Playing against hard bats

Hi Alois and Jeff,

At my club, I recently encountered two huge brutes who I have trouble with. They have no spin bats so spin does not matter. The problem is, if they serve, they serve a wide nospin serve to my backhand. As my backhand lacks a bit of power, my return goes quite slowly and then they smash it at about 3000km/h (with exaggeration of course!). If I try pushing it back, it will go high and make matters even worse. Since their bat has no spin, if I try adding spin, it does not affect them and this becomes a trouble during my serve. However I disguise it, they simply tap it and no matter how spinny my topspins are, they still return it with ease. Even though I later found a way in and won the matches, it was very close and I thought to myself that if I played someone like them who had a little more skill, I will literally get creamed. So any tips?

Hi Oliver,

The key when playing someone that plays like that is to put some backspin on your serves and get the ball to hit their bats quite fast.  This combined with slow and very spinny topspins will usually trouble them.

Playing flat is what they are looking for so mix up the spin.  The other thing is to keep the ball low.  Because they don't have the ability to spin the ball on their strokes the lower ball will mean a very low margin for error for their strokes.