I think it is fair to say most players less-than-enjoy playing against long-pimple players but I haven’t seen many that struggled against this group of players as much as I have, or at least I used to do.
I was so bad that I would almost invariably would lose to any opponent who had long pimples even if they couldn’t hit any other shot with the normal side. Over the years many players, coaches and even my pimple opponents who, after thrashing me, tried to teach me how to play against pimples.
I knew all the strategies about how the spin would reverse off the pimples: hitting one top spin then one backspin, serving fast and low spin etc off by heart, and yet I still could not apply them during matches and furthermore, playing against a pimple player would affect my performance afterwards against classical players as well. This story continued for years and became almost like an unwanted trademark for me on the tournament circuit.
Eventually I gave up using the usual strategies and started experimenting with other ways. Soon, I realised the common feature of all the usual strategies which was needing to change my shots and the natural angle of my bat to over-ride the long-pimple's effect on the spin of ball; and that just was not working for me. Therefore after trying tens of different ideas, I have now developed a strategy for myself which has not only helped me to a 75% win rate against pimple players this year (2023-2024) but more importantly, playing against pimple players no longer have an adverse impact on my performance afterwards. My strategy is mainly based on two principles:
1. To shorten the rallies as much as possible and ideally finish the point by the 3rd ball attack
2. To return balls with high slow top-spins (almost lobbing) after the 4th ball if they are in my F/H and slow chops if they are in my B/H and wait for the other player to miss or use their inverted rubber, so I could play my normal attacking shots.
To achieve these, I serve either:
A. Topspin Tomahawk to their pimple side, so invariably it comes back to me as backspin, and then I hit a heavy aggressive topspin to their inverted side
B. Pure Backspin B/H serve to their pimples, so almost invariably it comes back with top spin to my B/H, and I can then hit a B/H smash to their normal side.
You can see this illustrated in the short videos below:
Here is the full match I played against push-blocker Daniel Nicholson at the 2024 Gloucester Grand Prix.
Comments