careful when buying balls from department stores! Balls are rated from 1-3 stars, with 1 star balls typically only used as practice balls or too fill a robot. Just about any tournament will require the use of 3 star balls.
Tables
If you're strapped for cash and you're looking for a cheap table for home or a small club, craigslist is a great place to buy used tables. I've picked up several tables this way for my local club.
If your club is in a location where the tables need to be put away after each session, I recommend one of the light "rollaway" tables. My personal favorite can be folded up with the net still on the table, so it's extremely fast for setup and takedown.
Different brands of tables do tend to have different playing characteristics, so when possible, it's a good idea to play on a new type of table before playing a tournament on them. The major variation I've seen is in how much the spin of a ball "bites" into the table (basically a function of how frictionless the table surface is). When a ball hits a table with low friction, it tends to bounce off a little quicker and spin doesn't affect the trajectory of the ball as much.
Training Robots
Table tennis robots can be used to practice strokes and footwork. The robots shoot balls in a method similar to that used by the tennis robots which most people have probably seen on television at least. Table tennis robots do not actually return balls, as someone might first imagine when hearing the term "robot".
Unless you are in an area where there are plenty of players to practice with, a robot makes a good supplement to regular play, since the robot can always play without requiring you to schedule a playing time! I particularly like to use a robot to practice a new shot before trying it on a real person, since the robot will keep feeding me good balls no matter how bad I flub the shot and it doesn't get frustrated by my repeated misses. My general training style is to first practice the new technique with the robot for a few days, then drill with a person for a few days, then start using the technique in game play with weaker opponents, then finally introduce it in to competitive matches once I'm comfortable with the shot.
Surprisingly, another useful way to use a robot is to practice service with the robot turned off, since they often have good netting systems for collecting the balls you serve into a tray on the opposite side of the table for easy pick up.
Newgy
Newgy robots are the lowest cost robots and are probably the most popularly sold robot in the world. It only takes a few minutes to put on or take off the table and the controls are simple to understand and quick to change. The Newgy website has considerable product information and a Coaching Forum with dozens of articles, tips, movie clips, photos for table tennis strokes, serves, footwork, drills, strategies, and most other table tennis skills. Also available is a 105-page Training Manual, free for download from their website.
The newgy robots have two design limitations:
- only a single spinning wheel is used to apply both speed and spin to the balls, so only spinning balls can be ejected and the amount of spin is directly tied to the speed at which the ball is ejected
- only a single "type" of ball can be configured at any given time, so it's not possible to program a sequence of balls to work with such as looping an underspin ball, followed by looping a topspin ball.
Despite these limitations, the Newgy robot is an excellent value for the money and makes a useful supplement to training with a person.
Amicus
Game Videos
It's helpful to occassionally watch some games by professional players to see what techiniques they use and what is possible to do. Watching games live is the best way to appreciate what's happening in a game, but well taped video can also be useful for gaining a better understanding of advanced techniques, especially when slowed down to half-speed. Even reviewing the same games as you advance in skill can be helpful, as you will often see things you didn't see on earlier viewings of the games. For best video quality, I recommend some of the quasi-exhibition games filmed by ESPN/Killerspin that are available on DVD from most table tennis equipment sites.
Of course, if you have a video camera, it is also very useful to have someone tape you while practicing and playing games, so you can see things about your game that you might not be aware of in the heat of the game. It's quite surprising sometimes how differently your game will look on video compared to the way you've been visualizing it in your mind.
Books
Dannote 00:34, 13 February 2007 (EST): I've only read three table tennis training books, and I'm willing to recommend two of them:
- Winning Table Tennis by Danny Seemiller and Mark Holowchak
- Table Tennis: Steps To Success by Larry Hodges
Here's some other books you may wish to try:
- Robo-Pong Training Manual by Larry Thoman (available as a free PDF download from the Newgy website)
- ITTF Level 1 Coaching Manual, by Glenn Tepper
Acquiring Equipment
For tournament quality equipment, generally the simplest thing to do is buy your racquets and rubber online. Some vendors I've purchased from in the past include Paddle Palace, Table Tennis Pioneers, Zeropong, and Dandoy sports. There are also several ebay vendors with relatively cheap equipment coming out of China. For purchasing cheap used tables for my club, I've had a lot of success with craigslist. DanNotestein 14:53, 12 October 2008 (EST)
