(By Larry Hodges, Member of US Table Tennis Hall of Fame, www.tabletenniscoaching.com/blog)
What’s the biggest threat from your opponent? One of the best ways to consistently beat weaker players (i.e., avoid upsets) as well as knock off stronger players is to neutralize whatever his biggest threat is. It’s hard for an opponent to win if he can’t use his biggest strength!
You don’t want to overdo this. Ideally, you dominate with your strengths. But if you and your opponent both have strengths, then whoever takes away or handles the opponent’s strengths best is the likely winner.
So, how do you do this? That would require an entire book! (Yes, Table Tennis Tactics for Thinkers comes to mind.) But more simply, it comes down to three things:
1. Identify their strengths that threaten you.
2. Find ways to stop them from using the strength.
3. Find ways to handle that strength.
I’m going to use the example of a player I played a year ago in a tournament. He was rated much lower, and shouldn’t have been a threat. But that type of thinking is the quickest way to lose to such a weaker player. So, what did I do?
1. I identified his biggest threat, which was his tricky long serves. So, while he played a match, I nonchalantly stood on the far side, watching his serve as if I were the receiver. By the time we played our match, I was used to that serve, and the strength was mostly gone.
2. How did I stop him from using that strength? Once I had seen the serve enough, I felt confident I could loop them. When I did that, he was forced to serve shorter, simpler serves, which made his serve less effective.
3. Once he began serving shorter, the threat of the long, tricky serves was gone, and I won easily.
Result? The player was not a threat. But if I hadn’t gone through the above, then there was a chance that at least the first game would have been iffy. And giving up the first game is the first step toward a bad upset. Worse, once you lose that first game, it’s easy to lose confidence in your shots, and it’s all downhill from there.
Here’s another example. suppose your opponent has a nice backhand loop against push. How do you prepare?
1. You’ve already identified the strength that threatens you.
2. How do you stop it? Suppose he serves short backspin. Most players would probably just push it back to his backhand, giving him his strength. Instead, you can: push aggressively to the backhand (quick, fast, heavy, low, wide), and see if he can handle that; push aggressively to forehand; push aggressively to middle (his playing elbow); push short; flip; sidespin push. That’s a lot of options!
3. How do you handle his backhand loop? Go watch him play from the far side. When he backhand loops, imagine yourself blocking it. Use your racket and actually make the motion, perhaps matching his opponent’s blocks when they are effective. Then visualize doing so in your head, over and over. By the time you actually play, you’ll be used to it. Perhaps start by pushing aggressively to the backhand, and establish that you are now comfortable blocking it – more than once, if necessary. (But if you still have trouble with it, perhaps use more of #2 above.)
So, why risk losing? PREPARE!
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