Tip of the Week
Loose Grip Leads to Better Shots.

Is There a Mathematical Advantage to Serving First?
I keep reading online postings about whether a player should serve first or not. Many of them insist you have a better mathematical chance of winning by serving first. That's simply not true. Here's a simple way of looking at it.

A game to 11 is really just a best of 20, where you just happen to stop once a player clinches it by scoring 11 points. If it goes to 10-all, you alternate serves so both players serve just as often, so there's no mathematical advantage to serving first or second there. So we'll assume that the game doesn't go deuce. Is there a mathematical advantage to serving first or second? Ignoring deuce games, no matter what the final score is, one player scored 11 points in this hypothetical best of 20, and so even if both players had an even number of serves (i.e. ten each), he'd win 11-9 or better.

Some would argue that if a player gets to serve first, he'd get to serve more often, which is technically correct in many cases. But it doesn't matter since even if they played it out so both players got to serve an equal number of times (i.e. ten times each), a player who scored 11 first while serving first is still going to win 11 points, even if he allows his opponent the same number of serves. By serving first, all you can do is make it closer if you lose, or more lopsided if you win.

Tip of the Week
Sidespin Serves that Break Away Tend to Be More Effective.

Writer's Retreat This Week and Table Tennis
No blog this week after today – I'll be back next Monday, Nov. 16. I'll be away all this week at a writer's retreat at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, MD, which they call a Writing Staycation. It's a day thing, where I drive over early in the morning, and return that night. So little table tennis for me this week – I've got others subbing for me in most of my sessions until next Saturday.

As I blogged about on October 16, I recently sold a science fiction novel to a publisher, "Campaign 2100: Game of Scorpions." (As noted in the blog, it has lots of table tennis.) So this week I'm starting the sequel, "Campaign 2110: Scorpions in Space." The first one was 123,000 words (that's 622 pages in double spaced Courier New). This one will likely be a touch shorter – I'm aiming for 100,000 words. I hope to get 30,000 done during the retreat. I promise to keep table tennis in the novel!

What's the difference between a writer's retreat and a writer's workshop? At a retreat, the focus is on writing new stuff. At a workshop the focus is on critiquing each other's work – in advance you read and analyze the submitted work of other participants, and at the workshop you give both a verbal and written critique to the writer. (And they do the same for you.) It's usually done in sort of a circle, where you go around the circle, with everyone giving their comments in turn, and everyone turning in the written version at the end. I've been to many of these, including an annual "The Never-Ending Odyssey" that I go to for nine days each summer in Manchester, NH.

Serve and Forehand Attack, and Serve and Two-Winged Attack
Ilia asked the following on the TableTennisCoaching forum:

In your amazing book "Table Tennis Tactics for Thinkers" [Larry's note: I'm blushing – but I also added the link] I read that it is beneficial to be able to have different tactics for games, i.e. Plan A, Plan B, Plan C. I can loop both with backhand and forehand, but my backhand open-up against backspin is weaker. So my Plan A is to use forehand loop whenever possible, and use backhand loop for receive and when caught off-guard. The Plan B is to play forehand from the forehand side, and backhand from the backhand side. I have two questions:

1) What is the best recovery position after the serve for Plan A and for Plan B? Should they be the same?
2) How to practice these two plans with the best efficiency? Should I spend, say, a few weeks strengthening the Plan A, and then a few weeks on Plan B? Or it is better to interleave the practice? I play 4-5 times per week for 2-2.5 hours for each session.

It was such a great question that I decided to use it in my blog this morning.

First, remember that favoring your forehand is probably the right thing for you to do tactically, based on what you wrote. Strategically, even if you always favor your forehand, you should make sure to strengthen that backhand! (Tactical thinking is what works now; Strategic thinking is thinking long term. You need both.) But now let's look at the two questions.

>1) What is the best recovery position after the serve for Plan A and for Plan B? Should they be the same?

What to Do with Defaulters
Recently there's been discussion about what to do with players who default matches to protect their rating. (Here's a discussion on this at Mytabletennis.net – it starts with the third posting on page 3 of the thread.) It's a problem, though overall it's often overblown. But there are a few players out there who do this regularly, i.e. "strategic" defaults to protect their rating. They'll enter a rating event, play the players ahead of them, but default to those below them. This means the players below them paid for an event and expected to play matches, but instead got defaults for their money – and unlike the player who defaulted to them, didn't get the chance to play the players above them.

There are also more "legitimate" defaults, where a player defaults a match in one event because he's tired, and perhaps wants to save himself for another event. But that's part of the game – if you are so out of shape you can't play the match, then perhaps you should be penalized for it, or at least have incentive so as to think twice about it.

There is no simple solution. I could go through all the possible solutions and point out the problems, but that would be time consuming and pointless. It's one of those problems where you have to choose the least bad solution. So finding flaws with a possible solution does not disqualify that solution, it simply gives us something to compare to the flaws of other solutions.

National Table Tennis Day
Let's establish a National Table Tennis Day. In the weeks and months before that day we'd flood the media all over the country with press releases, and recruit clubs to take part. We'd also do a web page and a promotional video. Then, on the day itself, we'd get clubs all over the country to open their doors and welcome new players. Some ideas for that would include a short beginners' clinic, an exhibition, and a recreational round robin event, singles or doubles. Snacks and drinks a must!

I suggest the date be Sept. 23, commemorating the anniversary of table tennis's Olympic debut in 1988, allowing us to tie it into the Olympics. Once the date is established, we do a nationwide campaign to get clubs to join in every Sept. 23, with lots of local promotion. Having the date this far in the future would give us time to promote it properly. Perhaps have a countdown thing on the web page counting down the days until Table Tennis Day. Additional benefit of Sept. 23: The initial day would be Sept. 23, 2016, a Friday, when many clubs are open and when people are free (not a work night). England already has a National Table Tennis Day – July 16. We could match them, but I like the Sept. 23 connection better. Either is fine with me.

ADDENDUM: As GMan pointed out below, the ITTF is scheduling a World Table Tennis Day on April 6, 2016. Let's join them!

Tip of the Week
Distance from Table When Looping a Push.

My Weekend
This was one of the busiest four days I've ever gone through, Fri-Mon. Here's a rundown.

• The usual private and group coaching – but a little less than usual as one student was away at a tournament, another was sick, and another had to cut a lesson short because of shoulder problems, so only about seven hours total.

  One interesting note – it seems a number of players I'm coaching are working on backhand serves, so I'm coaching that a lot. My backhand serve was my #1 serve for a short time in the late 1970s, but I had some arm problems that made that difficult and pretty much stopped using it. Now I'm using it a lot – in demonstrations! In fact, I've been coaching it so much that on Sunday I spent ten minutes practicing the serve to get it back to where it was way back when. The big breakthrough was I finally can do a backspin serve that comes back into the net – more of an exhibition trick serve than a player should use in a match (where it's better to drive the serve out so the second bounce is at or near the end-line), but it's good practice, and shows students just how much backspin one can put on the ball. (I can do this easily with my forehand serve.)

Local schools are closed today for a "professional day" for teachers. As is my standard practice, when the kids are out of school, I'm off too! So no blog today, and the Tip of the Week will go up tomorrow. (I'll get a lot of work done.) But I'll leave you with this short, six-second repeating gif image of a player catching the ball on his racket, carrying it over, and smashing it. Legal??? Time to go practice this new shot!!!

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A Short History of Modern Receive
If someone were to write a History of Receive, I think there would be four major breakthroughs in modern professional table tennis.

• 1960s: Looping (Europeans and Japanese, especially Hasegawa). Before this time top players mostly attacked a long serve with a regular drive (or they'd chop it), without much topspin. But as the loop was developed during the '60s, long serves became vulnerable to a loop. And so most top players were forced to switch to serving short most often, which are often not as tricky and doesn't have as much break. There were players who used loop-like shots before this, but until the '60s looping wasn't done at a particularly high level. Nobuhiko Hasegawa in 1967 was the first world champion with a modern loop. He also was the first of the great lobbers, plus had a big backhand.

  Here's vintage video (8:57) of the 1971 World Men's Team Final, Japan vs. China (China wins 5-2), with Hasegawa against chopper/looper Liang Geliang in the first match. At 5:10 Hasegawa goes up against Li Jinghuang, a lefty penhold attacker. (China wins 5-2.) Others shown include Zhuang Zedong, Shigeo Itoh, and Mitsuro Kohno. (I couldn't find any video from 1967, when Hasegawa won the Worlds.) Here's 14 sec in 1974 of Hasegawa against Li Zhenshi, who now coaches in California, with Hasegawa looping a number of times against Li's blocks and hits.

State Championships and Why Table Tennis Leaders Often Don't Try New Things
The project is moving along pretty well – see the USATT news item from last Friday (also my blog for that day). As of that time we had 14 state championships in 2015 (plus 15 state games). Since Friday we've had volunteers stepping forward for another eight state championships in 2016. (I'm hesitant to name the states until they have gone through the sanctioning process.)

When you run a local tournament, you may get publicity. But think about it – what do you think will bring in more exposure, another MDTTC Open (or some other tournament), or the Maryland State Championships? Some monthly or even 4-star event in California or New York, or the California or New York State Championships? State championships are a must. I've always known this, but didn't really prioritize it until our new CEO, Gordon Kaye, convinced me that now was the time to focus on setting these up, and asked if I'd take charge.

Now here's the thing that many don't understand. The GOAL is state championship in all 50 states in 2016 (plus DC – which someone just volunteered to run, so cross that off the list). Ignoring state games, which usually aren't quite the same thing, we've gone from 14 to 22 state championships. Let's suppose, just suppose, we end up with 40 in 2016, and that we turn many of these into media events, bringing attention to our sport. Would this be a success? Of course!

Coaching Tennis Players at Table Tennis
This keeps coming up. (I played tennis on the side for many years.) I'm coaching a ten-year-old who plays tennis and insists on using an almost tennis-style backhand. Whenever I get a new player who's played a lot of tennis, five things happen – one good, one sort of good, one bad, two very good.