tabletennisJunkie.com - table tennis and ping pong forum for equipment junkies!

[729 fx]

Defensive players try to outlast their opponents, either by avoiding their own mistakes or by provoking opponents into making mistakes. They are normally choppers, modern or classical defenders or even an out-an-out blocker.

Choppers - against a chopper, one has to be be patient. Defensive choppers thrives on your mistakes when you become impatient. To play against a chopper, alternate your shots between deep loops, and short pushes. The chopper is likely to try to force you to make errors by using a variety of amounts of underspin. Expect the chops to vary from no spin to light spin to very heavy underspin. Finally, work the chopper down the middle more than side to side. The sides are often a chopper's strength while many have problems with shots hit down the middle. Move the ball in and out and use the drop shot, especially to their forehand side.

Blockers - Blockers, just like choppers, are often defensive players. They try to get into a rhythm and move you out of position. As with the chopper, break their rhythm by varying the shots. Hit one deep and hard and then alternate with a short shot. Hit a high, spinny loop because blockers often like to use the power of their opponents to win points. Again, be patient, use just one power shot at a time, and sometimes trick the blocker into initiating an attack, in which they are usually not strong with.

[729 fx]

If playing against an opponent performing a push-block, what counter can we use?
So far I can only think of looping it back others than doing the same push back to the opponent.

[ejunkie]

It's hard trying to be patient with choppers since they know that you are trying to be patient.
They wouldn't force mistake by chopping alone. So a good chopper would smash/kill a lot to put pressure on you. They have the good techniques of different underspin pushes and can setup their attacks in a push rally. So it's almost impossible to beat them unless you have a good serve to setup you attacks.

[729 fx]

Yes, that is the methodology of a modern defender. They are patient when playing defensive strokes but give them any chances to attack, they will do the offensive stroke.

[ejunkie]

I should know because I play this style a lot, more in the past then nowadays. There are weaknesses of this style but I wouldn't like to tell on my fellow choppers. May be Varghese, also a defensive player, can give us his opinion.

[varghese]

Modern Defense Vs Modern Defense Video Wang Xi Vs Joo Se Hyuk : http://www.tabletennisvideos.net/video/ ... oo-Se-Hyuk

The video is from our own video channel TableTennisVideos.net.

[729 fx]

Wow! Two modern defensive players going at each other's.

This is a nice video, varghese.

ejunkie, I do agree that modern defensive do have its own weaknesses. Every other styles, like two-winged looper, blocker, classic defender etc, do have their own weaknesses. The only question here is what styles work for you (or you are comfortable with) and whether that style with its inherent weakness can reduce your mistake as compared with your opponent's style.

[ejunkie]

One is very easy to spot. The modern chopper, being a chopper, can not attack on both wing like ph and sh loopers. So he is limited himself to one side offense and has the same weakness as the older ph style w/o rpb. He then has a lot of weakness when he is attacking, like not good at long rallies when he is attacking, and like relying on power of his attack and not well balanced attacks.

[729 fx]

For me, I would prefer to be an all-round player, like Waldner. No matter if my opponent is an attacker or a defender, I will have my ways to counter/overcome them.

[iluvtt]

Chopper can attack with their backhand actually. They can use their long pips (or short pips) or they can twiddle their bats & use their inverted rubbers to attack but top ranked choppers like Joo & Chen don't do these often. The only chopper (as far as I know) that twiddles quite a bit is Ruwen Filus & he's ranked like 130 ish in the world.

I agree that every style be it attacker, defender or all-rounder has its own weaknesses & you are bound to meet some players with styles that are unplayable to you (assuming the level of the players are almost the same).