Should New Players Start With Basement Ping-Pong or Serious Table Tennis?

• Case 5: You are going to play for fun and bragging rights against family, friends or workmates who all use cheap rackets/custom equipment.

  In this situation, do what everyone else is doing. If everybody else is using cheap rackets and you are using a custom racket, once you learn to control the racket you will have a big advantage over everybody, forcing them to buy custom rackets if they want to keep up, and then forcing them to learn how to control the rackets too.

  Then, until they learn to control the custom rackets (which can take a while without some qualified coaching), everybody will probably be having less fun since it will be harder to have long rallies due to the lack of control when dealing with the extra spin that is on the ball. And once your opponents finally do learn to control the ball, everybody is roughly equal again, and you will be in almost the same situation as if you had just used a cheap racket like everyone else anyway!

  Or if everyone else is using custom rackets, you should probably get yourself one as well (as well as a few lessons on how to use it properly). While a custom racket is harder to control and takes longer to learn how to handle, once you do master the racket it does allow you to perform more variety of strokes, as well as some advanced strokes that are very difficult to perform with cheap non-grippy equipment. If you stick to a cheap basement bat, you will find yourself outgunned by the paddle of your opponents, and you will have to be a pretty good player in order to overcome this disadvantage and still win. Losing all the time because of an equipment handicap isn't all that much fun either.

  The rule of thumb: when playing for fun and bragging rights only, stick to using what everybody else uses. That way everybody is on the same playing field, and skill (or lack of it!) becomes the deciding factor, rather than equipment.

Conclusion

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