Yin and Yang – Forehand and Backhand?
I was contemplating how many players favor the backhand on short balls, but the forehand on long ones, and realized it was just Yin and Yang. In Chinese philosophy, "this describes how opposite or contrary forces are actually complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another."

Now look at the symbol for Yin and Yang, which is from the page linked above. (Ignore the two dots – perhaps they represent holes in your game?) Imagine the white is your backhand, the black the forehand. Then when the ball lands short (the top of the picture), you only cover a little of the table with the forehand, while covering most with the backhand – all that white up there. But as you move away, the black area increases while the white decreases, as the forehand coverage goes up while the backhand coverage decreases. Yin and Yang!

I'm sure some of you could write more on the various Yin and Yangs in table tennis. And of course it's not all Yin and Yang – some, like myself, sometimes favor the forehand even on short balls. (I can go both ways – sometimes receiving nearly every short ball with my backhand, other times nearly all with my forehand.)

Tip of the Week
How to Cover a Short Ball to the Forehand.

MDTTC Open House
Here's a great video (4:18) of the Open House at the Maryland Table Tennis Center this past Sunday, created by Ming Li. The event started at noon and ran for three hours, all free. (Here's the Facebook version.) Here are five photos, also by Ming Li. Throughout the event were periodic raffles - and lots and lots of food and refreshments! Here's a rundown:

MDTTC Open House, Balticon, and a Four-Day Weekend!
I'll be mostly away the next four days, mostly at the Balticon Science Fiction Convention, which is Friday through Monday (Memorial Day). However, I'll be back at MDTTC on Sunday (12-3PM) for our Open House, where I'll be doing a demonstration and exhibition; running a Parade of Champions (single elimination, one game to 3 points – you heard that right! – with everyone welcome to participate); doing a trick shot demo (where I teach the 50-foot serve, blowing the ball in the air and over net, backspin serves that bounce back over the net, speed bouncing, playing alone with two paddles, etc.), and a service seminar. I'll be doing some private coaching afterwards.

At Balticon I'm a panelist, and will be doing a reading Saturday night at 8PM (either from my new novel, or one of my short stories). I'll also get to hobnob with fellow SF and fantasy writers, including Guest of Honor George R.R. Martin – who I've met before! Yes, I Know Him!!! (Okay, maybe he'd vaguely recognize me from conventions as that stalker fellow writer he once met.) For you ignorant people scratching your heads and wondering what Martin's rating is and what sponge he uses on his forehand, he's the author of Game of Thrones, now the hit HBO series. He does more kills in a typical chapter than most of you do in your table tennis careers. (I've read all five of the Game of Thrones novels – but they average over 1000 pages, so it's like reading 15 books.) Hopefully they'll sell a bunch of my novel in the dealer's room. 

Rarely Used Hand Signals for Illegal Hidden Serves
Here's the video (5:38), which came out in February. But there's something surreal to me about having signals for hiding the ball (with the arm, the shoulder, and the head), when these are almost never called, no matter how blatantly the player hides the serve.

As I've blogged many times, we have a culture of cheating in our sport, where essentially every major title is won with illegal hidden serves that are done right out in the open, where everyone can see it, and the umpires will not call it. Yes, it's tough to see if a serve is hidden, but that's clearly covered in the serving rules – 2.6.6.1: "If either the umpire or the assistant umpire is not sure about the legality of a service he or she may, on the first occasion in a match, interrupt play and warn the server; but any subsequent service by that player or his or her doubles partner which is not clearly legal shall be considered incorrect."

And in case that's not enough, there's also 2.6.6: "It is the responsibility of the player to serve so that the umpire or the assistant umpire can be satisfied that he or she complies with the requirements of the Laws, and either may decide that a service is incorrect."

Backspin Mania Continues!
Yesterday was quite a site – ten minutes before the scheduled 4-5PM session with two kids there were FIVE of them all on a single table, all practicing and competing to see who could do the most backspin serves that came back into or over the net. This past week it's been a battle to get some of them to do regular practice – they are absolutely backspin crazy. That's all we did from 4-4:30.

When we went to regular practice, guess what they insisted on working on? More backspin. So we did a lot of pushing. (Maybe we're developing a bunch of choppers? Should I explain long pips to them?) I stopped trying to explain that keeping the ball LOW is important – they were more interested in pushing so the ball bounced backwards. Since they ranged from beginner to advanced beginner, and were 7-8 years old, I allowed it – they got great practice learning to graze the ball. (Have trouble creating great spin on your serves? Then learn from the kids, and try to make the ball bounce back into the net! Here's my article Visualize Your Serves and Make Them Do Tricks.)

The youngest, age seven, goes absolutely bonkers whenever he makes a serve where the ball bounces back over the net onto his side – and he can do it about 10% of the time now, which I wouldn't have  believed possible a week ago. At that time, he'd not only never done it, he didn't know what a backspin serve was – and now, one week after learning how to do one, nearly all his serves bounce back into the net! He's rather single-minded about this, as you can guess.

Tip of the Week
Contact Point on the Forehand. (I actually did an entire Tip for this morning, only to discover I'd already done How to Serve to the Backhand Attacking Receiver. After over 270 Tips of the Week, that's the first time I've ever done that.)

Why My Forehand Push Is Much Better Down the Line
Here's something I hadn't really noticed before - my forehand push down the line is pretty good, but crosscourt not so good. Unless I'm chopping, I only forehand push against short balls, mostly when someone serves short to my forehand or drops my serve short there, and I decide not to flip. Off this ball I have a big angle into a righty's forehand - but the very threat of this means opponents automatically cover it. And so what do I almost always do? Fake it crosscourt, and then, at the last second, taking it right off the bounce, I push it down the line into their backhand. And that's what I became used to doing, and so have great control over it. But when I do go crosscourt, as I often do in drills with students, I don't have nearly the same control because I so rarely did it that direction. 

You'd think I would have developed the crosscourt forehand push for playing lefties - but there's a different reason why I didn't. Against lefties who serve short to my forehand I almost always fake a down-the-line flip, and then, at the last second, flip it crosscourt into their backhand - which almost always sets up my forehand against their backhand return. (I was a strong forehand player.) For variation, I drop it short to the lefty's forehand. And so again, I rarely pushed crosscourt. 

Serving Mania
Serving Mania has struck MDTTC! At least with my students. I blogged about this on Wednesday, about two kids who spent an entire one-hour session doing almost nothing but backspin serves (trying to make the ball come back into the net or bounce back over the net). It happened again on Thursday, where two kids (including the 7-year-old I blogged about on Wednesday) spent 40 minutes doing it again. There's getting better and better at it, and get pretty excited when they make the ball jump backwards and over the net.

We have a scoring system: one point if you get the ball to bounce back and hit the net; three points if it bounces back over the net cleanly after one bounce; two points if it bounces back over the net, but nicks the net in either direction, or takes more than once bounce on the far side to come back over the net. Here's a video (78 sec) of Ma Lin demonstrating the "ghost serve, where the backspin pulls the ball back into the net. But the ultimate backspin trick is making it bounce back over the net!

When I do the Trick Shots demo at the MDTTC Open House on May 29 I'm going to demo and teach these "Come Back" serves. It's a fun trick shot, though more advanced players see it coming and either reach forward or go to the side of the table, and smack it in. (I'll also demo and teach the 50-foot serve; blowing the ball so it balances in the air – sideways!; rallying by blowing the ball over the net; speed bouncing on the table; and playing alone with two paddles.

Chop Blocks
I have a student who cries "Foul!" whenever I do a chop-block. He insists no one else does them, and often will catch the ball when I do them. Before we go further, what is a chop block? Here's my article, Chalk Up Wins with Chop Blocks, and here's the video, Ma Long Chop Block (5:17).

Yesterday, in a session with Matt, I threw a chop block at him, and he wanted to try it. Now I wouldn't normally devote half a session to chop-blocks, but on the other hand I'm an adherent to Saturation Training, which means if you are going to make a change in your game or add something new, you really focus on it for a time until you get it right, rather than just work at it now and then. So we did just that – spent half the session on it. For most of this I stood a few feet back and fed him loops, multiball style, as he chop-blocked and sidespin-chop blocked.

This is a shot that most people have trouble with at first, and then it comes together suddenly, once you get that "smothering" feel of contact. And once you do, it creates havoc for opponents. I think it's even more effective these days for a simple reason – it's one of those shots that has died out in popularity (except for long pips blockers, who do it naturally), and so few players are used to it. There's a reason why world #1 Ma Long likes to use it.

Backspin Serves for Kids, and Making the Ball Return Into or Over the Net
Had an interesting session yesterday with two kids, ages 7 and 9. You'd think kids that age are balls of energy, wanting to smack the ball over and over. But when they get interested in something, that becomes their whole focus – and that's what happened yesterday.

I'd been teaching them backspin serves recently. It was new to the 7-year-old, while the 9-year-old was a bit more advanced. It started with the 7-year-old rushing out to the table five minutes early, and with a bucket of balls, trying to serve backspin so the ball would bounce backward. I'd demonstrated this to him a few days before, and he badly wanted to do it. He was able to serve so the ball would sometimes come to a stop, or even sometimes bounce backwards, though usually with the ball never reaching the net. He wanted to serve so it would go to the other side and bounce back into the net, as I'd shown him. And so began our hour-long Odyssey. (Here's the serve in question, though they aren't doing it with a high toss.) 

Adjusting to Different Balls in the Yucky Insane Plastic Era (YIPE!)
One of the realities of the YIPE era (yes, that's what I'm calling it!), where we use plastic balls instead of celluloid (which is actually a type of plastic, but we won't get into that), is that the balls vary widely, far more than before. It used to be that everyone knew that Butterfly balls were slightly softer and lighter than Nittakus, and you'd warm up with the appropriate tournament ball and you'd be ready. But now they vary dramatically. Playing with the various 40+ Nittaku, DHS, Butterfly, JOOLA, and the seamless Xu Shao Fa is like trying to play basketball where one moment you're dribbling a basketball, then suddenly (in no particular order) it's a bowling ball, then a baseball, then a golf ball, etc.

One of my students, Daniel (who I've blogged about before) played in the Capital Area League this past Saturday. He tends to play too passive, and so we've spent a lot of time working on using his serve to set up his attack. Alas, we weren't using a Nittaku Premium 40+, and so when he used that in the league, he said it felt really heavy, and he had no confidence in his attack. Result? He went back to pushing.

The moral here, and for others, is that you need to work out in advance what events you'll be playing in, find out what balls they will be using, get a supply of each type, and make sure to practice with that ball before each event.