Hitting/Practicing with Lower/Higher Rated Players

I think most of us old-timers have seen it and, more importantly, "experienced it".  We've all had folks who are (maybe) slightly stronger act like hitting with or playing us would ruin their life.  But (hopefully) we've also had much stronger players who go out of their way to help.

I think most players should be aware that they should read the whole initial post and understand that they are almost certainly members of both camps, i.e. sometimes the stronger, and sometimes the weaker player.  They should know how to act as courtiously as possible in both situations.

bes

Yes, but we are talking about playing at a club.   Most of us will not ever play against a world ranked player and if you ever do then hitting or practicing should not be a problem.

 

I made a table of handicaps,  percentages of points won and games won, in order to achieve different spreads in ratings points.   If you look at it the other way around the ratings difference can be used to index into a table that would provide the expected percentage of points, games and matches won.

The scale is roughly logarithmic similar to the ELO chess rating system.

learn more here.

http://www.teamusa.org/USA-Table-Tennis/Ratings/How-Does-the-USATT-Rating-System-work

A 200 point difference means the better player will need to win 40 times to each win of the lower player to maintain a 200 point ratings difference.   The rating table is very quantized unlike the ratings central method.

To win 11-8 means the winner won 57.9% of the points.

That could feasibly be more about match nerves, experience, and tactics than about the soundness of their technique.

How does the scale work, exactly? Is it logarithmic, linear, or what? 

Here are my thoughts and they are probably biased by my attitude to this and what worked for me coming up.

Moreover, let's get this straight - practicing with a higher rated player, especially when the gap is over 200 points, should always be seen as a privileged opportunity for a lower rated player unless the lower rated player is paying for coaching.  After all, we all know that to get better, we need to get exposed to higher quality shots, so the opportunity to do so in practice is very valuable and should not be trivialized by taking liberties - of course, if the higher rated player is an arrogant or rude person, it's one thing, but all things being equal, when a better player gives you a chance to hit with them, the attitude of the lower rated player should be one of gratitude for the most part in normal cases.  Maybe I should have stressed this in the original post because you seem to be missing that part of the equation.  If the lower rated player is keeping the higher rated player's ball on the table, in general, just by doing that, the lower rated player is learning to control a higher quality of shot and that is valuable practice just by itself even if nothing else is worked on.

The fundamentals of blocking against loopers can be taught.  As long as you aren't looping at over 60% for the first 5 balls and aren't looping all over the place, the ball is usually blockable if the person has the right blocking fundamentals (in a match, this changes for a variety of reasons).  Usually, the culprit is bad blocking technique if the loop isn't at full power and when hitting in practice with people, there are many good reasons not to go at full power for at least the first 5 shots of the rally by both players.  After that, one can decide to ramp up the pace but the value is already at least there for both players.

So I see the higher-rated players side of it.  Do they want to use one of their two matches for that turn on the table playing someone hundreds of points lower?  And if not, then they don't hit with that person at all.   

The amount of time NL gets to spend doing drills and various forms of pure practice at Trolley Car TTC is very unusual.

Then why not just play a match, as jrscatman pointed out?

Maybe this problem doesn't exist in Japan, but it is a problem in the US.  One of the barriers to developing better players is finding ways for players who want to improve but don't want to go broke paying for coaching is to spread the right kind of culture around hitting.  Again, if you want to play a match, play a match. But if you need to warm up your strokes, you need the drill discipline.    No one expects you to be laser point precise in your control, but hitting to the backhand when the drill is forehand to forehand warm-up ignores the fact that the main reason you can tee off on the ball is that your opponent gave you a warmup ball, not a match ball. 

Since I started our club about 3.5 years ago many of the lower players look up to me to help them out so I'm happy to walk around spending some time with lower players as long as they are good listeners and really try to do the things I recommend to them to improve their game.

It's also a shame some of the higher players won't help out lower players by hitting with them a little. I understand if you want to improve your game and hit with better players, but if some of the higher players would just spend 10 - 15 minutes with the other players that would help.  We actually have a 2200+ player come to our club a few times that has really made some derogatory comments to lower players when they ask him to hit with them for a few minutes.  One guy was a 1900+ player that has an unorthodox style and when he asked the higher player to hit with him his response was "I need to practice with someone that has a proper stoke". Needless to say this didn't go over to well with the lower player so he walked away. He later apologized for his comment and tried to make it up with that guy but the damage was done and the lower player said he would just find other players to hit with.  I still laugh about his comment sometimes and thought about printing that on a T-shirt. LOL.