The guys at PingSkills (Ex-Olympian Jeff Plumb, and Olympic coach Alois Rosario) have come up with a possible solution - the PingSkills vault. I decided to join up with a free membership, in order to check it out. So was the Vault good value? Read on to find out!

Ping! London even has its own website, and is garnering its fair share of attention both offline and on the Internet. Here's a selection of the Ping! London buzz.

• The Ping! London website - a jolly good place to start.
• The Ping! London launch promo - a slick video complemented by some upbeat music - pretty eye catching!
• The actual Ping! London launch itself - looks like everybody present was having a lot of fun - I notice they even got ex-world champion Jean-Philippe Gatien and England's own Matthew Syed to help out!
• A little more English TV attention, courtesy of All About Table Tennis. Check out the baby bat!
• A local internet piece from the Docklands - involving British legend Desmond Douglas.
• Even the good old BBC got into the act - with this article on its UK website.

• His distance from the table at the start of his return of serve.
• Feet positioning once the serve begins, and for stepping in to take short serves.
• The use of a backward hop in order to move from returning a short serve into position for the fourth ball.
• The maintaining of a forward lean during the rally wherever possible, even when moving backwards.
• Positioning depth from the table once the rally begins, to allow room and time for counterlooping.
• Ball position relative to the body and height of the ball at contact during the service.
• Footwork used to recover from the service into third ball position.

Secondly, I'd suggest taking a look at this video kindly provided by forum member scottgordon, showing himself playing against Matt Seeberger in the 2009 Sacramento Hardbat Fest. Scott is a recognized hardbat player, while Matt is a completely self taught basement player who apparently had never been to a club before! Scott is playing a fairly conventional hardbat style, while Matt has an obvious tennis influence, right down to the double handed backhand. While I would never teach a new player to use such a stroke, Matt makes it work quite well for him at this level, although the length of both his forehand and backhand strokes are a bit long for more advanced play. But still a lot of fun to watch.

Actually, that brings up an interesting point - obviously you can't see the other player in the first video, but it was a fairly standard game of advanced table tennis between two players in the WR 100-300 range, with Justin's opponent dominating on serve and serve return. But I find the hardbat game much more fun to watch. Whether that's just because of the novelty of watching some good hardbat, or whether it's because the hardbat play has some nice longer rallies while the advanced play is mainly full of serve return mistakes, I'm not exactly sure. I watch a fair bit of advanced table tennis, so maybe I'd get bored watching that sort of hardbat all day long. But regardless of why, I did really enjoy watching the hardbat clip, so thanks Scott!