Hello Guys!

I made video about various forehand topspins in professional table tennis. Hope you find it useful :).

I would also like to hear some feedback from you.

Unfortunately, it also adds to the preparation time for the stroke which is a large downside. If more preparation time is required means you can't take the ball so early (unless you're super fast) and have to play farther away from the table, otherwise you'll get jammed bad. 

I don't really agree with the increased control that bent arm forehands have, if anything straight arm forehands have more control because there's more power and with more power means it's easier to overcome whatever spin is on the ball, and you create more spin which makes the stroke more stable. 

In my opinion it is better to do more bent arm against fast shots and straight arm against slow shots where you have the time to add power. If you look at say Ma Long he does this too, you'll see him with a bent arm contact when he doesn't have time or is out of position, not every forehand is executed with straight arm at contact. 

all seems logical to me

That's one of the reasons I like chopping. My bent arm FH is not very great or desirable by me... but with chops, I can choose which ball to attack and then have time to really load up with the straight arm-hip torque action. Still much slower to recover from, so I usually revert back to block/chop if they do return the loop. Though my opponents sound like yours in that other thread, where they don't often return the big loops so I'm not punished very frequently for using such a large swing/recovery period. I try to make each one a snipe... go for good position against them so at most the return will be weak. 

In order to make big swings work you gotta somehow slow the game down, and chopping is definitely one way to do it. The other way is to use the short-game and push well. If you look at the players with the best forehands in the game (Ma Long, Xu Xin), they don't often flip the ball and prefer to play short game with more underspin, because underspin balls are a lot slower than topspin balls, which allows time for them to whip out these big forehands.

The other thing is with service, if you have a very good service, you'll earn a lot of opportunities to get that big FH in, simply due to poor service returns from your opponents. 

It has a lot to do with footwork too, you'll see that a lot of these players with big straight-arm swings have insane footwork and anticipation (even in the pro scene) so that they can consistently get into the perfect position to execute it. 

It's a very different game philosophy from the machine gun approach, which is aimed towards opening up and transitioning safely into the topspin rally and then overwhelming opponents with quick and fast topspin counters, in which case I feel like bent arm FHs have a distinct advantage there (I have a couple practice partners who play like that and it's a completely valid gameplan too). At the pro scene, for e.g. Chuang Chih-Yuan, Harimoto, Fan Zhendong tend towards this kind of game. 

Yeah, that's right. If I'm playing someone who isnt comfortable looping the serve, I'll usually do obvious heavy back spin that stays low so they're forced to push it back or go for an attack. If they push I'll try my own big swing loop and if they like to attack, I'll drop back to the chop zone.

The other thing I  noticed in that video is ma longs footwork on the unexpectedly short ball. I thought I was doing some goofy shot, but I see he does a similar one. Where he does his fh with the right foot well behind the left, and then his left foot shoots forward about onto the same line as his back right foot, essentially falling forward onto the left while the right stays behind