The first four are psychological, the rest are tactical ideas.

1. Remember the mentality and feel of a great match you've played, and get back into that mode.
2. Take ten seconds to stare at something in the distance to clear your mind.
3. With nothing to lose, relax, have fun, and just play.
4. Ignore the score and just play the next point. Repeat.
5. Attack elbow with backhand. Most players have trouble against an aggressive shot right at their playing elbow, and the easiest way to do that is with the backhand, where you are facing the opponent and so can see his elbow. Do it over and over in rallies and watch him crumble. (Exception - if you're playing an all-out forehand attacker, then go for the wide corners.)
6. Short no-spin serve. They are harder to push heavy, low, or short, and tend to pop up. And if the serve is very low, they are surprisingly hard to attack effectively. So serve and attack! Mix them up with backspin serves.
7. Slow, spinny, consistent loops. Missing your loop? Then slow it down and go for lots of topspin. You'll be surprised how many players fall apart against this.
8. Quick-push serves back wide. Can't stop the opponent's serve and attack against your push return? Are you giving him easy pushes, or are you quick-pushing the serve quick off the bounce into a wide corner? To the backhand will likely disarm him, to the forehand will likely catch him off guard. (If you have good touch and have practiced this, you can also push them short.)
9. Stop and think about how you are winning and losing points. Then pick a winning service pattern, and one or two other tactics that will win.
10. Talk to a coach or top player between games or in a time-out. He might see something you have not. Or just talk to anyone between games, and you'll be amazed at how talking it out makes it obvious what you need to do.

One of the things coaches stress is that you should be aggressive against deep serves. (A short serve means that, given a chance, the ball would bounce twice on your side; a long serve would only bounce once.) Against a short serve, you can rush and angle the server by taking the ball quick off the bounce, plus you can drop the ball short. But against a deep serve, you can't do this, so a passive return gives the server an easy attack. If the server has a weak attack, that might be okay, but in most cases, if you don't attack deep serves, you put yourself at a disadvantage as the server gets an easy attack.

But to attack the deep serves you first have to recognize that the serve is long. How do you do this?

Imagine an outfielder in baseball running down a fly ball. (Or any other sport that involves judging the trajectory of a thrown or hit ball.) He doesn't do mathematical calculations to judge where the ball will drop. He simply watches the ball as it rises, and from that, with experience, he learns to judge the arc the ball will take. And so, after time, a good outfielder can immediately run to almost exactly where the ball will drop.

It's the same thing in table tennis - not just in judging whether a serve is long, but on ANY shot. With experience, you learn to judge, as the ball is leaving the opponent's paddle, where it will go. (Advanced players take this to another level and often know where the ball is going before contact, by watching the ball and racket as they approach each other.) When an opponent serves, it's the same thing. Watch his paddle, and as the ball bounces off of it, you should be able, with practice, to almost instantly judge its trajectory. If you can do that, you'll immediately know if it's long or short.

More specifically, you'll see how fast the ball comes off the paddle, how downward it travels (which lets you know high it will bounce, which is part of the trajectory), as well as the spin. (Topspin will make it bounce out at you, and so usually goes long, while backspin slows it down, and is more likely to pull the serve short.) Advanced players can judge the depth reflexively as the ball is leaving the paddle or sooner. With practice, you should be able to do so before the ball bounces on the server's side of the table.

You do have to judge it quickly as it takes time to set up an attack. So how can you practice this? Get a coach or practice partner and have them serve to you! Ideally, have them do "half-long" serves, where the second bounce, given the chance, would either bounce very close to your end-line, or just off it. You get to judge which it is. It can be difficult to tell if a ball is going to go one inch long or short, but you should be able to judge it so that if the ball goes six inches off, you always loop it. And then four inches, and so on. Top players are masters of judging this to within an inch or so, and instantly jumping on serves that go too long.

These are both great incentives in practice. Some want to win so badly that they'll practice, hour after hour, to achieve their goals. Others hate losing so much that they'll use it as incentive to train forever to avoid it. A little of both often helps.

The problem comes when you have to play a match - and that's when hating to lose becomes a problem. For some, it might help in practice, but in a match it's a quick way to choke away as you nervously play to avoid losing rather than playing to win. If you play to win, then you'll focus on doing what's needed to win, and you'll be so focused on that that you won't even think about losing, and so won't get nervous or choke.

Where are you on the "Want to Win" vs. "Hate to Lose" spectrum? Here's a simple test. If, at the instant that you lose a close match, you are surprised, that means you were focused on winning, which is what you want. If, however, you are not surprised at that instant, you were focused on not losing, and that very type of thinking might be what brought on the loss.

Imagine when playing that your body is a belt. If your feet are in the wrong position, or if your grip is off, then it affects everything in between. If your foot positioning and grip are both correct, then like a belt that's been straightened, everything in between falls into place. Isn't that a great analogy?

As a coach, I've noticed that most technique problems come from improper foot positioning or grip problems, although many players (and some coaches) often treat the symptoms instead of the root cause. When you fix the root cause - often the two ends, i.e. the foot position and grip - the rest often falls into place. Not always - longtime problems with foot positioning and grip can create bad habits, and they can be hard to break. But getting the two ends right is a great step in that direction, and one of the top priorities with new players so they develop good technique from the start.

Many players rally very well in drills, but not so much in matches. Once they get into a match, they not only lose consistency, but they also rally like a drill, hitting the ball right back at the opponent rather than trying to win the point with placement. Here is a progression of drills you can do to solve this problem - but do them in this specific order. (If working with a partner instead of a coach, take turns.) The key is to first build up accuracy from both the forehand and backhand sides, then do so off random balls, while always attacking (and reacting to) the three spots you should always go after in a match – wide forehand, wide backhand, and middle. (People often forget to practice shots to the middle and reacting to such shots, and so can't do either effectively in a match.) A few notes:

• Do each drill until you are proficient at it. After that, perhaps two minutes each as you work your way through the progression. Once proficient at each, you should be proficient at these types of rallies in matches. (You don't necessarily have to do all of these drills every practice session from here on, but once you gain proficiency in them, you should come back to them regularly as a "tune-up.")
• The middle is where partner's elbow (roughly the midpoint between forehand and backhand) would be in a rally, typically a little to the left of the middle line (for a righty). For these shots, partner stands toward the middle and plays his choice of forehand or backhand.
• "Side to side random" means partner goes randomly to both corners, but not middle.
• "Complete random" means partner goes randomly to all three spots, the corners and the middle.

Drills Progression

1. Forehand to forehand warm-up.
2. Backhand to backhand warm-up.
3. Forehand down the line to partner's backhand.
4. Forehand to partner's middle.
5. Backhand down the line to partner's forehand.
6. Backhand to partner's middle.
7. Alternate forehand and backhand, to partner's backhand.
8. Alternate forehand and backhand, to partner's forehand.
9. Alternate forehand and backhand, to partner's middle.
10. Random side to side, to partner's backhand.
11. Random side to side, to partner's forehand.
12. Random side to side, to partner's middle.
13. Complete random, to partner's backhand.
14. Complete random, to partner's forehand.
15. Complete random, to partner's middle.
16. Both sides serve topspin and rally placing the ball to any of the three spots – forehand, backhand, or middle.