Serve Tips No One Tells You With Seth Pech

Hey everyone and welcome back to Peckpong, the channel where I talk about things that you can do to improve your game, match reviews that I play, and some drills and things that I do to try to help improve my game as well. Today we have the highly requested topic and that is the topic of tips they don't tell you on how to improve your serve. It's taken me a while to get all the information and create a nice video, but I hope it's worth the wait. So our first topic is everyone's favorite, it's going to be serve deceptions and a lot of the different ways you can use serves to deceive your opponent. So the first one we'll cover is the two-way Timo Boll serve and he's not the only one to do this, I think Patrick Francisca does this as well, but basically they've created a serve that can go in both directions at the last second, and what I mean by both directions is I mean spin-wise, he can make the spin go one way or the other. So what this does to the serve receiver is typically they can see what serve you're lined up for, whether it's a forehand serve or a reverse serve, and they can go through a mental checklist of all the serves you've done, all the receives they've done, and they can kind of go through and figure out what kind of receives they want to be doing. So now Patrick Francisca and Timo Boll have widened their amount of serves that the person has to think about receiving. It's not just forehand serves, it's all the reverse serves and the forehand serves. So this clever little motion that they've developed has really helped them to make the opponent less confident in what kind of returns they're going to be doing. Alright, the second serve I want to talk about is the fast dead serve. This one is used by a lot of top players, and for good reason. So basically, when a good player does a fast serve, if they do straight topspin, the opponent can just put their racket in front of the ball and the ball will go over the net. So what a lot of top players do is they do fast with a slight bit of backspin. So if the opponent puts their racket on the ball, out of surprise, the ball will go down. So it really forces the opponent to have to lift the ball. And if they try to push it, it doesn't have enough backspin that they'll be able to keep it low. It'll probably go up really high. So this really puts them in a corner that they have to be doing something, and their reaction time has to be good because it's a fast serve. Another thing to mention with the fast serve is that you want to try and mix up the location. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten a good point by serving once or twice to the backhand and then serving to the middle of the table, to their elbow. So to make this serve work is you need to come in and hit the back of the ball and try to go downwards with an open racket. This will create the backspin on the ball. Enough backspin on the ball that it'll make it hard for your opponent to just put their racket there to get the ball over. They'll have to lift it. So the next one is how to make your dead serve more deceptive. And a trick I learned from a friend was that when he did his dead serve, he would go down very fast under the table. And for some reason, the way people see it is because you're moving down very quickly, it looks like it'll be backspin. So their natural instinct is to think backspin. But the key is to touch the ball a little bit upwards and then move down to kind of create this illusion that there's backspin on the ball. So another thing is that you should try and make your heavy underspin look similar to your no spin. So basically you move down under the table for both of them. And your opponent has to be very focused on seeing the exact contact of the ball. A really interesting one that I learned from Kamal, and this one is very situational. It depends the kind of player you're playing against. But if your opponent is really focused on playing short, like it's getting 8-8, 9-9 or whatever, and they're just dead set on playing short because it's been working for them, Kamal said that you can serve a little bit of a higher dead serve. And what this stops your opponent from doing is playing short because the ball, normally if it's staying low, it's very easy to keep it low. But if you do a higher serve, the ball spends less time in the low position and more time in a higher position. So your opponent is going to end up taking the ball at a higher push. And they're so dead set on playing it short that they don't notice that there's a slight difference in the height, and they end up pushing it a little bit high, which gives you this advantage to maybe loop over the table or have a flip kill over the table for the win. It's a really fun serve because you'd normally think that all serves have to be low, but this serve really works if your opponent is really dead set on playing short because they don't really notice these little discrepancies in the bounce. Another really great serve tactic is to play the ball really short. I know this one works because people do it against me, and it's very annoying because I like to flip people's serves. If you can serve the ball very short, it's going to stop them from flipping because they have to really reach for the ball. And when they really reach for the ball, their range of motion becomes very limited and they're not able to touch the ball like they would normally do. If you're playing the ball very short and they want to push the ball short, it's probably going to be a little bit easier. So this tactic is best used for people who are trying to attack your serves. In order to do this serve, you need to be hitting the ball closer to the net on your first bounce. If you're hitting closer to your edge of the table, it's going to create a lot of residual energy, and that energy will carry over and make it a lot longer. So this is a serve tactic that I found that works for me. I randomly discovered it when I was playing matches, and that is to do the same exact spin and the same exact serve, but with different motions. And you can do this one right after the other, or maybe on your next serve. This causes your opponent to do is, let's say you did a good backhand side spin serve and they kind of popped it up and you were able to come over the table and loop it. Well, they're going to remember the next time you do that backhand serve to watch out to make sure it's not too high or to do something different. But if you line up with a different motion, say a reverse serve, and you do the exact same serve, they're not going to have the recollection that you're doing a backhand serve and they're not going to remember exactly what kind of return they did. So they might make the same mistake twice because you did the same exact serve, spin wise, but with a different motion. Another great serve you can do is to use the side of the table. And what I mean by this is if you're going to be looping a ball and it comes off the side of the table with your forehand, it's hard to loop it because you're in risk of hurting your arm or injuring your arm on the edge of the table. So what this does is it kind of forces you to go in a general direction. Typically this serve is done with a righty to lefty matchup where the lefty or righty serves forehand pendulum serve and it goes off the end of the table. And the other player feels forced to loop it because it's long. If they push it'll go long and the other person will get a free attack. So they end up putting it to a more predictable location. And that's a good opportunity for a counterloop. Another place you can do this serve is a righty righty matchup. And you use backhand serve off the edge of the table to the other right-handed player's forehand. This is a big one used by Dmitri Ovtcharov. He just uses the edge of the table to his advantage to make his opponent feel like they have to go one direction and he can use that to make a good counterloop. A fun way to practice this serve is to get a little net or something or a little basket and put it on the side of the table and just practice serving into it. It's important to serve this serve at the edge of the table, not so close to the net because then your opponent feels like they have to loop it because it's a little bit longer and it also has a little bit more energy. If you serve it too close to the net, they're going to be able to push it short. So one of the most common serves in table tennis is the forehand pendulum serve. And the most common location is to put it to the backhand of the opponent in a righty righty matchup. And what this does is it makes your opponent feel very awkward because the spin off a forehand pendulum serve to a backhand will go against their body in the wrong way. And the development of the backhand flip really destroyed this tactic. It was one of the most common serves back in table tennis in history because of the way it made their opponent feel uncomfortable. So lots of opponents would move over to the left side of the table and use their forehand because there's a much more natural angle to receive the ball. And what this does for the player who's serving is it opens up a down the line serve. A little trick is to see if your opponent is able to receive that serve with a banana flip or if they feel comfortable with that serve. If not, you should just serve side spin a lot to their backhand. And if they push it with their backhand, most likely they'll be putting the ball a little bit higher and you can get a lot of free attacks. And then once they start maybe moving over to their forehand and receiving with their forehand, you can burn them down the line and create this dynamic. Now they have to really think about how are they supposed to receive the serve. Another tactic you can do to disguise your serve is after you touch the ball to change the angle of your racket very quickly. It makes your opponent have to be very focused on the contact when you touch the ball because a lot of times players will just continue on with the same racket angle after they touch the ball. And that gives the opponent the ability to see what kind of spin was on the ball because they just kept the same angle. If you change the angle very quickly after the serve, they're going to have a lot harder time seeing what kind of spin you put on the ball. Some of the best servers in the world use this tactic very effectively. They are able to change the racket angle into a position that looks like the opposite of what they spun, as well as changing their motion to look like the opposite of what they served. So if they have a good topspin serve, they're able to disguise it and make it look like a backspin serve with not only their angle afterwards, but their motion before. Basically, the follow-up is what you do after your serve. And this can make your serve a lot better if you have a stronger follow-up. Your opponent will feel a lot more pressure to make a better return if they know that your follow-up is extremely strong. So they're more likely to make a lot more errors because they probably feel like they have to do something, maybe keep it a little bit lower or loop it a little bit stronger or try a placement that they're not so comfortable with. Making them do these things that they're not comfortable with is going to make your serve actually stronger. So it's not the fact that your serve is so good, it's the fact that your follow-up is so strong that makes your serve better. A really good example of this is the match between Darko Jorgic and Lin Yun-Ru in the Olympics. Lin Yun-Ru's serve is, to begin with, very good, and his follow-up is also top tier. So these two things combined, it made Darko feel very uncomfortable with the returns. Anytime he made a weak return, the point was basically over because the third ball of Lin was so strong. So this really made him feel forced to make strong returns, and consequently he missed a lot of them because he felt the pressure to make good returns. This theory comes from poker, and basically you don't have to know poker to understand this, but basically in poker, if you have good cards and you only play when you have good cards, your opponents will know that you only play when you have good cards, and they won't play you, so they won't lose their money. So basically what good players do is they play when they have bad cards as well as good cards, because then their opponent has no idea whether they're bluffing or they actually have good cards. So basically when you do this in table tennis, it's important to have a very nice wide variety of different serves that you can do, because your opponent will feel less confident about what kind of serve and what kind of receive they're going to be doing. If you're only doing the same one serve every time, it doesn't really matter how good that serve is. Your opponent will eventually figure out how to return it. If you have 10 or so different serves that you're doing, and you're winning with those serves, then you're spreading your opponent's attention very thin, because each time you win a point with a serve, your opponent has to log that into their brain and think about how they're going to do that differently next time. Top level players have seen hundreds of different serves and have mapped out receives that have worked really well for them in the past. So they practice these serve returns hundreds and thousands of times, and it's really hard to spread their attention very thin because they feel so comfortable with such a wide variety of different serves. Our job as table tennis players is to spread our opponent's attention as thin as possible and to make them have to mind juggle all these different serves that you're doing, and they're more likely to make a lot of mistakes. Alright so that's the video. I put a lot of information into this, and like I said, I put a lot of time into making it. So yeah, if you liked it, leave a thumbs up, maybe comment in the section if you learned something or not, and yeah, stay tuned for the next video, and I hope you liked this one. Alright, see you guys!