Seth Pech YouTube Channel (PechPong)

I feel like the pro player really took it easy on him - did not serve the highest quality fast long serves that he would have used in matches (which would have made PechPong look bad lol) - for pro level long serves both the 1st and 2nd bounce would be near the white line and the ball will just be full of nasty spin with all the same deception as that of a short serve.

But in general good tips - the trick is indeed not to use any arm movement as much as possible for all the strokes - any arm movement is just gonna cost time and create lots of unforced errors. For e.g. against underspin you have to go low using the legs and not the arm (keep the arm in the exact same position relative to the body). And against fast topspin serves if you use the arm then there's probably not enough time for the backswing so you'll just hit the racket edge. 

I would add something I recently learnt from Yin Hang here which helped me a lot - to follow the ball trajectory with the racket movement to create a bigger window of contacting the ball correctly - for e.g. if the sidespin is carrying the ball towards the right, then the racket should also be moving towards the right when looping it regardless of whether the BH or the FH is being used.

Yeah there's no deception but still it wasn't fast/deep enough and the trajectory could be quite a bit flatter especially on the underspin ones. He wasn't going all out on the spin production either. Some of these serves in the video look like amateur level serves.... I've seen much higher quality long underspin serves from pro players. 

I was a bit disappointed by the quality of the serves as well. The video has turned out to be somewhat trivial: use your wrist? Yes-yes, use your wrist. And the only nontrivial thing came from Seth: to adjust to the ball use your legs, rather than hand/arm. Use your legs to not disrupt your hand's movement.

What i currently don't quite understand is how some players put the racket on the table and still manage to cope with fast backspin white-line-to-white-line serves into backhand. And many players stand in this ready position, think of Kanak Jha, for instance. Here's the video exemplifying:

I have a training partner who does this (has the racket on the table) and baits the long fast serve (it doesn't work against him that much). So the idea is if you have close to 0 arm backswing (you backswing with your body alone), and you open your racket angle to deal with backspin, and have a good impulse from the leg, you can pretty much overcome any fast long backspin serves with reasonable quality even with a very small BH loop movement. However you need some fast reflexes and I think the quality of the loop will be reduced with this receive position, but it's way easier to receive short serves in this position.

Personally I imitate Wang Chuqin's serve receive where the left hand holds the racket along with the right slightly behind the table, it gives the best balance between short and long serve receive quality imo. 

There's a shit ton of advice to looping quality long fast serves that Seth didnt really cover in this video imo, stuff that they take for granted/do automatically but is highly important. The real problem that they don't tackle in this video is the fact that you have to deal with short serves too. For eg if you thought it's a short serve and it turns out long, how do you adjust? And vice versa. Or the microadjustments that you have to make if you suddenly feel there's more topspin or underspin on the ball. Or how to increase the margin of error when looping (it's easy to loop a serve if you know what's on the ball, but what if it's blurry, how can you still make a safe receive with reasonable quality?). Also the correct footwork to loop various balls which is extremely important (in fact I think Seth takes too few steps and relies too much on prior knowledge/anticipation rather than actually reacting to the ball - compare the no of steps that Ma Long or Wang Chuqin takes as compared to him and it'll become very obvious)

It's a bit too broad/trivial to be useful, don't you think? "You read, prepare, react and hit the ball" — yes, kinda, but I'd like more specifics. Especially from high-ranked guys, with a lot of experience.

It's like saying that the game of table tennis is to place the ball on the opponents side one time more than he places the ball on your side. Trivially true, but simple rules often lead to very complex behaviour, and this, the latter, is what we actually discuss.
 

NextLevel wrote:  Seth is also a 2400-2500 player so this idea that there are serves that will challenge him significantly even when he doesn't have to read them is really interesting.

Well PechPong (Seth) has set a very high bar in his previous videos (for eg footwork, FH, etc...) in terms of his attention to detail, and there are a lot of "basic" videos out there already....