Reflections on Grip, Spin and Playing Surfaces

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   After much reflection, I have concluded recently that my rally strokes and serves are about where they should be even though they could clearly be better, and my major areas for improvement are reading and manipulating spin, especially short/over the table balls.  So I would like to share some of the recent results of my reflection that may help some of you who find spin and the existence of so many playing surfaces complicated.  The article should probably have a million diagrams but that is for a later time.
In addition, there is often a negative reaction  to pips players, mostly by inverted table tennis players who learn in environments dominated by inverted players.  I would like to explain why this occurs and give the inverted players who feel this way some intellectual and practical tools for dealing with these issues.

Many of these thoughts are still growing and imperfect, and I would appreciate any corrections or criticisms.

Here are the conclusions, which I will discuss in more detail in the ensuing paragraphs.  They may seem mostly like common sense, and to some they may be, but it took me some reading and four years of playing to get to them. 

1.  Grip and racket head speed are what produce spin or stop spin.
2.  Grip has two components, the surface component and the sponge/mechanical component.
3.  The grippier the surface, the greater its ability to stop and impart spin based on its own direction.
4.  Rather than confuse yourself thinking about the different surfaces, think in terms of the amount of grip the surface of your opponent has.
5.  Ultimately, given the time scales at which TT will play, intellectual understanding is no substitute for practicing against these surfaces.
6.  The best practices are ones where these surfaces are used in conjunction with whatever surfaces you typically play against so that the contrast in strokes forces the brain to read, plan and execute based on the ball read.

1.  Grip and racket head speed are what produce spin or stop spin.

The speed at which the racket is moving and the grippiness of the rubber are what impart spin onto the ball.  The Faster the racket is moving as it grips the ball, the more spin is imparted given the same kind of contact.  Grip is simply friction - when a surface is grippy/tacky, it slows down the ball rotation and if the racket is moving fast enough and the surface is grippy enough, reverses it.  This is what happens with inverted rubbers and what allows an inverted player to return a topspin with a countertopspin/topspin block with relative ease ease.  More on that in point 3.

2.  Grip has two components, the surface component and the sponge component.

The surface component of grip is often the easiest to consider and is derived from any things, including the friction/grippiness of the surface and the elasticity of the rubber surface.  While I don't want to get too detailed, the sponge/mechanical component is based on the idea that if the ball is allowed to sink into sponge and distort the rubber more (vs. a wood surface which would not allow for much penetration), the ball can be exposed to more pips per surface area and this allows the ball to be gripped better than if there was no sponge where all the stress would be left to the topsheet to handle. 

3.  The grippier the surface, the greater its ability to stop and impart spin based on its own direction.

The over-generalized hierarchy of rubber grip is something like this.

inverted/pips-in (always with sponge) > short pips-out with sponge > medium pips-out with sponge
> short pips-out OX > medium pips-out OX > long pips-out with sponge <=> anti-spin > long pips-out OX > frictionless long pips > frictionless anti

The way to think about it is this - let's say your opponent topspins the ball to you and you want to return the ball with heavy topspin the ball back to the person.  Well, you have to stop the ball from rotating in the direction towards you and send it back rotating with topspin towards your opponent.  With inverted rubber, this is generally possible, as inverted rubbers have sufficient surface grip to stop the ball from spinning in any direction and invert the direction within reasonable spin levels produced by most people.  The optimal contact points on the ball to stop the spin and the racket head speed to make it go back to the opponent as topspin are critical, but most inverted rubbers have the ability to do this.  The same with heavy backspin - inverted rubbers are generally able to stop the spin and have the spin go back to the opponent as backspin.

When we get short pips rubbers, this begins to change, but not so much.  Short pips rubbers cannot stop and reverse with heavy topspin the highest amounts of topspin.  Depending on how you play, this may be a good or a bad thing.  Very rarely, the levels of topspin are so heavy that the ball sometimes slips off and goes back as light backspin.  On other occasions, the balls are stopped and reversed with topspin, but with less topspin than the same stroke would produce with inverted.  The lesser topspin or light backspin are both what some people refer to as dead balls.

However, when a ball doesn't have much spin, short pips are able to impart significant spin on the ball.  Also, short pips can add significant spin in the same direction as the ball is already rotating (hence, they can chop back heavy topspin into backspin, loop heavy backspin into topspin and are good for continuing/adding sidespin to serves, where most inverted returners tend to go against the spin.

As we go lower and lower on the hierarchy, the lower rubber grip reduces ability of the rubber to stop and invert the spin.  Lets's look quickly at long pips - those surfaces tend to have less friction so they are almost completely unable to stop spin so they almost always continue the spin, no matter what ball comes in once it is spinning decently - hence heavy topspin will be returned as either light or heavy backspin, depending on the stroke from the player, and heavy backspin will be returned as either light or heavy topspin.

If the behavior of long pips is confusing, or you just need more clarity on what it means to stop (or go against) vs. continue (or add to) the spin, this article by Greg Letts is very helpful and is an online classic for TT players who need to intellectually understand long pips.

http://www.gregsttpages.com/articles3/53-articles/long-pimples/87-long-pimples-for-beginners

4.  Rather than confuse yourself thinking about the different surfaces, think in terms of the amount of grip the surface of your opponent has.

This is one of the main points of this article.  Too often, the question is how to play against short pips vs. medium pips vs. long pips vs. anti-spin, when the real issue is whether the surface has the ability to stop/impart spin or not.  While there are small nuances of sponge that affect relying mostly on surface grip (especially when dealing with people who use well worn inverted rubbers as well as some cases of anti-spin and long pips), if you know how grippy your opponent's equipment is, then you largely have all you need to know about the rubber.  You can then have an idea of how much he can put on his serves with his wrist action if anything, and whether your spins will be inverted (behave the same way that they do vs. inverted rubbers) or reversed (behave as they do vs. long pips or lower friction rubbers).  

Over time, in order to read spin better, you will have to realize that even inverted players may or may not be utilizing the grippy potentials of their rubber.  In the end, you learn to play the ball while thinking about how the amount of grip the surface you are playing against impacts the stroke.

5.   Ultimately, given the time scales at which TT will play, intellectual understanding is no substitute for practicing against these surfaces.

All of this is theory, and TT is a very fast game - you need to hit with players who use various kinds of equipment with different levels of grip to get used to the idea that a surface with less grip can produce a different result from the one you are used to playing against.  Our minds simply tend to use certain visual cues to read spin and many of these are tied to the stroke the player is playing against us.  In order to force the mind to look for more clues, we need to diversify the situations we expose our mind to in order to stop it from looking just at the stroke and to force it to account for the nature of the surface being used, which will often sound a little different from inverted at the very least.  

One of the benefits of using an inverted/pips-in surface is that it is the surface that allows you to generate the most spin once you develop the timing and the strokes to use inverted surfaces optimally.   Therefore, you can just about add or reduce spin to any ball that comes from another surface that can't produce spin, the only caveat being that you need to read the spin on the ball somewhat accurately to learn how to handle the ball.  But given the stabilizing nature of spin, you don't need to be 100% accurate in your read - you just need to be accurate enough to know how to contact the ball and generate enough spin to keep the ball under control and on the table.  Inverted also allows you to play at different distances so you can play further from the table to give yourself more time to respond to the faster balls, or closer to the table to pick up the slower balls.

Since spin enables you to control the ball more easily and stabilize the flight using the Magnus Effect, inverted rubbers make it easy to keep the ball on the table with spin strokes, both slow and powerful.  Along with ITTF regulations that limit the amount of grip one can design into pips-out rubbers, this advantage of pips-in rubbers over pips-out rubbers has made the exclusive use of pips-out almost non-existent at the top level in the modern game today.

The critical thing is that one needs to learn how to generate topspin with one's stroke.  Players who complain a lot about pips tend to be players who have never practiced much against them or who do not have strokes in their arsenal that can add spin to spinless balls.  Once you have both kinds of strokes and play against surfaces with different levels of grip, you will complain about pips much less.

6.  The best practices are ones where these surfaces are used in conjunction with whatever surfaces you typically play against so that the contrast in strokes forces the brain to read, plan and execute based on the ball read.

Ideally, your best practice player is a twiddler who uses diverse surfaces.  Or at least, spend 1 minute hitting against one surface/spin and one minute hitting against another surface/spin.  This will force your mind to look for cues other than the stroke to figure out what is on the ball.  If you simply practice against long pips exclusively, your mind will have a stroke, but will not be using the stroke based on reading the ball.   While this might help to learn a stroke, it will not help retain the information for actual match play, which is when it is most critical.

This is still a work in progress, but I would appreciate comments and thoughts from everyone.  Thank you a million if you read this far. 