If you are having trouble deceiving your opponent about the amount of spin on your serve, remember that you have many factors under your control that can affect the spin you produce. Different combinations of these factors can help produce subtle variations of spin that are not easy for an opponent to read. These factors include the following items.
Difficulty: Easy
Time Required: Indefinite
Here's How:
- Service motion - the speed, height, and direction of your swing can all be varied.
- Wrist snap - the wrist can be used to any degree you like, from a heavy snap to no snap at all. Making contact at the beginning or end of the wrist snap, when the bat is moving more slowly, can also affect the spin.
- Height of the ball toss - the higher the toss, the more potential for spin.
- Direction the ball is hit - hitting down into the table will tend to kill the spin.
- Amount of brushing vs. solid contact - an almost infinite amount of variations of brushing contact can be made, producing many different amounts of spin.
- Adding sidespin - the addition of sidespin adds extra complexity to the path and bounce of the ball, and makes it harder for the opponent to read the amount of backspin or topspin on the ball. It also means that you can produce a serve that obviously has heavy spin, but your opponent will have to determine what proportion of sidespin vs. topspin or backspin is on the ball.
- Changing the speed of the serve - faster serves tend to curve less and deviate when bouncing less than slower serves. So you can actually get quite different serves with the same amount of spin just by changing the speed. Not exactly a deception in spin, but still effective!
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