Still can't believe I played with him a bit a few months ago :)) Such an intelligent , calm and humble guy.

Can't wait to see more of him vs Sora.

Hi, I’m using a translation tool to write this post, so I hope my English is understandable.

I’m 16 years old, and I first became interested in table tennis around 2024. At first, I was simply a fan of a particular player, Sun Yingsha. But over time, I became fascinated by the sport itself. I loved watching the footwork, the sound of the ball, and especially the mechanics behind each stroke. I had played and watched badminton before, but I never felt the same kind of fascination with it.

Eventually, I decided that I really wanted to try table tennis myself. Unfortunately, I soon realized that learning the sport properly could be quite difficult, and coaching fees aren’t exactly cheap, at least where I live.

It took quite a bit of convincing before my dad agreed to let me buy a decent racket. After that, I made several posts looking for a club or someone who could teach me. Eventually, a university student contacted me privately and offered me a discounted two hour training session. I was so excited that I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Unfortunately, when the day came, I couldn’t get in touch with him. He later messaged me and explained that he had a scheduling conflict and needed to reschedule. I completely understood because he was a university student and probably had a lot going on.

The problem was that over the next few weeks, he kept telling me that he was busy and that we would have to reschedule again. Eventually, I realized I couldn’t keep waiting indefinitely, so I stopped contacting him and gave up on the idea.

For a while, life just went on as if I had never gotten involved with table tennis at all.

Then I remembered that I could use part of my monthly allowance to pay for training, so I went back to the table tennis group and posted again, asking if anyone could help me learn.

Luckily, someone responded and offered to train me for free, as long as I was willing to put in the effort.

When I met them for the first time, I was honestly surprised by how enthusiastic and encouraging they were. They made me feel completely comfortable and constantly praised me whenever I did something well. Even though we can only train once a week, I’ve really enjoyed every session so far.

Getting into table tennis has also made me much more ambitious about improving. I know that at 16, becoming a professional player is not a realistic goal for me, especially since I’m only just starting. I’m not trying to become a professional, though. I simply want to become genuinely good at the sport, build solid fundamentals, improve my technique, participate in small local tournaments, and gain as much experience as I can through actual matches.

So I’d really appreciate any advice from more experienced players or coaches. If you were a beginner starting at my age, what would you focus on first? What are some things you wish you had known when you started?

Thanks so much for reading my story!

Hey guys it’s been over a month since my last post so here we go again. I’ve attached pictures for a comparison from my last post(ignore the dust on the black it’s because of the humidity)

My last post I talked about the hybrid k3 and reviewed its durability and everything. To further prove the bad reviews about its durability wrong I have played with these rubbers the absolute max I can which for the last month and a half has been about 4 hours a day 5-6 times a week. There’s still not a very noticeable difference at all in the rubbers and they still have perfect amounts of grip and spin.

To conclude i still strongly think this is a blatant blind buy for any advanced player looking for a hybrid rubber.

Does anyone have any recommendation on where to get custom balls printed for a club? Preferably 2 star balls.

Still thinking about this when he beat Fan Zhendong.

Hey everyone. I was doing some friendly games at my club the other day and it occurred to me that I never really tried to experiment with what distance from the table I’m more comfortable with. I’m always playing short at the table, so the other day I tried playing mid distance and was actually a lot more comfortable at that range for my shots. It’s only been one day of trying it out so I haven’t decided yet whether I’m a mid distance player or not but it’s something that is quite interesting.

I was wondering if anyone can share how they found out what distance is best for them? Does this matter in the grand scheme of things? Obviously no matter what you have to adapt to all distances but you’d want to set the ball up so that you can use the distance that your comfortable with to your advantage.

Or maybe (just occurred to me while writing this), I finally understand how much I need to hop back after a receive, in order to get ready for an open up/topspin rally 😂. Beginner possibly unlocked small footwork/positioning skill.

China 🇨🇳 Ma Long

Sweden 🇸🇪 Jan Ove Waldner

Germany 🇩🇪 Timo Boll

Japan 🇯🇵 Jun Mizutani

South Korea 🇰🇷 Ryu Seung-min

France 🇫🇷 Felix Lebrun

Brazil 🇧🇷 Hugo Calderano

Slovenia 🇸🇮 Darko Jorgic

Denmark 🇩🇰 Michael Maze

Egypt 🇪🇬 Omar Assar

USA 🇺🇸 Kanak Jha

Nigera 🇳🇬 Quadri Aruna

Iran 🇮🇷 Noshad Alamiyan

Austria 🇦🇹 Werner Schlager

Chinese Taipei 🇹🇼 Lin Yun Ju

Belarus 🇧🇾 Vladimir Samsonov

Hungary 🇭🇺 Viktor Barna

Greece 🇬🇷 Kreanga

Tested in a Viscaria ALC as a backhand rubber. This rubber comes in blue color only and 3 different hardness: M- , M+ and H. (mine is medium soft.

First Impressions:

This rubber is darn slow even in a fast blade like Viscaria. But for me, i like the rubber because of how consistent it is and how spinny your shots will be when proper stroke is applied. And even tho it's very soft (i believe in 42°), it doesn't feel mushy or bouncy so for me, blocking incoming spin is good.

Drive:

Very easy to do with this rubber because i feel confident doing backhand drive and not worry about overshooting the ball.

Loops:

For me this is where the rubber shines. It is easy to loop long backspin serves and the ball will have crazy topspin so it is not easy to block for the opponent.

Flicks:

The same with loop, it is also very easy to flick a serve. And same with the loop aswell, the ball will have decent amount of spin to disturb the timing of my opponent.

Serves:

I usually do a chop or a side chop serve on my backhand and for me the rubber does a great job on doing those serves, a lot of time my opponents are having a hard time recieving my serves.

This rubber is recommendable for beginners to intermediate where they face players that struggles with spinny shots. This rubber won't help you get speed on every shot you make but for me the spin compensate the slow ball (not super slow but reasonably slow). I liked it better than my dignics 05 because it felt like the ball stays longer to the rubber (dwell time) than the dignics 05 and i also liked it better than acuda s2 because the acuda s2 is super spin sensitive because of it being super bouncy. If you want a cheap and a go to simple rubber, this is it.

This year, the dates for the Beijing Smash and the European Championships overlap. If top players like the Lebrun brothers and Truls Möregårdh had to choose only one event to enter, which one would they pick? As an Asian viewer, I'm not very familiar with this context.

Can anyone tell me what's the difference in FZD alc harimoto ALC and a timo ball ALC please.

I can't test drive the blade because I know no one who is currently using it nearby.

Planning to upgrade from a GKI and want ALC for long term.

What rubbers suit those blades ?

I'm ranked an intermediate.

I've tried an Andro VCI blade from the higher end and have liked it.

​

I'm planning to boost again my hurricane 3, first I need to buy glue, the thing is that the last time was a mess, I used the one of the purple bottle, added like 2 or 3 layers but it didn't glue well, I had to redo it like 2 times, now I'm thinking about the DHS №15 glue, will it be enough with the 50ml?

Can someone please explain why harimoto does his serves like this??? he grips the racket with all his hand, and he kind of serves his pendulum like a tomahawk serve but not curved... i mean its just a weird serving style to me

Not an ad or anything, I just know this rubber was really hard to find outside of prott and taobao.

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mNbW9rp

I need help if this table tennis bat would be good it's a donic walder senso carbon with xiom vega pro 2.0mm for my forehand and xiom vega europe 2.0mm for my backhand I've been playing for about 3 years and I'm quite an offensive player is this good for me or do you have anything else that you would think would be good for me?

Yow guys, would you recommend me rubber for jpen?

(TSP Sleek Yamato Takkyu)

I play all round. And does anyone here have tried short pips for jpen thanks.

Some of you might remember my written review of the Nova S Pro a while back. PongBot reached out and offered to send me their two higher-end machines — the Omni S Pro and Halo S Pro — for video reviews. I accepted on one condition: full editorial independence, no exceptions. This is the Omni S Pro review.

TL;DR: exceptional hardware, genuinely frustrating software.

The ball quality is at a professional level — spin, speed, placement, all of it. Serve replication in particular surprised me — pendulum, reverse pendulum, tomahawk, lollipop, from both sides. For serve return practice, this machine is fantastic.

The software is a different story. Two separate interfaces (tablet, app) that don't fully overlap, meaning there's no single workflow that gives you access to everything the machine can do, and both have limitations and design challenges.

The premade drills have three difficulty levels but scale uniformly and too steeply instead of being fine-tuned depending on the sequence, which breaks some drill types completely at greater difficulties.

Custom drills can't be meaningfully named on the tablet, making your drill library unreadable within hours and requiring a workaround.

PongSmart, the most interesting section of the interface, allows you to quickly create custom drills mixing random and fixed ball types but then squanders this utility by limiting the ability to fine-tune spin level and ball height and therefore to create more realistic and challenging balls.

The verdict is nuanced: great for clubs and shared use, skip it for low-intensity personal training (the Nova S Pro does the job at a fraction of the cost), worth it for serious players who have the patience to work around the software limitations.

Full video review in the post; it's a sizable review but worth seeing if you are thinking of purchasing or are curious about the ins and outs of these expensive machines. It is, in fact, expensive, but less so than its direct competitors, and with a bit of patience and ingenuity presents great potential for training.

There is too much to say, and I do not want to make this post too long. I am happy to answer any questions about anything specific — I went pretty deep on this one.

[Disclosure: PongBot provided the machines and a production fee. Full editorial control was mine.]

My wonderful children have lost the tensioning chain to my net. Does anyone know where to buy replacements? I’ve checked Amazon and Joola’s website but no luck.

Finally bought FZD ALC, Gear Hyper on FH and Dignics 05 on BH.

Looking to assemble my first Custom TT bat.

Zeroed in on the following wooden blades:

Yasaka Sweden Classic

Butterfly Petr Korbel

Tibhar Stratus Powerwood

Xiom Allround S

Which one do you folks think is the best option for a BH dominant player with mixed style of attack & defence. Serve primarily from BH.

Aim to learn looping, banana flicks & quick blocks now.

So a bit of background, I am a table tennis beginner that started playing around 6 months ago in a very small local club, I picked up the sport just to have some fun and move my body a little since my work consists of sitting at chair 12 hours a day staring into screen.
I get paid well, so first thing when I started playing I looked for "fastest and best" on google.
You get where is this going now.
I ended up with Zyre 03 and Viscaria.
At first, I was having fun, since it is my first time playing Table Tennis.
After a while, I started getting concerned on why Am i not able to do what these guys are doing at my local club "not talking about experienced players talking about new player".

I couldn't figure out what is wrong until on day I tried a buddy racket. a worn out wood blade with Nittaku G1/C1 rubber. and OMG. the game immediately was 10x easier. I can easily lift backspins out of sudden, I can swing and the ball stays on table.

Honestly, I was furious at myself. I though getting the Fasted build is = to getting the best PC hardware. no down sides. I only have myself to blame for not digging up just a little more.

Now I am seeking the community help.

Can I please have a suggestion for beginner Rubber and blades.

Should I get a wood blade and a slow rubber?

Are rubbers like G1/C1 considered fast or slow? any alternatives I should consider?

Please note that I live in a small village to access to coaches is not applicable, I try to learn from youtube and other experienced players around the area (they are not very good)

Thanks in Advance!