From Greg Letts,
Your Guide to Table Tennis / Ping-Pong.
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What Makes a Good Serve? (continued)

Deception

Deception has always been an important part of serving. With the recent rule changes designed to end the practice of hiding the ball during the service, deception in serving has changed as well. Nowadays, players focus on deceiving their opponent by:

• Type of Spin - players use serves that look similar to each other, but actually have slightly different spin. For example, this can often be a serve that looks like light backspin and sidespin, but actually has only sidespin. An unwary opponent will play the ball expecting backspin, and will return the ball high enough to allow the server to attack.

• Amount of Spin - the server attempts to deceive the receiver about how much spin is on the ball. For example, the server tries to make the serve look like it is light backspin and sidespin, but in actual fact puts a lot of backspin on the ball. He is hoping that the opponent will treat the serve as a light backspin and put the ball in the net.

• Placement - a player makes it obvious he is serving in one direction, but at the last split-second he turns his bat a fraction to change the direction the ball is going. This tends to be used more on long, fast serves, where the receiver does not have much time to adjust to the change in direction.

• Faking - more advanced servers can swing the bat back and forth near the time of contact, making it very difficult to see just when the ball was contacted. This is not an easy technique to master, but it can be very effective.

• Sidespin - many good players incorporate sidespin into almost every serve. Using sidespin gives the opponent one more thing to worry about, and it also helps to make it harder to tell what amount of backspin or topspin has been put on the ball. Don't forget to use different amounts of sidespin as well!

Follow-up

Use serves that tend to complement your best third ball and fifth ball attacks. If you are better at opening your attack from a backspin ball, use double-bounce serves with heavy backspin and sidespin, that are difficult to flick, in order to encourage a push return. If you are better at counterattacking, you would be justified in using more long serves with varied spin and placement, to allow your opponent to attack, but to make it hard for him to attack well, so you can make a strong counterattack on your third ball.

Practice

Considering how important the serve is, how often and for how long you should practice it? I would recommend at least 10 minutes of serve practice for every hour spent training. You have to do enough to keep your serves sharp - there is not a lot of room for error when double-bounce serving or serving long and deep.

Also, try to find some time where you can just serve with a bucket of balls and no opponent - when you play against someone else it can often be hard to know whether you really are double-bouncing the serve, or is your opponent pushing or flicking balls that he really should be looping back?

Make a point of having a working knowledge of all the serves - you don't have to master each one straight away but you should know the theory of how to execute them. This will also help you when it comes time for you to return someone else's serves!

You will need to master at a minimum the forehand pendulum serve (with backspin/sidespin, sidespin only, and topspin/sidespin) and the standard backhand serve (again with backspin/sidespin, sidespin only, and topspin/sidespin). More exotic serves such as the forehand tomahawk, reverse pendulum and others can be mastered later.