This time, I’m just going to ramble about some differences in mentality between playing pips and playing smooth. More specifically, I’m trying to address some difficulties I’ve been having.
First of all, I think it’s safe to say that playing pips (effectively) is much more difficult than playing smooth. This is a direct consequence of not being able to generate the same spin. With smooth rubber, you can basically be anywhere, and hit any incoming ball with varying degrees of topin, and your ball will land back on the table. Even if you slightly misread the spin, by generating tons of topspin, your ball will safely dip back down. Well, in some cases, the same is often said about pips. The lower sensitivity to spin makes it easier to return serves and control incoming spin. However, I found the contrary to be true. Although it’s probably true that you’d be less inclined to, say, eat an underspin serve, it’s much harder to return it well. If the serve is high and/or long (but mostly just high), the pips do have the option of a flat hit, which is nice, and faster than a flip with inverted. However, a good low serve necessitates a push return, which is much more difficult to do effectively with the less spinny pips. There’s a much stronger emphasis on speed, placement, and most importantly, variation. A strong push with inverted can often force a weaker (more spin-oriented) opening loop, but a strong push with pips is not nearly spinny enough, so you have to either drop it short (also harder, I found, due to the slipping effect), or make sure you push long and fast to some awkward place (elbow or really wide to the forehand usually). Also, you’d think relatively dead serves would be great, since they’re smackable, but it’s actually very difficult to read the spin precisely on a barely-spinning ball. And, of course, if you read it wrong, it floats. So, usually against those types of serves, I do something like a roll (pushing is just asking to get killed), but again, placement is very important since it doesn’t have the speed or spin of a loop.
I’m not very good at staying on topic. Let’s go back to topspin play. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but the pips absolutely suck when you back off the table. If I get pushed back, I start chopping, because hits are going to float and lose speed (if they even land), and fishing/lobbing has relatively little spin. Well, no matter if I’m playing pips or smooth, my basic ball receiving strategy is the same: be prepared to use the backhand, but if possible, use the forehand. The reason I think of it this way is because you have less time to react to balls coming to the backhand (since they’re all taken in front of the body), whereas you have a split second longer when taking balls with the forehand (that split second makes all the difference). With the backhand pips, I have to be even more alert when using the backhand, because the balls really need to be taken at, or before the top of the bounce, especially with spinnier balls. The thing I really like about pips is that you have several options when blocking (just look at Gao Jun), assuming you judge the incoming spin correctly. There’s also the option of punching the ball (Wang Tao is the man). However, just like with smooth, it’s increasingly difficult to return balls with increasing spin. Using smooth rubber, it’s because the rubber will eat the spin, and pop the ball up (although you can just do that adding topspin block that rebounds surprisingly fast). I’ve found that with pips, the problem is exactly opposite. Against super spinny balls, the pips WON’T eat the spin enough, and the balls will float back, making it really hard to keep on the table. I haven’t really had this problem yet since I came up here, but there’s nobody here with Mark-level spin.
Well, I got interrupted in the middle of writing this, so I lost track of where I was going to go with this. So, in conclusion, playing a pip game is very different from playing smooth. I think most people tend to think of pips as more of an easy way out — that is, thinking it’s easier to return serves, and easier to attack. Of course, I would have to disagree with both of these statements. There was a time where I thought the same thing. Losing to pips players, I would feel like it’s cheap (because I wasn’t used to playing against it). But now I know that with pips, you have more weaknesses, and have to work harder to cover them! At least to me, playing pips is about adding variation to the game. I definitely wouldn’t recommend pips to a very aggressive player. Taking a look at the high level pips players (very few left in the men’s game), they tend to step around much more than double-inverted players, because it really is much easier to attack with smooth. So why would I play pips? It’s fun, and it’s different.
Oh, I guess I should talk about my own game lately. I feel like I’ve been making some sort of progress. At least, my backhand stroke and shot selection has become more “pure.” When I just started out with the Clippa, I tended to still focus quite a bit on generating my own spin (since it was possible), and I used many inverted-like strokes. The 802 is much less spinny, so I’ve learned to hit through spin more (instead of using my wrist to spin it), and focus on placement with pushes, instead of spin. Pretty soon, I’ll be able to use something like Spectol, which is my ultimate goal, because it’s better for producing strange blocks. Luckily, I’ve never really had a backhand loop, so I’ve been adjusting pretty fast!
