Many of my posts lean towards speaking generally. Tips and approaches I have learned myself or topics I find important to address for the developing player.
However, I think the blog would be more meaningful to myself personally & hopefully helpful or at the very least interesting to anyone reading if a more personal approach was taken. Thus, I will occasionally post my thoughts from club night and certainly local tournaments when our club has them.
Last night's club had a good turnout on attendance and I've been pleased with the number of newer players that are showing up. For me personally, it was an up & down night. All in all I played 3 singles matches & went 2-3 in those.
I don't know if you are like me, but in almost every sport I've ever played in the losses eat at you more than the joy of winning. Perhaps there's room for me personally on the mental side to be able to enjoy the game more. Not that I don't now. I love it actually. But there's room for improvement there I think.
The ups were fun. I was playing with one of my few remaining blades (ebaying most of my stuff. See my post about EJing. Still more things to sell on that stand front.) that happens to have duel inverted. I was on fire most of the night. Big sidespin loops & backhand RPBs that really took some people by surprise. There were several moments in the night where shots of mine got oohs & aahhs from club members. Doing my best Xu Xin impersonation I suppose who is known as a showman.
But in hindsight, it was style over substance. If I am evaluating my 3 singles matches, the two wins were against players I feel I should beat, (although be careful with assuming you will always beat someone in table tennis. IMO that can get you into trouble) and the one loss was against my training partner who I have struggled to beat. Furthermore, when I think about the best I was playing, I was in a doubles match where my relatively newer partner and I jumped out to a 2-0 lead vs two older experienced vets. I was hitting impressive shot after shot. However, those "wow shots" started to disappear after that and they ended coming back to win 3-2. Looked great but the end result was still a loss. What's more important?
In my last singles match vs my training partner, I quickly got behind in game 1 either 0-4 or 0-5 after a series of simple missed pushes. Nothing flashy about those points. No big winning loops. Simple short game. The kind of pushes where you can almost feel the opponent saying "here open it up. Be my guest" and you're afraid or too tense with the pressure of a match to pull the trigger as you should. The kind of ball you wouldn't think twice about opening up in practice but a match is a different story.
From there, everything snowballed. Suddenly I could not hit a single shot in. It was one of the worse, and actually one of the best (more on that in a minute) beatings I've ever taken as he cruised 3-0 in one of our more lopsided matches yet.
What went wrong? What was I thinking? I'll tell you. Why I was kicking myself, and I fully admit I can be my own worse enemy here, was that I beat my partner just two weeks prior playing the very different and weird style of penhold short pips/long pips twiddle game. "Great. You won? Why on earth would you switch a week later?" you might ask. Because I love of the feel of the extra spin & wow shots one can get playing inverted. Truth be told, I can do several different things pretty good and I think this hasn't helped me at all in my EJness. I can penhold RPB or shakhand backhand rip a winner. I can chop shakehand pretty well. I can loop with heavy sidespin penhold. Etc. But just because you can do something, doesn't mean you necessarily should. Being tempted by the extra power & speed might have few moments of looking nice, but it greatly hurt my consistency. Again, style over substance.
So back to short pips/long pips it is for me. I know I am most consistent there. Is it flashy or impressive to watch? No. It's quite the opposite. It's playing up close on the table and the speed of several balls is much, much slower. You won't have those wow moments. Someone from the sideline might be watching and think there's nothing special going on there based on speed of the shots. But in the quest for playing what gives me the most consistency and what I enjoy "turning things into a tactical battle vs a sheer power one" I think this will suit me best.
Have any of you ever experienced this or know someone like this? Leave a comment if you have. Feel free to share.
Stay tuned for future club updates.
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