legal boosters?

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 AndySmith wrote:

 ohwell wrote:

What makes the situation an uneven playing field exactly?  Everyone can use booster provided they don't mind breaking the rules.  

AFAIK the only serious case for an uneven playing field focuses on custom rubbers vs commercially available.  Just force everyone to play with commercial rubbers - and so, force DHS to make the CNT rubbers widely available.  Booster is neither here nor there.  

Everyone can use which booster exactly?  Can everyone get the same stuff?  The same argument for non-commercial rubber can be made for non-commercial booster as well.  Just having booster on the professional scene introduces a chemical-lab arms race.

But that's just idle speculation.  There are two factors in my mind about the level playing field.  First - if you want to obey the rules, or not.  A player who feels an ethical obligation to not cheat is disadvantaged.  Second - boosters are more of a necessity for a single type of rubber - H3N and the like, allowing their use at the top end of men's play.  A player who doesn't want to boost (or doesn't have access to the quality of chemical needed) is then possibly unable to even select that type of rubber, even if he/she thinks it may suit their game, because it lacks catapult.  

Imagine you're a young professional and want to go down the H3N route - where do you start?  What do you do?  Do you commit to it, find your own way of boosting?  You run the risk of discovery at any point, or the booster you select becoming unavailable (and yes, how do you get the same base rubber the CNT use).  It's more of a level playing field in terms of equipment selection, but boosting factors into that.

I agree with the idea that the ITTF should provide equipment to pros at official tournaments, randomly selected from official stores.  I floated that idea around the forums a while ago (this discussion comes up a lot of course).  There are pitfalls for the amateur consumer though - DHS (for example) may be tempted to sell a factory boosted H3N on the open market to enable sponsored players to use it, but the boost might be so short-lived that as a bog standard customer you encounter a seriously short shelf life.

I really dislike the muddy, grey area the ITTF has put us in at the moment.  Either make a serious effort to ban it (and only allow commercially-available rubber fitted in controlled conditions), or allow safe, tested booster to market and give all players access to it without fear of reprisals.  If you sanction and approve them, you also have a chance of testing them and making sure they pose no health risks.  Don't ban it with unenforceable illogical rules and then turn a blind eye.

Lots of great points.  I agree that framing the issue in terms of the availability of boosters is misleading, and that custom boosters are a problem too.  I must admit though:  I doubt differences from custom vs commercial boosters boosters make nearly as big of a difference as whether or not boosters are used at all.  But it’s entirely possible they do.  The solution might be to make custom boosters illegal. I’m not sure.  But if that’s the main issue it comes down to we would both agree that the crusade on boosters is misguided: it should instead be a crusade against proprietary/custom rubbers and chemicals.

About h3 needing booster, in a way that other rubbers don’t.  I fully agree.  But at that stage I must admit something else: my background hypothesis is that at the end of the day this mess is socio economic.  I suspect that what’s going is more like a tension between China’s need to train developing players with very affordable rubbers and corporate interest in maintaining the costs of rubbers made with tensor type tech as high as possible and maximize profit.  (DHS also has commercial interests here, but if I’m right their business model as far as rubbers go relies mostly on selling affordable rubbers in very very high quantities,)   If that’s correct, ITTF’s seemingly absurd position is actually very sensible: a ban on boosters that they don’t enforce incentivizes tensor type rubber purchase while letting the low tech, cheap rubber + booster be.

(If that’s right the whole thing has little to do with tacky top sheets.  That would raise the question of why top level tacky tensor type rubbers aren’t widespread.  My best guess would be that there just isn’t a big enough market for it to motivate Bty/ESN to do better than the handful of options they currently produce.)

Ofc these are just hypotheses and guesses which I’m not in a position to adequately verify.