Update on rackets

I was advised by my coach to restrict myself to 5-ply all-wood rackets, and as I mentioned before I wanted something light. I also decided that I should go for something that was fairly slow. My reasoning was that this would allow me to hit harder as circumstances allow with less risk of hitting off the end of the table, and also give me flexibility with rubber choices; rubbers as a whole are getting faster, and I figured that even a fast rubber probably wouldn’t be too uncontrollable if put on a slower blade.

Several of the ones I was looking at initially ruled themselves out because they contain carbon or similar materials. Others, such as the Ma Lin Extra Offensive, looked like they were a bit too fast. And anything heavy, or whose weight I was unable to find out easily, was knocked off the list. Most obviously, most blades simply aren’t available with a Chinese pen handle, so the list was short to begin with.

Since I don’t really know what’s going to suit my long term, I also decided to go cheap. And because I decided to go cheap, I eventually opted to buy two rackets with similar specs. The idea was that alternating two rackets would allow me to get a sense for how rackets differ in feel, and this would also allow me to try out 4 different rubbers.

So here’s what I got:

• Donic Appelgren Allplay Senso V1, with Yasaka New Era and Donic Vario Big Slam
• Xiom Fuga, with Andro Plasma 380 and JUIC 999 Elite Ultima.

My coach said I really needed to put the New Era aside for a year and use something softer and spinnier, so I’m thinking of replacing it with a Xiom Yanus.

Of course, trying two blades with different rubbers means it’s difficult to compare either the blade or the rubbers because each depends on the other to quite an extent. So I may try moving the rubbers around at some point.

At the moment, my feeling is that the Appelgren setup suits me best.