Geospin Tacky vs Sriver

I've been using Sriver since I started to play table tennis, which is like 20 years ago, but out of that, probably only played few years with any decent frequency. I currently use J-Pen blade from Butterfly and play close to the table. I am able to beat most recreational players but in the club, about 1/3 can beat the crap out of me...

With geospin, I went more forward. I don't know which is more spinny, but it doesn't bounce off the rubber as much as others. The rubber creates the spin, so you have to produce the force.

There may not be any less spin. If your loops have a higher throw angle, it's harder to block low. With low loop drives with the same amount of spin, it's easier to block low and might appear to have less spin.

Geospin is a great rubber, but it's just too bloody slow without speed glue...

During my first play, I didn't feel any more spin on Geospin compare to Sriver L - felt about the same. I didn't feel any more loop but I do have to admit I wasn't paying attention to my opponents' returns. I play again later today so I'll experiment more.

pimpmyracket wrote: yhbae01 wrote: I do have a question on the looping technique however - my looping skills may not be up to par. How do you get the ball to fly higher while keeping the ball on the table? When the ball has no spin or has top spin and I do hard vertical swing, I always hit a home run. Just about all of my drive clear the net by no more than few inches which probably indicates that they have more speed and less spin. This is the case for both Sriver and Geospin. As I mentioned before, my swing is already quite a bit forward even before the switch. I would really like to figure out how to return backspins more reliably by looping. I'm not sure exactly what you're doing, since you said you hit a topspin ball by swinging vertically (straight up?) which would make a very high ball. You would swing vertically for underspin, not no-spin or topspin. And yes it sounds like your hits are more speed than spin. Whenever you loop you have to keep a closed racket angle. Let's say you're loop swing is moving diagonally forward-up. Your racket face should be parallel to that. You might be opening the face too much, creating a flatter hit with less spin. You have to keep a closed racket face and just graze the ball. When you have loads of topspin, the ball will arc downward really quickly.

yogi_bear wrote: if you compare sriver and geospin is like comparing a porche to a kia pride car

pimpmyracket wrote: yhbae01 wrote: Perhaps I am catching the ball too thick instead of glazing? I do hit the ball almost always at the top near the table and I noticed alot of loopers wait for it to sink further down even below the level of the table... Could this be the problem?   Thanks for your feedback... For heavier underspin I like to let it sink before hitting it. If it's high enough though you can do a loop kill at the top of the bounce. But the issue of grazing the ball is different when you switch between tacky and non-tacky rubbers. Tacky rubbers generate spin more from the topsheet, whereas non-tacky rubbers require the ball to dig into the soft sponge to generate the spin. This is most noticeable when lifting heavy underspin balls. When I first tried non-tacky rubbers (Andro Quad 450), when I graze the heavy underspin balls, the ball would just drop down (I mean straight down, it didn't grip it at all, didn't move forward). That's because it was too much of a graze shot so the ball didn't dig into the sponge to grip. When I switched to tacky rubbers, I could graze anything easily.

I've played around with getting spin out of different rubber types and found a similar problem switching between a tacky rubber and a non-tacky rubber. While both were quite capable of generating spin, there was a difference in the technique I needed to get the results I was looking for.

Basically, when I play with tacky rubbers with high throw angles, I need to close the racquet a lot more and don't have to focus on "grazing" the ball as much. A less tacky rubber would not reward my angle play the same way, though - the spin is generated more by sinking the ball into the sponge and then moving the paddle in the direction of desired spin generation before the ball is ejected. It's more of a "grazing" stroke than an angled stroke (in my mind) because the tacky rubber's follow-through is much more in line with the direction of the ball's motion.

I found that angle of impact was sufficient for getting spin out of a tacky rubber, but that I needed more movement  while still keeping the paddle face relatively perpendicular to the direction of desired ball movement. I guess I'm trying to say that my experience with tacky and non-tacky rubbers leads me to believe that racquet angle is king for tacky rubbers and stroke angle is what gets it done with grippy, but non-tacky rubbers.

Hope that's coherent - kinda tough to describe. Just realize that the sticky geospin is going to tolerate a much more closed racquet face for topspin and a more open face for backspin. I find that I can still hit with my geospin if I keep it relatively flat, but that I can rip enormous spin out of it by using an extreme angle on my stroke.