Ma Long Serve - the Illegal Elephant in the Room
Yesterday I linked to this video (5:18), "Ma Long - King of Epic Shots," and asked, "Notice anything strange about the serve he does at the start? Watch the slow motion replay starting 12 seconds in. I'll blog about this tomorrow."

The strange thing is that the serve, the standard motion for most top players, is so illegal it's mind-boggling that the world #1 player can get away with serving like this over and over, very publicly where all can see, without it getting called. Most of his opponents do it just as much – it's the norm at the higher levels. It's like the proverbial elephant in the room that everyone pretends isn't there. As I've blogged before, cheating is rampant in our sport at the higher levels, even among cadets under age 15.

The problem, of course, is that the serve is hidden, something I've harped on many times here. Here is a five-picture sequence of the serve. In pictures one and two, using the pole that's just above his head, you can see how he's thrown the ball backwards while thrusting his head forward, and the two meet in picture three, where the ball completely disappears behind his head as he's about to contact the ball. In picture four you can just see the ball reappearing below his head by his throat. His contact is while the ball is behind his head, where the receiver cannot see. (Below I'll go over the serve and show five rules being broken, and then give my solution.)

Tip of the Week
When Playing an Unfamiliar Player, Focus on Serve & Receive.

Crazy Month
It's been a crazy month, and it's only getting crazier. Over the past month or so I've launched the State Championships Initiative and the Regional Associations Initiative, and the Regional Team Leagues Initiative will be out probably in a couple of weeks. (I'll blog about these more later.) MDTTC was named an ITTF Hot Spot. We've spent lots of time preparing players for the upcoming Team Championships (whether in Washington DC or Philadelphia) and for the USA Nationals in Las Vegas in December. I put together the Hall of Fame program booklet and the ad for the Hall of Fame Inductions for the Nationals program. Plus all the usual coaching (private and group), as well as the regular tutoring I'm now doing at the club, mostly in English. (If I listed everything I've crossed off my todo list for this past month, I'd have to use up all existing pixels in the universe as this blog would go from here to the farthest known quasars…) Oh, and four Tips of the Week and these daily blogs!

The following is also a USATT news item that went up last night.

Regional Associations
It's a New Era - and We Need Volunteers!
By Larry Hodges
USATT Board Member, League Chair, and Regional Associations Coordinator

Let's be honest. It's silly to think that an organization with six full-time staff members (plus a few contractors and volunteers), with a budget the size of a 7-11, can organize and run table tennis all over the United States.

Instead, we need to have Regional and State Associations all over the country, with each one primarily in charge of the table tennis activity in their region or state. There are surprisingly few right now and that needs to change. This is how successful table tennis countries are organized, as well as successful sports in the U.S. And that's what we need to do as well.

And that's why we need you. We're looking for volunteers interested in taking charge of developing the sport in their region. These organizations could roughly parallel the regions used in the National College Table Tennis Association, or individual states could have their own regional association. USATT will supply a sample bylaws, but you'd be free to make changes, within reason.

Periodic Physical Checklist
Okay, here's mine! (Confession – I was up half the night on something, and woke up with a headache. This inspired me to write about health stuff. It's also why today's blog is a bit shorter than usual. Back to more serious table tennis tomorrow!) I have very tight muscles, and because of that I tend to get too many injuries, alas. Part of it is my insistence of playing a physical game rather than just be steady and block. If this is boring to you, skip to the other stuff below!

Mental Strength – with Jan-Ove Waldner's Tips for Peak Performance
Wow, what a great book! I just read Mental Strength (available from Amazon), by sports psychologist Gregor Schill, former Swedish star Malin Pettersson, and of course Jan-Ove Waldner, the legend and arguably the greatest player of all time. There are nine chapters:

1. Mental Training – in Theory
2. Attitude and Enjoyment
3. Self-Confidence
4. Stress Management
5. Winner Instinct and Goals
6. Preparations and Continuous Development
7. Focus and Concentration
8. Twelve Tips for Sports Parents
9. Mental Training – in Practice

Most chapters starts with Waldner's comments, followed by Schill's (which usually build on what Waldner said), followed by Pettersson's, followed by exercises. I marked my copy up with notes; here are some highlights. (There is great stuff by all three, but I'll focus here on some of the best stuff from Waldner, with apologies to Schill and Pettersson. Otherwise this would be one very long review! Most of the text that's not attributed directly to Waldner or Petterson is by Schill.) There are lots of charts and color pictures.

Preface by Jan-Ove Waldner. "Since I have always been very conscious of how important the mental or psychological game is within table tennis, it went without saying that I would share my thoughts on the subject when Malin and Gregor asked. Because, in truth, the question is not whether you should train the mental aspects, but rather how you should train them." This basic concept, so obvious to champions, is lost on most players.

Yesterday and Today – SF & TT
Yesterday and today are rather weird days for me. I normally would pick up two kids for our afterschool program, and after the program I have a 90-minute coaching session. Normally this means leaving my house by 2:45PM, and finishing at 7PM. (I usually leave by 2:30 PM so as to be safely on time and so I can spend some relaxing time in my car reading or doing a crossword puzzle while I wait for the school bell to ring.) But by a weird coincidence, all the players I pick up or coach yesterday and today are injured or away – one has shoulder problems, one is at a chess tournament, and two others are doing an afterschool activity. And so I had no coaching yesterday or today. (I do have an eye appointment at 12:30 PM today.) So what did I do? I devoted yesterday to science fiction & fantasy, and today to table tennis.

Today I plan to "finalize" the plans for regional associations and regional team leagues. By "finalize" I mean have them ready to go public, though they will be an ongoing thing as they are perfected and updated. (I ran the plans by the USATT League Committee, which I chair, and a few others.) If all goes well, they'll go up as USATT news items in the next few weeks. I might do them together, or perhaps one week apart. (The first part, State Championships, went up in October.)

I blogged about Regional Team Leagues on Nov. 24, 2014, and about Regional Associations on Nov. 25, 2014.

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.