I am a TT player who encourages people to play the open game, cutting out too much chiseling, I feed my opponents so they can grove the strokes and I like to impart the knowledge learned from your Guide. The clock face on the TT ball seems very important, but I would like better description & action to able to play these advanced Backhand & Forehand strokes using the TT ball as a clock face. I am 81 years young.
All The Best Regards from a TT player
Jack
What is the Clock Face Approach?
The clock face approach is really just a simple way to give people a starting point on where to contact the ball when playing certain strokes. It's not an exact science though, but a good way of thinking to help you adjust your stroke when you make a mistake.Along with the clock face point of contact, you have to also think about the direction that your bat face is actually traveling, since the two work together to produce the desired result - having the ball travel at the right height, with the pace and spin that you want.
A Clock Face Example
Imagine you are hitting the ball (with your bat held with the handle horizontal, and the blade pointing up and down) from your right to your left. Hitting the ball at 3 o'clock with a bat traveling horizontally will give you a fast, flat hit with no topspin. But hitting the ball at 3 o'clock with the bat face traveling vertically up will give you a heavy topspin ball, with little forward speed. So both the point of contact and direction of the swing are important.Now imagine that you turn your bat a little so the top points more to the left, and the bottom more to the right - say at 45 degrees. It's going to be tough to hit the ball at 3 o'clock with your bat angled this way - you'll make contact instead at around midway between 1 and 2 o'clock. Now if you swing forward completely horizontally, the ball would go down and forward, with a bit of topspin. If you tried to swing up completely vertically, you'd actually make contact with the back of your bat! So in order to put heavy topspin, you have to swing both forwards and upwards in a straight line, closer to the angle that you are holding your bat face at. This will give you heavier topspin but with a little forward speed as well.
If you swing somewhere in between these two extremes, you will get different amounts of topspin vs speed. The closer you swing to a horizontal line, the more speed you will get and less spin you will generate. The closer you swing to the angle that you are holding the bat face, the less speed you will get and the more topspin.
So in general, the point of contact and the direction of your swing work together to allow you to control how much spin and speed you put on the ball. The more you tilt your bat forward, the lower the ball will go (for the same swing direction), since your contact point moves more to the top of the ball. And the more you swing in the same direction that the bat is angled, the more spin you will generate for the same contact point.
Using the Clock Face Approach to Adjust for Mistakes
By varying your contact point and direction of your swing, you can adjust how high the ball will go, and how fast, and how spinny. This helps you correct your mistakes and use that feedback to land the ball on the table. For example, if you are hitting the ball in the bottom of the net when you make contact at 2 o'clock, but with good topspin and pace, you could tilt your bat back a little and contact the ball closer to between 2 and 3 o'clock, and swing in the same direction. You'll get a little more upward lift from changing the angle of your bat (and a little less spin) so the ball should clear the net. Or you could keep the bat angle the same, but swing a little more upwards instead of forwards, and you'll also get more lift on the ball, since you will spin the ball a bit more upwards. Or you could do both, and you'll lift the ball a lot higher!The trick is in adjusting things just enough to get the ball over the net, but not so high that it goes off the end of the table! Keep practicing and you'll become better at automatically adjusting your bat angle and swing direction to correct mistakes.
Anyway, hope this helps clear up the clock face method of hitting the ball a little more. Keep on swinging!
