Ongoing Tactical Adjustments

I've had some interesting matches in recent times with a local elderly 2100 chopper. I haven't lost to him in many years, but he's been finding ways to make it more . . . interesting.

I'm better against choppers than any other style, and once went over 20 years without losing to a chopper rated under 2400, while beating five over 2400. And this chopper is a very defensive one, with long pips on the backhand, inverted on the forehand. He often covers much of the court with his backhand chop - he's pretty mobile. With his defensive game, I have no trouble winning; it's no contest. I generally win points five different ways against him when he's chopping: 1) Serve light topspin to his long pips and rip a winner; 2) Steady soft and not too spinny loops over and over to his long pips until he misses or pops one up slightly, which I can rip; 3) Line up to loop to his forehand, but at the last second go inside out to his wide backhand; 4) Line up to loop to his wide backhand, but at the last second whip around and loop quicker off the bounce to his wide forehand; 5) Sudden attacks his middle, which in his case is toward his forehand side; and  As long as he plays defensive, I'm pretty much at home.

But he's been working on his attack. I think before he had some relatively dead sponge on his forehand, but at some points went to some sort of modern-age looping sponge. Every time I come to the club I see him practicing looping, which is eye-opening as he's never really even had much of a forehand in all the years I've known him, and he's older than I am (I'll be 53 next month). But it's starting to pay off for him as he is starting to not only loop, but even counterloop on the forehand.

Table Tennis Tactics for Thinkers Update

I thought it was all done, finished, completo . . . but then I had to deal with the publisher (CreateSpace.com, which is a subsidiary of Amazon.com). They have online conversion processes for converting from Microsoft Word to two formats, one for Print on Demand (POD), the other for Kindle ebooks. Unfortunately, neither worked properly.

I'd tested this previously in converting "Pings and Pongs: The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of Larry Hodges" into both formats, and it had worked beautifully. However, that was mostly text, while the Tactics book has lots of pictures and (more problematically) captions and various formatting tricks. Over and over in both conversions the captions would move to some seemingly random spot on the page rather than stay under the photo where I put them. And when I did little formatting tricks, such as setting text at 99% (so as to pull up a line to line up the text on a page properly) it didn't always come out right. And let's not even talk about what it did with bulleting and tabs!!! One side result was that often text was now outside the margins due to the conversion.

Yesterday afternoon I emailed their tech support, explaining very specifically what the problems were. In response this morning I got a generic email explaining that text cannot go outside the margins, which was 100% unhelpful and didn't address the problem - that their conversion process was off, and that one of the side effects was it was putting text outside the margins. I am not happy with them.

Table Tennis Tactics for Thinkers - DONE!!!

It's done. Finished. Completo. Yes, that was me screaming with relief at 2:56 AM eastern time when I finished entering corrections and additions to the page layouts, the last piece of this long book puzzle. Hopefully I'll be able to send it off to my printer later today, and if all goes well, it'll be on sale within a week, in both print (print on demand) and Kindle ebook formats. I'll announce when it's ready. Here's the cover – can you recognize the player and the statue?

I'm not completely done; I still have a bunch of online stuff I have to do to get everything ready for the printer. And there'll probably be some minor fixes I'll have to make. And I'll probably keep thinking of things that absolutely, positively HAVE to be in it. But it has to end sometime, and I plan on getting it to the printer today.

I'm not going to do a lot of promotion of it at first. The plan is to get my other five books (four on table tennis) formatted for print on demand and ebook, and then have all six on sale at LarryHodgesBooks.com (which sell through Amazon.com). Once they are all ready – the goal is by June 1 – I'll start a huge advertising blitz.

Final stats:

• Finalized at 2:56 AM on Tuesday, January 29, 2013
• 101,516 words
• 90 pictures
• 244 pages
• 21 chapters (plus an Introduction, an Afterword, Glossary, Recommended Reading appendix, About the Author, and an Index)

The Importance of Counting or Keeping Score

Tip of the Week

Holding Back on Serves.

Why You Should Play in Events Where You Are a Top Seed

It all depends on whether your goal is to be a Champion or a Spoiler. Champions have a burning desire to win, and enter tournaments with the intent of winning events. Spoilers have a burning desire to pull off a major upset now and then and so gain temporary rating points, and so they avoid the events where they would be seeded.

If your goal is to be a Champion, then you must think like one, and learn to execute like one. Consider:

• You’ll never learn to play under pressure unless you put yourself in that position regularly, by trying to win the events you can win. There’s little pressure in playing higher-rated players.
• You’ll never learn to defeat lower-rated players regularly unless you play them regularly, and learn to mow them down. Every time you lose to a lower-rated player is a lesson on something you need to work on; every time you avoid playing a lower-rated player to avoid losing is a lesson lost.
• When you learn to mow down lower-rated players, you can apply these same techniques to higher-rated players.

So you have to ask yourself: are you playing to be a Champion, or to be a Spoiler looking to pick up a few temporary rating points?

Here's a longer article I wrote on the topic, "Juniors and Ratings."

Sheeba problems

Recently I've been feeling rather tired, and it's affected my work. But there's a simple reason for it. My dog, Sheeba, a corgi mix, will be 15 next month. She often cannot go the entire night without being let out. So recently, about every other night, she's been waking me up at 3-4AM so I can let her out to do her business. I sure hope this is a temporary thing!

Table Tennis and Animals

Yesterday morning the comic strip Pearls Before Swine featured table tennis, with Pig winning a ping-pong trophy. That is the inspiration for this morning's blog. We'll start with dogs.

Dogs and table tennis just go together. I've known this since "Junior" became the club mascot for the Northern Virginia Table Tennis Club in the early 1980s, even garnering a "Junior of the Month" write-up in USATT Magazine. (I wasn't editor at the time.) Junior came to the club with owner/father John Tebbe, and entertained us while we weren't playing. He was well behaved. Tim Boggan even featured Junior in one of his History of U.S. Table Tennis volumes.

Also well behaved was the dog that a woman from New Jersey had when she came to several of our training camps at MDTTC in the 1990s. This dog would quietly lie down next to her table while she trained, and would never move until she gave the okay. One day several kids tested this by stacking ping-pong balls on the poor dog, balancing dozens of them in its fur as the dog looked on patiently.

Here's my cartoon about why dogs don't play table tennis. Yes, dogs are nearly color blind. I have no idea if they can tell red from black. And here's the hottest chick in table tennis.

In the Fun and Games section here at TableTennisCoaching.com you'll find a Humorous Videos section. Page down a bit and you'll find segments on "Ping-Pong Dogs" (17 videos) and "Ping-Pong Cats" (76 videos!). From this, perhaps table tennis is going to cats more than dogs.

Table Tennis and Weather

We had nearly two inches of snow last night here in Germantown, Maryland, and it's 16 degrees outside. This is is the first snow we've had this winter, and it's by far the coldest. This got me thinking about table tennis and weather - and here's a short list of how weather has affected table tennis!

SNOW - The North American Teams Championships in Baltimore used to be the U.S. Open Team Championships in Detroit. (It moved to Baltimore and was renamed in 1998.) I began playing table tennis in 1976, and started going to the Teams for the first time that November. For the next three years (1976-78) I got a ride up with Jim Mossberg, a ten-hour drive. One of those years we were hit with a snowstorm in Detroit. We planned to drive back starting Sunday night. However, the snowstorm forced us to check into a hotel. The snow kept coming down, and we weren't able to return home until Wednesday. (I did some checking, and there were heavy snows in Detroit in November of 1977 and 1978, so it was one of those years - I think 1977.)

COLD - Players sometimes make the mistake of leaving their racket in the trunk of their car when driving long distances to tournaments. This leaves the sponge cold and dead. At one tournament a player had this problem, but he had a simple solution - he got out a hair dryer and warmed his racket up! (If a cold racket plays dead, wouldn't a very warm on play faster and bouncier? Perhaps players should heat up their rackets before big matches with a hair dryer? I may have just revolutionized the game. Or perhaps umpires and referees will soon be forced to take the temperature of both players' rackets before a match. I've opened a can of worms here.)

USNTTL and Leagues

Alas, it seems the U.S. Nationwide Table Tennis League is no more. When you go to www.usnttl.com, you get a note saying, "This account is expired due to non renewal of services."

I was already a little irritated at them for another reason. Late last summer, after the entire thing was set up, I was invited to be a member of their Advisory Board. I agreed, and I took part in a one-hour phone conference with other newly appointed Advisory Board Members and the ones setting it up, and where I was told about the league. I gave a few recommendations (not sure if any were followed, since it was a bit too late for major changes since the league was already set up), and that was my entire involvement with it. Later, when the league was "postponed," I only found out about it by emailing them after the planned start-up date, after it had already been postponed. When nothing was happening, I asked to be taken off the Advisory Board. But I was told the person who did the web page was now in India and out of contact. So a number of months went by where there was no league going on, and the only names people saw there were the Advisory Board, none of whom had anything to do with the actual creation or running of the league. The names of the ones who set everything up never had their names on the web page.

So at least I'm no longer listed as an Advisory Board for a league that I never really was involved with.

Putting aside their apparent disappearance, and rumors that they kept the entry fees despite never running a league (anyone know if that's true?), it was a good try, but it was likely doomed from the start. The problem with trying to set up a nationwide league the way they did it is that there was little existing infrastructure to support it. To set up a nationwide league, several things have to happen.

A Six-Year-Old's Focus

Yesterday I had a one-hour session with a six-year-old I've been coaching regularly for a while. He always has a hard time keeping focused, not surprising at his age, especially for a one-hour session. Even though he's six, he looks more like four, and I think has more attention problems than normal for his age. I do a number of things to keep his attention, such as using various objects as targets (such as a large rubber frog and iguana he likes to hit), and mixing in game-type activities, such as knocking stacks of paper cups off the table). Getting him to listen and follow directions is like getting Democrats and Republicans to compromise. The fiscal cliff and debt ceiling negotiations have nothing on this kid.

A interesting thing happened yesterday. For the first ten minutes I was having the usual battle to keep his attention. Every minute or two he'd start singing or dancing or making up some weird story or who knows what. He kept grabbing a toy soldier that he claimed was a table tennis champion, and for some reason he kept putting scotch tape on the table, either because he wanted me to hit the tape or because he claimed it was holding the table together.

And then, suddenly, for perhaps the first time ever, he was totally focused. For twenty minutes he was nearly silent, in complete concentration. During that period he played by far the best he's ever played. He was smacking in forehands and backhands with ease and good form (I'm feeding multiball), and hitting the targets I put on the table.

Then the twenty minutes were up, and he was back to being a six-year-old. But at least now I know he can do it. We'll have to keep working on it.

Jack Huang Photos and Nostalgia

Tip of the Week

The Backhand Banana Flip.

Bringing Back the Forehand

It's harder and harder to play an all-out forehand attack as I approach age 53 next month. But sometimes the stars - or is that ping-pong balls? - align just right. On Friday and Saturday I played as a practice partner in two-hour match sessions with our top juniors. On Friday, I did a little of everything - looping, hitting, blocking, fishing & lobbing, even chopping. And nothing worked.

So on Saturday I decided to bring back the 1980s and play all-out forehand attack, mostly looping, as well as lots of smashing. To do this, I focused on staying very low, with a much wider stance than I've used in recent years, but probably the same stance I used back in the 1980s. And lo and behold, I started to move pretty well, and the shots started to hit pretty well, and guess what? I played pretty well, going undefeated. Most of the players I played were lower, including a horde of 1900 to 2000 players, but I did beat one 2250 player, losing the first game and then dominating three straight. It wasn't until my very last match that my muscles suddenly realized that I'd been coaching or playing since 10AM (it was now almost 6:30 PM), and that's when they let out. Since we were running out of time, the last match was a best of three to 11 against a 1600 player, and after a barrage of misses where my legs and back were on strike, it went deuce in the third before I pulled it out against a very hot but (even though he lost) still pretty excited kid. I almost feel sorry for how hard I plan to play him next time, assuming I'm a bit more rested!

Target Practice

One of the true tests of your stroking precision is simple target practice. It's also a way to develop that precision. How do you do it? Simply set up a target on the far side of the table, and after bouncing the ball on your side of the table (or jus tossing it in the air), hit the target.

I do this regularly both as a demo and with students, usually using either a 16.9 oz Deerpark water bottle or a 20 oz Gatorade bottle. Usually I can hit it five out of five times. If you can't hit it at least three out of five times, you need to work on your precision and possibly your stroking technique. This exercise allows you to focus on the stroke mechanics and precision without having to worry about an incoming ball that isn't in the same spot every time.

To do this, just set the target on the far side of the table. I usually put it on the far left side (a righty's forehand court). Then I stand by my backhand side, bounce the ball on the table, and whack! I do it both hitting and looping, though the latter has a bit less control. As an added exercise, take a step off the table, toss the ball up a bit, and loop it, contacting the ball perhaps just above table height, and hit the target.

Here's a hint: don't consciously aim the shot. Just line yourself up, look at the target, and then the ball, and just let your natural muscle memory take over. Your subconscious controls these shots; your conscious mind just gets in the way.