My advice for those who want to be get better is to invest in a good paddle. For example, the Butterfly brand, $35+. And forget hard rubber "paddles", without the right rubber, you will never be able to spin the ball effectively.
There's a whole style of play called hard bat that people use, in which they only use hard rubber (or pips out). The fact that they cannot spin effectively can be an advantage -- they aren't affected by their opponents spin!
Given the right technique, they can be deadly, since basically, any spin that you give to the ball is reversed when it comes back (very low friction on their paddle, so essentially their hit does NOT change the direction of the spin. So, for example, if you give them topspin, it will come back at you with underspin).
I have the opposite problem. Ping pong is the official sport of Trovix, whereas I'm a foosball guy (doing a PhD where the staff room has a foosball table and a Mame machine will both make you awesome at foosball and Yie Ar Kung Fu)
And for those people who think they need a ping pong table, I bought this as an impulse purchase while at the bookstore and brought it into my relatively conservative office. And it's sad but true that that one $10 purchase generated more positive kudos than anything I'd done recently. Yes, it has hard paddles and the net is tiny but a ping pong break can do you good - (as long as the conference room next door (thin walls) isn't in session).
It's probably not a coincidence that there were ping pong tables in the Computer Center and Engineering Center buildings of our University; lots of people played (I never got into it, though; kinda hard to play when you have tunnel vision).
You wouldn't be able to do that with someone who plays fast enough. Even if you could do it on your serve 25% of the time, that's only an 1/8th of all points. And you'd probably hit a lot of your attempts to hit the edge off the table.
Ron Graham was amazed that an elderly and seemingly frail Paul Erdos could easily beat him (may have been those damned amphetamines again!). So he (Graham) bought a ping pong serving machine, and eventually became the table tennis champion of Bell Labs (he's also an expert juggler and trampolinist). I think his wife Fan is also a killer player.
He's 5 years old and can barely reach over the table. But, he's able to back up 10 feet from the table and hit absolutely huge returns. I was able to beat him, but he definitely scored lots of points on me. Given that I'm rated about 750, this is crazy!
Give him a few years and he'll be playing pro in no time.
