Hey everyone and welcome back to another Top Tip Tuesday!

For those who haven’t be following my previous Top Tip Tuesday posts, I have basically been sharing pointers on how to increase your level of table tennis. They are tips that I have personally picked up over the years and I’ve found that they have helped improve my skills as a table tennis player, as well as increasing my basic knowledge of the game.

Over the last few weeks, I have shared a few tips on the service game in table tennis.

Service is one of the most important aspects of most sports, including table tennis, and so I thought that I would carry on this theme of service tips for today by sharing another tip that a lot of professional players utilise in their own games.

Top Tip: Serve more short serves to your opponent’s forehand.

Now at first glance, you may be a little wary of this tip – speaking from experience, I know it can be nerve-racking to serve to my opponent’s forehand side, because most players have very strong forehand strokes and might just ‘kill’ the point.

However, I picked up a little tip that I should try to serve more short services into my opponent’s forehand, instead of perhaps long to their forehand or even short/long to their backhand side.

Source – ittfworld

The reason for this, is that a lot of players have very strong backhand flicks, backhand topspins and forehand topspins, but yet most players (myself included) struggle with forehand flicks.

The forehand flick is one of the most technically difficult shots to perform in table tennis, thus making it difficult to control with spin and power against a good service.

The idea then, is by serving more short services to your opponent’s forehand, you are making your service game more uncomfortable for your opponent to receive, hopefully giving you a weaker shot to play against – believe me, against some players it can be a really good tactic to use.

Of course there are a few things to bear in mind with this tip.

Firstly, many players don’t even attempt to perform forehand flicks, and rather push the ball instead (a push return may not be to your advantage, especially if you were hoping for a potentially weaker return)

Source – ittfworld

To add to that, players with a strong backhand flick might attempt to run around to perform a backhand ‘banana flick’ from the forehand side, which might again put you on the back-foot so to speak.

On the other hand though, you might even prefer these types of returns from your serves and the fact that most players would resist in performing a forehand flick can actually help you dictate the receive you get from your opponent, as you would have a rough idea of the type of shot they might play.

At the end of the day, it really just depends on the opponent and your own preferred table tennis tactics!

I hope you liked this week’s Top Tip Tuesday! Please do leave your thoughts/recommendations for future content in the comments down below 🙂