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.

Chinese pen-style table tennis rackets

There are lots and lots of shakehand rackets available for table tennis. And, at least in Japan, there are lots of single-sided penhold rackets available, too. But it’s a bit more difficult to get hold of a good Chinese penhold racket, which have rubber on both sides and are typically quite a lot heavier than the Korean/Japanese-style penhold rackets. They also tend to be balanced so that they’re lighter on the handle end and heavier at the playing end.

Two kinds that I have seen around are the Yoshida Kaii racket, and the Ma Lin family of rackets. The Ma Lin family comes in several flavors:

• Ma Lin Extra Offensive
• Ma Lin Carbon
• Ma Lin Soft Carbon

There are some other types of Chinese-style rackets that I haven’t seen in the wild, but have found in catalogues and through net searches:

• the Kan Yo Fiber Special (80g)
• the Butterfly Chinese AL
• Waldner Senso Carbon

Does anyone have any recommendations? I think I’d like to keep the weight of the blade down to around 80g, to allow more flexibility with rubber thicknesses. But I don’t really know what 80g feels like compared to 90g, and it’s possible that weight increases from rubber thickness would dwarf 10g from the blade. Any insights?