How did I play today?

Played a League match against Patrick and three more matches against players much better than I am.

I beat Patrick fairly easily. I was able to initiate the attack most of the time and could win easy points this way. When I opened hard, he did a decent job blocking it back in the second game, but he was backing off the table to do it. I switched to slow looping and managed to win a good number of points outright. Once we got into a rally, he did a good job counter attacking, but I was able to hit winners when we played backhand to backhand.

I played Randy and got smushed. I was having trouble both controlling my serves and reading his serves, which made the match very lopsided. I have a lot of trouble against Randy and his controlled hitting style. I thing the biggest help would be able to be more aggressive on service return.

I played David later and played ok, but was never in any danger of winning a game. I had trouble with his no spin hitting early in the match, but was able to adjust to it. My biggest problem against David was sustaining offense and picking the right serves to use. I probably should have varied serves a bit more.

I played an asian fellow, but didn't get his name. Lost again, but mostly because I didn't take the match seriously enough. I won the first game fairly easily and was in all the rest, but wasn't doing everything I could to win. After the opening game and I get a good assement of what serves and level of spin my opponent can create, I need to think hard about being more aggressive with my backhand service return.

I played Tong for my final match and lost fairly easily. One thing to note is that he would serve down the line to my forehand and I would loop hard to his backhand, but then he would block pretty well, and I wouldn't be able to follow up with my backhand attack. I should have tried to either move my stance farther over to the forehand to try and go cross court or tried a slow loop deep to his backhand. I had the same problem when I would get a weak ball on my serve. I need to learn to loop these to the forehand corner. My other problem was on backhand service return. I think if had tried to be more aggressive and looping his serves I could hand done better. His serves didn't seem particularly spinny.

I feel that I did return serves with my forehand fairly well and attacked long serves with decent consistency. I did have problems with one of David's serves where he served just inside of my forehand strike zone. I was having trouble recognizing in time that I needed to side step just a bit to get a good return.

I'm doing better with my backhand attack, but expect that it will be several months before I wouldn't consider it a weakness and people to stop picking on it. I also need to learn to not try and loop low just barely long pushes to my backhand. I'm missing a lot of these. I also need to make better progress with my backhand smash. It's really not a shot I use in singles much though.

I'm also going to try and go to a different blade. While the Kong Linghui Special feels great in the looping game up till around 8 feet, it seems to be a bit too bouncy for consistent flipping. I bought a triple arylate galaxy de-1 blade to try and I think I'm also going to try the keyshot if I can figure out how to fix the handle.