Tenergy 05 Substitute

I think you may be on to something.  Even though I have had the two rubbers and have previous posted good things about RD on Boz's website 

After warming up with Red Diamond for about an hour with an person I played with my RD on a BalsaCarbo X5 and T05 on a TBS.   I have played much more with the T05 so that is why I warmed up with the RD.   I then played against the Newgy hitting just FH near, mid (1m) and long ( 2.5-3m).  I rarely get back more than 2 meters in a real game situation.

I hit about 100 balls at each distance with each paddle.   Surprisingly I didn't find much difference.   I thought I would see a big difference back at 2.5 meters but I didn't.  For the distance shots I set the Newgy up to 20-22 and angled the head down to about 7 so the ball would barely clear the net and with lots of top spin so the ball would stay low.  At 2.5 meters back I was hitting the ball from below the table top level with speed so these are real loops.   I was surprised that the effort required was about the same and the angle of the paddle direction and blade was about the same in both cases.  The RD may have needed to be open just a hair more but not enough to be obvious or to swear too.

On the BH they played about the same too.   I find that to play a decent BH I must crouch and keep my elbow up so that when I swing and hit the ball my forearm is about horizontal.   With a little wrist action I can get good and similar loops from both but I was getting tired so I didn't try FH loops from 2.5 meters back.

I didn't try too much serving.  I am not the best at serves anyway What I noticed is that both the RD and T05 have much more bounce and spin than the Mark V I normally play with now so a few serves went long when I was serving.   The person I was playing against it not that good as returning serves so I could easily hit a back spin or top spin and win a point right off the serve with either paddle.   I would have to play with these two rubbers against my regular sparring partner to get a better idea.

My regular sparring partner can tell when I am not playing with the Mark V paddle because the other paddles have a little more spin, speed and stay low.   I need to play against him with both the T05 and the RD during the same session so he can tell me which is the hardest to play against.

As it turns out my red T05 rubber has a tear in it.  I may try a RD so the black T05 and RD are both on the TBS.

I think if I played more with both RD and T05 I would start to notice some differences but this I can say,T05 isn't $66/$14 times better than RD.  It is too bad their isn't a Black Diamond.   I didn't not think Black Power was near as good or even close to T05.  The spin to speed ration of BP is too low.