Table Tennis...

Sorry for the lack of posts just lately. I’ve been playing more table tennis just recently, and I have got into coaching, and also taken on the task of remaking the club website so I’ve been quite busy.

Table tennis is a great sport that generally requires a great amount of skill to play at a decent level. I say generally because there is one aspect of table tennis that reduces the need for skill and that is what I’m going to write about in this post.

There are 3 main types of rubber used on table tennis bats. Inverted (or smooth), short pimples out and long pimples out.

Inverted rubbers are good for spinning the ball (provided your stroke is correct), but are also susceptible to incoming spin and therefore you need to adjust your strokes accordingly depending on the spin your opponent puts on the ball. This takes a lot of skill as you can imagine.

Short pimples out rubbers are less capable of spinning the ball, and the correct stroke for these types of rubber is to hit through the ball more. These rubbers are still affected by incoming spin (to a lesser degree than inverted) and also require a good amount of skill to use.

With both of these types of rubbers you can tell what spin is being applied to the ball by watching your opponents stroke. Nothing is hidden from you, it is just up to you to control the spin and make a good return.

Long pimples are a completely different story. You can’t generate any spin with them, but neither are you affected by incoming spin, and so little skill is required to control the ball. What actually happens is the ball hits the pimples, which bend around the ball, altering the spin to something random and unreadable, thus producing errors from the opponent. In the sales pitch for these types of rubbers they emphasize the spin reversal and the deception it creates. This appeals to peoples desire to win at all costs as it gives the user an advantage, regardless of actual playing talent. Basically, with long pimples, you can play the same shot against almost any ball and you will return it with random spin on it, hence the deception.

In my playing career I have seen players transform into difficult opponents simply by putting long pimple rubbers on their backhand side. One such player moved up two divisions after doing so. The other day I was watching a player I knew years ago returning really spinny serves by just pushing the ball with his bat. I was amazed and thought how good he was at returning serves and how much he’d improved. Then I discovered he had long pimples on his bat. He proceeded to tell me how using long pimples really improves your game. This is just rubbish. I have no doubt that at general league standard you will win more games, but it doesn’t make you a better player.

In no other sport would you be able to use equipment that gives you such an advantage and covers up weaknesses in your game. This begs the question, why is it allowed? The answer is money. Table tennis equipment manufacturers sell these long pimple rubbers to people who only care about winning, and there are a lot of people like that out there. It’s a form of legalized cheating, and for financial reasons they are allowed to be sold and used.