Got in last night and today met up with the forum's own Timo22 for a fun warm up.  Timo has bought a few of my used rackets from the forum so we've exchanged quite a number of emails and pms in the past.  Nice fellow!  After warming up for a while we had a friendly match which true to our ratings came down to the 5th set with Timo squeaking past me 12-10.  I believe I had the upper hand in the rallies but his spinny serves were just a little too much for me to handle.  At least three of the sets were deuce so it was quite close.

This is my second trip to the nationals; first one was in 2006 and it seems like the event was larger then.  My memory is not clear but there don't seem to be as many tables as 2006 and the event is in a different, maybe smaller, section of the las vegas convention center.  There also don't seem to be as many vendors as last time.  I was wondering if the event would be hit by the recession and it seems like perhaps it has.

In any case, it's exciting to be here because of all the new and different faces.  I watched Dan Seemiller play a match and Mark Hazinski warm up.  Seemiller was interesting, the guy does not play a power looping game at all.  I know jrs with loops much stronger than his.  Yet he totally took apart his opponent with very carefully placed pushes, blocks, drop shots, and short spinny loops.

Tomorrow's event is the U1300 and for Friday I'm in the U1100 and the U1600 40+.  For you internationals, U1100 means that anyone with a usatt rating at the cutoff date of under 1100 is eligible for the event.  The cutoff date was sometime in October so in my U1100 RR there is one player rated over 1300!  Presumably a skyrocketing jr who is perhaps playing over 1300 at present.

[Edit: the 1300 rating was apparently a mistake by the usatt.  The player was an older guy who assured me his rating was actually much lower.  I figure it was about 950 or so.]

We seem to have two schools of thought about the best way to cope with heavy topspin.  The answer really is dependant upon how much spin is on the incoming loop, and what level the player is who is blocking. Since Garwor instigated in his original post to me he had a problem controlling the topspin, the obvious answer is that he's either pushing forward too much or is playing contacting with a bat face that is too open, or (most Likely) a combination of the two. Nobody really likes to passively block, using bat angle only as in general it allows the looper more time to 'step in' and murder you. My personal preference is to concentrate on controlling the topspin via reading the spin and adjusting the bat angle, before getting more advanced and pushing forward, I feel the approach favoured by some coaches of playing through the ball with a common angle in order to force the pace results in an inferior ability to adjust ultimately. Just my opinion, which seeing as this is my blog, prevails here.  I have to add, holding a bat still on reciept of serve does not result in the ball flying uncontrollably, as long as you angle the bat face accordingly.

My own personal US national warm up tournament as I won't be playing another match before The U1300 event on Thursday.  Had a reasonable day, going 3-1 on table 2 (out of 3).  The only loss was to an older pen-holding gentleman who early on figured out that his long sidespin serves to my backhand weren't coming back.  He fed me a steady diet of them with the occasional long sidespinny job to my forehand, presumably to keep me honest but that wasn't really necessary.  That weakness is really starting to get to me.  Whenever I face a penholder who starts to serve backhand I know I'm in for a hard time.  The sad thing was that the games were fairly close as he was having a lot of difficulty with my serves as well.  The difference came down to a few missed 3rd ball attacks each game.

I also was having trouble finding that stroke on the forehand from Tuesday night.  It sort of came and went throughout the day.

Overall expectations for the nationals are low; really just to go and have fun and to try to give my opponents good matches.

You can see my league table here my team being LE4:

http://www.tabletennisuk.info/tables/derbys/derby/autotables-div1/derby_1.php

The top 3 teams are all equal on 19 points after 7 games. There is also a team lower down stuck on P4W3 who could also be equal on 19 points, however they have been struggling to get a team out, and unless they sort it soon I can't see them challenging for the top; with their best team they are more than capable though. We only have left to play CD3 & S2 and then we have played each team once.

Next Wednesday will be my last match before Christmas and it's against CD3 (see table), so a win against them would sit us in a very nice position for the Christmas break. Our only loss was a 6-4 loss against RR1 with our weakest side, so next time round we should given them a better match.

For the non-UK people who may be this, a quick roundup of how my local league matches work:

Derby league : 3 vs 3 = 9 singles + doubles = 10 matches played best of 5, 11 up. 3 points for a win, 2 each for a draw and 1 point for a 7-3 or 6-4 loss.

For the better teams this makes things quite absolute, but if you really want to break clear of the pack, you need to aim for an 8-2 win against your rivals.

Played up in Derby Prem again last night. It was a Derby match against our club's 1st team.

Was great to play up again, but both times I've been asked to play up its been against the 2 best teams in the league. I would have preferred to play a mid-table prem team to have a better go at them. To get an idea of standard, the 3 players were all 75%+ in Derby Prem and 40%+ in Nottingham Prem. I lost all 3 3-0. Against the 1st two I did alright, if I'd have played JV last (I played her 1st) I would have definitely taken an end at least, but still, she certainly knows what she's doing, and is very controlled. Had some great rallies though, nice and long, and this was the most fun out the 3 games. I really think that being able to have long rallies in a match situation really shows I'm doing somethings right (and other things wrong!). CA just had a fantastic flat hit BH, just flew from any height, even low down, and SM, well, hit some good shots here and there, but just too good for me, really good serves.

Overall, just abit too much class for me yet, and I'm not used to that level of intensity. Certainly the 1st two JV&CA, this is the kind of standard I'm aiming to get to in a years time. I don't know if this is a reasonable aim, but I don't see why not. SM is just another level up- doesn't matter how good my shots might get, just need more and more experience. There's still a gap between me and the standard I'm aiming for in a year, this really proves that I need to work my way up, and work harder, rather than hoping to keep playing as I am and magically be able to beat them.

Having had 24 hours to muss over last night's experience it occurred to me that there might be a simple explanation for why it might be preferable for beginners to accelerate their rackets through and perhaps past the point of contact. 

One thing that makes table tennis so difficult is the complex trajectory of the ball.  Even on something relatively simple like a strongly topspinned loop the ball slows down off the racket, drops sharply onto the table, then kicks off the table accelerating towards the opponent, only to slow down again.  That decelerate/accelerate/decelerate velocity profile may be unique to the sport.  In addition the magnitude of the deceleration is very large.  By some accounts on a hard smash the ball may be traveling upwards of 100 mph right off the racket, then slowing down to about 60 miles per hour at the net, and finally ending up at maybe 5-10 mph if the opponent is fairly far away from the table (10 feet?).  That's a net velocity change of 90 mph happening in perhaps 1/2 second.  90 mph is roughly 135 feet per second so the average deceleration is 270 feet per second squared, about 9 times the gravitational acceleration of objects near the earth's surface (32 f/s^2), i.e., 9 gs of deceleration.  Add to this the curvature of the trajectory due to spin and the effect of the bounce off the table and that's a lot of information to process very quickly.

Beginners understandably have a difficult time quickly assessing the situation with every incoming shot and correctly predicting where the ball is going to be when, something obviously necessary if bat is to strike ball.  More experienced players intuitively understand these things and are able to better anticipate the ball's movement, one of many reasons why they're so much better at getting in position.

So what do you do if your ability to predict the ball's path is not that good?  The natural thing I think would be to approach the ball slowly until you're so close that you can't miss at which point you accelerate your racket as quickly as possible and strike the ball.  It's the same strategy you use to smack a fly with a rolled up newspaper except just drawn out a bit more.  My guess, and that's all it is at this point, is that you start the acceleration of the racket (plus hand, arm, torso, etc.) too late to reach the maximum velocity before contact is made.  In fact you may still be accelerating the racket after contact, wasting power and hindering your recovery.

The more experienced player however has the luxury of knowing where the ball is going to be a split second before it gets there.  Therefore they can start the acceleration of the racket earlier and get the racket up to maximum velocity without having to worry about missing the ball.

Well that's my current thinking about it anyway.  As usual your thoughts are welcome!