I’ve watched players, even top players, spend hour after hour practicing the simplest serves imaginable. Yes, you need to practice basic serves so you develop near-perfect control of their height, depth, and direction. But it’s drudgery to practice such serves over and Over and OVER when there’s so much more you can do.

Serve practice is where you also work on putting trickery into your serves, in particular deception. Imagine you are serving to a real player. Practice hiding your spin with fast racket movements where you exaggerate one direction of the racket while contacting the ball in a different way with a barely noticeable twitch of your racket. Or work on maximizing your spin to the point where the ball seemingly explodes into flame. Or, after developing super-spinny serves, learn to use the same motion but serve with no-spin by contacting the ball near the handle. Or work on fast and spinny aggressive serves where you jam your opponent’s middle or spin it away from him at the corners. Or fast dead ones, especially at their elbow, that they put in the net.

There is so much more to serving than just putting the ball in play. If you are doing it right, it’s both a science and an art – and a blast to practice!

You’ve all played them – a tournament match that is simply uncompetitive, where you don’t have to try and you’ll still win easily. These can be dangerous matches. Why?

First, make sure it’s a “laugher” match. I once coached a match where my player was rated about 700 points higher than the opponent, and won the first game 11-0. Another of my students had a tougher match starting, so after talking briefly to the first player – mostly about keeping his focus throughout - I went to the other match. Afterwards, I came back and my player had won - deuce in the fifth!!! The simplest way to avoid this is to assume no matches are “laughers.” But even if you assume that, some of them are laughers. What to do in them?

First, keep your focus. It is far easier in a tournament to keep your focus than it is to recover it once you’ve lost it. Winning a game too easily is a common reason to lose focus – which is what happened in the match above. So, focus every point as if it were the most important point you’ve ever played. That should be true of every point you play in a tournament. (An occasional exception is for older or out-of-shape players, or when you have a lot of matches, and so intentionally play less actively in such an “easy” match so as to save yourself for later. But be careful of doing this as it can backfire.)

Second, while you might not need to focus on tactics or smart play against a much weaker player, you don’t want to mess up your own fundamentals by going easy and thereby not playing your normal game. That’s a quick way to mess up your game. That means looping against a push the same as you would against someone in a more competitive match. Otherwise you are just practicing playing poorly. This doesn’t mean ripping everything, it simply means using the same types of loops and other shots you’d use against a stronger player. You can push more to save energy, but don’t overdo it.

Third, work on serves and other fundamentals. Playing a match like this allows you to practice serves and other shots without worrying about the outcome. For example, when I used to play much weaker players in a tournament, my favorite tactic was to just serve backspin over and over, they’d push it back, and I’d have to move and loop every one of them effectively, including good placement. I didn’t need to rip the ball, but I’d practice the strong loops I’d want to use in a more serious match.

Lastly, don’t think of a “laugher” match as a waste of time. They are the perfect time to work on your focus, your fundamentals, and whatever aspects of your game that might need practice. And practice makes perfect – even if the opponent needs a lot more than you.

Perhaps the easiest way to stop an opponent’s big serve and loop is the loaded push. Many players don’t understand how effective this can be for a simple reason – until they can do it, it isn’t particularly effective, and so when they first try it, it doesn’t work. And so they stop trying to give loaded pushes. And so players never understand just how important those extra few revolutions of backspin can be.

A key is the thinking involved. When players learn to push, they generally think of it as a “safe” backspin shot to keep the ball in play. And so they push with “good” backspin, and that’s it. But a good loop generally beats a good push, and so something more is needed.

And that’s where you want to develop that loaded push. That means stop thinking in terms of “safeness,” and think in terms of “How much backspin can I put on the ball?” (But even a loaded push is very consistent, once learned.) Focus on grazing the ball, and using both the forearm and wrist to really brush into the ball vigorously. The goal is to force your opponent into putting the ball into the net. Load the ball with so much backspin it’ll practically die on your opponent’s racket. Do that, and opponents will struggle.

This doesn’t mean you push all or most serves back, though that can be effective against many opponents. It’s still highly effective to loop long serves, while against shorter serves, learn to push long or short, or to flip. But if you are going to push long, do it EFFECTIVELY – and that means not just pushing to keep the ball in play, but a LOADED push, one that the opponent often will struggle to attack.

Learn a push that is loaded if you want your rating exploded!

There’s a common saying in high-level sports: “Don't practice until you do it right. Practice until you can't do it wrong." This is another way of saying ingrain the fundamentals. You can never practice the fundamentals too much as that's how you make it so you can't do it wrong. 

Far too often I hear players say, “I already practiced that, I can do it.” What they say is correct, but meaningless in the context. The goal of fundamentals is that they should be nearly unerring unless your opponent does something to force a mistake. Block a loop? You should be able to do this over and Over and OVER – unless the opponent varies the loop, gives you speeds or spins you aren’t used to, moves it around, and so on. But in a drill, where you get the same ball over and over, you should strive for perfection. If you keep making mistakes, then you probably are drilling too fast.

Note that “strive for perfection” doesn’t mean you reach it, but if you strive to reach it in rote drills, then you’ll start seeing results in regular rallies as those ingrained fundamentals become automatic. The irony is that players below the advanced stages often have trouble ingraining these fundamentals because their practice partners are often their level, and if neither is consistent, then neither gets consistent practice and so they don’t ingrain the fundamentals as well as they should. Why? Because they drill too fast! Slow down to speeds both sides are consistent at, and then you can ingrain the shots.

And then you can practice until you can’t do it wrong.

“It’s an unreturnable shot,” said US Team Member Perry Schwartzberg many years ago after failing repeatedly to block, hit, or counterloop against fellow team member Ricky Seemiller’s slow, spinny loop. World #3 Mikael Appelgren had a similar problem against Ricky, losing to him when the world’s best counterlooper couldn’t counterloop Ricky’s spinny loop.

And yet, fewer and fewer players slow loop these days. Part of the reason is because at higher levels, and with modern sponges, players just go for power loops. And that often pays off at the higher levels. But below that – and as a change-up at the higher levels – the slow, spinny loop is a valuable shot.

The weakness of the shot is that if an opponent unhesitatingly blocks, hits, or counterloops aggressively, the slow spinny loop can be attacked effectively. But since players don’t see the shot that much these days, and are usually set up for faster, less spinny shots, they struggle against the shot if not overused.

A key reason players don’t slow loop as much these days is they don’t know the proper technique, and so end up with a less-than-spinny slow loop that is more easily attacked.

The key point here is a slow spinny loop is NOT just a weak, safe loop. It’s an aggressive shot done at full power – but nearly all of the power goes into creating topspin. It’s usually done against backspin, especially heavy backspin where you can convert the incoming backspin into even more topspin with an almost vertical stroke.

How do you do this? A key aspect is to let the ball drop more than usual. This makes it easier to arc it with super spin, using your entire body, and especially your legs. With power loops, nearly all of the force is forward, but with a slow, spinny loop, you use your legs to drive the ball both up and forward, with the emphasis on up. If you take the ball too high, you’ll go off the end, which is why it’s easier to do if you let the ball drop below table level, with knees well bent. (If you have knee problems, then compensate by simply dropping the racket down more and use more upper body, arm, and wrist.) Then use the whole body – legs, hips and waist, shoulder, forearm, and wrist. Each part of the swing propels the next part forward. The stroke is one continuous, smooth motion.

Just before contact, drive into the ball vigorously, with a big forearm and wrist snap as you contact the ball – but just graze the ball. Make that ball rotate like an angry Tasmanian Devil!!! The whole point of the shot is extreme topspin, not safe topspin.

If you go off the end, don’t slow down your swing; contact a little more on top of the ball and stroke slightly more forward, especially if the ball doesn’t have heavy backspin.

Experiment until you find just how much to let the ball drop, how much to drive up vs. forward, and how finely you can graze the ball. Find a partner and practice, where you serve backspin, partner pushes back heavy, and you slow-loop the ball with great power – with all that power going into topspin. With practice, it becomes an extremely consistent shot since the low ball speed and the heavy topspin pulling it down keeps it on the table.

So, what are you waiting for? Time to slow-spin for the win!