My nerve has unpinched itself enough that I felt ok to play again tonight.  So I waltzed in to the Berkeley club after a several month absence from RRs and took my prodigious hardbat skills and 1100 rating to table 6.  My sponge racket is in pieces and I've been hitting only with the hardbat with the guys at work for the past month so what the hell.

It was a learning experience.  At work we just smack balls around, no serving and receiving, no pushing, no short game stuff.  No points, sets, or matches either.  It's just to blow off steam between stints at the computer.  So I was expecting a lot of funny things to happen.  One thing about hardbat is that it's more or less true that the ball goes where the racket face is pointing.  It's refreshingly straightforward that way.  For instance if a heavy push comes your way and you open your racket face to push it back guess what?  The ball pops up.  Similarly, heavy topspin blocked with closed racket face results in ball bouncing on table halfway to net.  The variation of racket angle from vertical is pretty small.  Even a heavy chop against loop is hit at maybe 45 degrees.  And probably not even that.

So I made a lot of beginner type mistakes but I won a bunch of cheapo points too.  A typical scenario was: looper topspins, hardbatter blocks loop, which comes back either no spin or light topspin, looper expects block with more topspin and his next attempt goes straight into the net.  After a while I got the hang of pushing against underspin, which is kind of like a mini chop block, i.e., a push but with a nearly vertical racket face.  The ball comes back with very light or no underspin so the inverted player's next push gets popped up or pushed long.

There were a few good points with longish rallies but overall it was just mass confusion on both side of the table.  In any case, hardbat, sponge, clipboard, or frozen fish, it didn't matter to me - I was just happy to be at the table again. 

Here's one of the better ones on youtube.  Notice how hard the smashes are and how different the forehand technique is from that of a sponge player's. 

My hardbat experiment is now what, 10 days old?  And I've already tried three rubbers: Yasaka A-1-2, Gambler Peacekeeper OX, and Valor Premium.  The three rubbers are surprisingly different in feel and in play.  In the picture below the Yasaka is the dark red one, peacekeeper the light red one and the Valor rubber is black.  The differences are apparent.  The Yasaka rubber has the widest pips while peacekeeper has smaller pips and they're more widely spaced.  Both the Yasaka and Gambler pips are textured on their tops while the Valor pips are smooth.  The Valor pips appear to be somewhere in between the other two in terms of pip width and spacing.

Feeling the rubbers with your fingers gives the distinct impression of hardness on the Yasaka and softness on the other two.  The Yasaka pips are stiffer and more difficult to bend.  Also the "backsheet" is thicker and stiffer than the other two.  Both the peacekeeper and Valor rubbers feel quite soft and the pips are noticeably easier to bend.

In play the Valor rubber is easily the spinniest and is noticeably more springy and a bit faster than the other two (by sponge standards they would all be slow of course).  The Yasaka feels rather dead and slick in comparison and the peacekeeper has a bit of a long pips character to it that personally I didn't find appealing.

To me the Valor rubber is the overall winner hands down.  Easily the best feeling and with more spin.  Of course they all have massive control and chop like a dream but because the Valor is spinnier you can pull off a wider variety of shots.  The clincher for me though is that it has the best smell of any TT rubber I've ever used.  I mean it smells exactly like... a piece of rubber!  It's a rubber with an actual rubber smell, like a car or bicycle tire.  After so many years of nose deadening and headache inducing sponge rubber chemical smells I find that kind of charming.

I've had several sessions with my "hardbat" at work and you know it just gets more bizzarre every time.  How do you serve with this thing?  What even constitutes a serve?  What would be a heavy chop serve with an inverted racket has such a mild amount of underspin that it sometimes comes out as topspin after the second bounce.   You have to really really whack the ball hard to get any side or underspin on it.   On the forehand forget using a locked wrist and angling the racket to generate topspin.   Doesn't work, the ball goes straight into the table.  Instead you have to cock your wrist back on the backswing and stroke up the back of the ball with a completely open face as hard as you can while snapping your wrist through contact.  And all that work is rewarded with less topspin than that baby in the famous video gets hitting multiball with his dad.  It's essentially the same motion that tennis players use to generate topspin ground strokes.

Another thing about hardbats is the near complete lack of EJ opportunities.  This is part of the demented hardbat "culture" which is that matches should be decided mainly by the skill of the players and not on the quality, type, or cost of their equipment.  I know, what crazy nonsense!  As a result there are only a handful of hardbat specific blades available and even fewer ITTF approved rubbers.  Even worse, to play in a USATT hardbat event your blade must be all wood, so even if you choose to use a blade made for the sponge game your choices are ridiculously limited.  A seasoned, professional EJ such as myself could easily exhaust all possible blade and rubber combinations in a few afternoons.  So not challenging.  But one preservers and does one's best (heavy sigh).  A nice place in the hardhat universe to visit is over at Valor table tennis.  I picked up one of their "American Chopper" blades second hand from a player at mytabletennis.net and will give it a try next week.

The trip down the rabbit hole goes deeper.  How is it that in six years of playing table tennis I never picked up a hardbat?  Not even once.  Seriously?  And you call yourself a player.  The best sponge players play hardbat and they're good at it.  Why?  Because they're animals that's why.  If I were an animal I'd be a fat little corgi and that's why it's taken me so long to pick up a hardbat.

In any case my first version was simply BBC triflex skinny + Yasaka A-1-2.  The first 10 balls I hit went straight into the table, I think the best one made it halfway to the net.  Really, if you angle the racket down the ball goes down, it's very straightforward.  The pips don't grip the ball at all.  Brushing?  That's strictly for teeth and very furry cats.  Counterlooping?  Forget about it.  No spin reversal, no catapult effect.  Throw angle: negative infinity.  I had several sheets of long pips on for a few weeks and they're weren't nearly as weird as this stuff.  But then in a way I'm used to long pips because I've played against them so many times.  Hardbat?  I'm thinking hard here and I can only come up with four times in six years that I've played against them.  Once at the 2009 US Nationals, once at the sunset table tennis club in San Francisco, once at a now defunct club at a high school in west Oakland, and once at the Berkeley club (where sadly the hardbat player contracted EJitis and ended up using a variety of medium and long pips).  The site www.hardbat.com lists 78 players in the US currently playing hardbat full time, which is about 1% of the active usatt players.

I'm not going to go into the details of my experience because I'm still trying to come to grips with it.  The differences between hardbat and sponge are vast.  The saying bringing a knife to a gunfight doesn't cover it since it's more akin to showing up to the gunfight with a cream pie, three water balloons, and a mangy cat.  All I can say is I've played a couple of hardbat sessions now (just whacking balls around with the guys at work mind you) and it was fun.   And very very weird.