Playing Styles
From TableTennisTraining
Most experienced players can be divided into different general categories, depending on what strokes they favor during play. This section describes some of these different playing styles, how to train for a particular style, and how to play against players with a particular style.
Contents |
Looper
Chopper
Against a traditional chopper, the best strategy is generally to rally with slow spinny loops that get the necessary height to clear the net against the chopper's underspin. Spinny topspin balls drop quickly, forcing the chopper closer to the table and will often cause them to pop up the ball, allowing you to finish it with a smash.
It's important to note that you can smash thru a chopped ball, no matter how much underspin is on it, but the key is to wait for the ball to reach the top of the bounce. If you don't watch the ball carefully as it rises, you're likely to incorrectly anticipate the location where the ball will be when it reaches the top of the bounce, and this will cause you to smash into the net.
Long Pips Chopper
Strangely enough, the best strategy for playing a traditional chopper is one of the worst ways to play a long pips chopper. Long pips choppers create backspin proportional to the amount of topspin delivered to them by their opponent. So sending them slow spinny loops allows them to generate extremly strong backspin chops that are very difficult to reloop. The weakness of long pips choppers is that they can't generate strong spin on their own, so you generally want to send them light spin and dead balls during rallies, then take advantage of weak returns to go for fast ball winners (e.g. loop drives or smashes).
This strategy has one potential flaw, however. You may be faced with a long pips chopper who loops with spinny inverted rubber on the forehand who can generate attack topspin against the soft and dead balls you send them. In this case, you have to be very careful to place your your non-offensive shots well to avoid giving them balls to attack. For example, against the most common long pips looper/chopper who uses inverted on the forehand and long pips on the backhand, you will typically want to make fast deep pushes to their backhand since they can't attack well with the pips, allowing you to setup attack shots and make short pushes and drop shots to their forehand that they can't attack with their spinny rubber (this part of the strategy is similar to that which you should use against a forehand dominated looper).
Blocker
Counter Driver
External Links
http://www.newgy.com/TTCommunity/Archive/July2002article.html
