Chopping problems

Hi Alois, I played my first league match on Wednesday with the LP and had quite a difficult time.

First, my consistency was non - existent, my first opponent would do a light topspin serve to my backhand and then keep spinning in a comfortable position until I missed. I am struggling to find why I keep missing. Filus, Gionis etc all have the same stroke regardless of the ball that comes at them, so do I just need to extend my stroke, from Ear to knee and have a faster vertical swing with a light grip?

Secondly, I felt my tactics were wrong. I would just serve, and 'hide' behind my backhand and hope they would miss, whilst I kept playing it to the same spot every time, which resulted in me missing the table on their 2nd topspin in the rally 75% of the time. I know this is a very broad question, but what are the pros tactics? I notice they twiddle quite a fair bit, but I didn't know when to implement it in the game. 

Lastly, when I was getting in some sort of rhythm towards the end of the evening and getting a few chops on, the opponent would just slap - smash it past me, which I found quite bizarre because with it being backspin, it should go down into the net. When speaking with my team after the game they said that my shots were quite high and close to the net. So I was wondering, how do I chop the ball so that it goes lower and closer to the edge of the table with a 'skid' effect? Least to say I didn't enjoy the evening haha

Thanks 

Tam

Hi Tam,

You are just starting with the pimples.  You will need to work first on the consistency of the chop with the pimples.  At this stage it sounds like they are able to put a couple of balls to your backhand and get an error.  This takes the pressure off the attacker completely. Once you develop the consistency it will start to add pressure.  The next thing is to get the quality of the chop better by getting it longer... lower...  Again this will add pressure to the attacker.

One you can do these two things they won't feel so free to slap winners.  It will also them open up the opportunities for you to attack as well when they start to give you softer attacks.

Don't worry too much about results at this stage.  Firstly gain the consistency and then quality of the chops.  This will take a few months.