Intro

- Best players in the world have great service and attack abilities. Previously, the top players focus their third ball attacks on backspin balls. But due to the now-ubiquitous banana flicks, players must develop the ability to serve and attack TOP-SPIN balls (example: just picture Ma Long lol).

- There are 7 requirements to having a strong service and attack ability.

1. You must be aggressive in playing. Like actually fight for the opportunity to launch the first attack for each ball.

2. You must be able to attack the ball anywhere on the table, whether the ball is short or long, or directed to your forehand or backhand. I don’t think he means EVERY BALL, because you can’t really attack a short push that is really low, unless you have amazing footwork, but you get the idea.

3. You need to have a vast arsenal of attacking techniques. Examples include playing slower but heavier topspin shots, power-looping, banana flicks, and forehand flicks.

4. You have to be faster than your opponent to fight for the first aggressive ball. Only when you are faster than your opponent will you get more opportunities to attack

5. Explosiveness in your attacks

6. Have variety in your placements, even if there is one shot that you can do extremely well

7. Be bold enough to apply the aforementioned 6 requirements

- Types of service and attack

- For attack:

§ Deep backspin balls, short backspin, half-long backspin, and topspin

- For placement

§ Cross-court, middle, and down-the-line

- Rhythm/tempo:

§ Powerloop if you have the opportunity (if you’re fast enough)

§ If not, spinny slow loop

- Control

§ Yes! Control is a form of attack!

§ You must be aggressive in your control. Some people like to play short pushes really slowly, but if you look at the pros, especially Ma Lin, his short pushes are always right off the bounce and loaded with backspin.

§ Another form is to deep push into your opponent’s body

- The ability to attack relentlessly

§ Once you get to a certain level of play where it is difficult to one-shot kill your opponents, you must develop a system of 2/3 shots after the initial attack

§ What’s important is that before you actually serve, you should’ve already thought out the next 5 or 7 shots.

- Training method

- For example, you can split the table into 6 equal parts. For backhand and middle sections that are closer to the table, you can develop the mentality to use the banana flick. If it’s the forehand short section, then use the forehand flick. For long balls, ¼ of the table from your backhand side should be attacked with the backhand loop (I have no idea why he said ¼ if he split the table into 6 equal parts). The rest ¾ of the table, use your forehand.

- The point is to develop a personal system to use, and have it drilled into your game.

- The example that he provided is pretty much the standard for the Chinese players

- The reason behind this training method is that many players do, in fact, have an aggressive mentality, and want to attack every ball. However, without a proper system/structure built into their head, they often get confused/uncertain how to attack the ball. The purpose of the system is just so that you do the same thing when a certain type of ball comes your way, and that you always do the same thing, so that you don’t have to think and can do it automatically with enough practice.

- At first, you can use multiball with the same combination each time. What I mean here is that, if you’re practicing the banana flick for the first time, you should have all balls from the multiball practice directed to your backhand/middle areas. Once you achieve relative ease with this, then you can begin to have balls delivered to both your backhand and middle areas, without the coach telling you where he/she is giving you the ball. After you can do this well, then you can use single ball instead of multiball to practice, and then finally, to real game simulations.

- The key is to start from the basics! It is not at all helpful to something you can’t really do at the beginning. Do the drills you can do, at first, then slowly build your way up. This is especially important.

- One more point is that for young players, their coaches should have them develop an aggressive mentality at the very beginning

§ 3 factors children need to develop: (for coaches)

· The desire to attack

· They NEED to attack (lol)

· And they must have the guts to attack and not be afraid of missing the ball

§ For coaches and players:

· The services must be developed in such a way that it complements their play styles. So if your play style is heavily inclined towards using your forehand (eg. Ma Long), then you serve more pendulum serves.

· You must set up combination shots, ie. serve a fast ball down the line, and then attack the opponent’s backhand wide angle. Know what your strengths and weakness are. Know which types of receives you’re good at attacking. There is always a main combination that you use, and the other complementary ones for variation purposes. You also need to have a couple service and attack combinations for distracting the opponent (often long services do the trick). The whole point is to have a bunch of combinations, so that the opponent will not be too used to your main combination.

- Service receive:

- Just as important as service

- Due to the change to non-hiding serves, water-based glues, and plastic ball, the spin on serves is much weaker than it was before, which means that there are more variations to receive the ball, and that serves are more easily received.

- Focusing on your service receive can yield great rewards

- There are 3 types of service receive

§ Attacking:

· This includes short balls, half-long balls, and long balls, backspin and topspin, forehand and backhand.

§ Aggressive control

· If you can’t attack, you must play short pushes quickly, or push deep quickly, to put pressure on your opponent.

· It is common among less advanced players to give slow, low-quality pushes to balls that they can’t attack, which result in easy and powerful attacks from the opponent

§ “other’ type, which are “special” types of receive

· Faking shots

· Examples: pushing to the opponent’s backhand but with a faking motion so that they think you are giving them a forehand ball, or flicking to the opponent’s backhand but with a faking motion so that they think you are flicking to their forehand

· Basically shots that are not “standard” shots

· Even though these shots are not as powerful as “attacking” receives, they are much better than the simple push receive

· Great players like Waldner, Samsonov, and Boll are great at these types of receives

- How to train service receive

§ You must know what type of ball is served to you

· You must increase your understanding of spin, ie. how to nullify or increase an opponent’s spin

§ Enhance your ability to look at the ball, regardless of the fake motions they do

· Example: only looking at the moment of contact and not looking at anything else

§ The ready position

· It is correlated with the player’s height.

· Those who are taller and have powerful forehand and backhand looping capabilities should stand farther away

· Those who are shorter and smack the ball more should stand more closely

· Those who are good at stepping around can stand farther to the left

· Those who are prefer to attack from both wings should stand closer to the center

· Just look at the difference in ready position for Ma Long and Zhang Jike

§ Similar to service and attack, you must also divide the table into portions and decide on how to receive each type of ball. Then you drill it in.

- Effective training methods

- To master any technique, we always follow these 3 steps

§ 1. Multiball and single ball, fixed position drills

§ 2. Once the above is accomplished, then we do single ball, with more judgement skills, footwork, and adjustment abilities

§ 3. Be able to use it in tournaments

- Rallying information

- 1st, 3rd, and 5th balls are considered service + attack shots TOGETHER (they should not be regarded separately)

- 2nd and 4th balls are considered service receive shots TOGETHER

- This is important because if, for example, I make a good short push and the opponent is unlikely to make a good return, the next ball will most likely be a short or half-long return. Basically, you should have a good idea of how the opponent will react to what you play

- If you make a good long push, obviously the next ball will most likely be a long push, so you should take a step back to prepare for your next shot. If you don’t move, then you lose the advantage of making a good long push.

- Look at 23:59 for a nice table of what you should do

- Lastly, service receive is really very hard to develop. It is actually what the CNT do worst at, amongst all their brilliant training systems and methods. Often, you think you can receive well in training, but during real tournaments, problems surface. So you should think more about service receive, and young players should play more tournaments, in order to get a good feel about service receive.