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Employing Your Tactics While In the Match: Being the Explorer or the Dominator

Posted: November 5th, 2009 | Category: Recreation and Sports

Just like any other sport, you need to be mentally prepared for every ping-pong match that you intend to play. It helps if you prepare early on days before the game starts by studying your opponents and finding out what their strengths and weaknesses are. However, if you didn’t prepare like this, you can easily find out their strengths and weaknesses by being “The Explorer”.
By playing the Explorer, your tactic is to feel out your opponents by sending him or her many different types of shots. By being an effective explorer, you must use all kinds of shots once the game starts, such as blocks, loops, drives, counter-drives, spins, pushes, and other shots. By using this tactic you can figure out quickly which shots your opponent is weakest against. You should also hit the ball at various speeds and try out different kinds of serves.
As was previously mentioned, this is going to help you narrow down exactly what your opponent strong points and weak points are. This is going to allow you to be the aggressor and concentrate on sending your opponent balls and serves that they are weakest against. As an example, if you find that the up opponent is weak against the soft lob, try to give him or her more of those.
That isn’t the only strategy you could use the, you can use another strategy in which you control the game right from the get-go and bring it onto your opponent and adjust as you go. This form of gameplay is known as the “dominator” method for obvious reasons.

A dominator won’t show any mercy and they will come to the table throwing their best shots straightaway from the beginning of the game. This method will force your opponent to make adjustments to how you play and not vice versa. As you can see this can be a really good position to be in, but you also need to know how to adjust to your opponent as well. If you aren’t able to adjust to your opponent’s shots, then this will probably mean the loss of the game for you.

My being in a dominator, you are going to need to bring your best shots out first and be able to make adjustments according to how your opponent responds to your shots.

You now need to make the decision on which type of player you are, either an explorer or a dominator. A good ping pong player will have a mixture of both and one that can adjust to their opponents quickly. So, whatever kind of player you are, make sure that you know how to adjust to your opponent in order to beat them at their own game.

These are great tactics you can practice, and if you need an ping pong table to practice on you can find some really great deals at http://outdoortabletennisables.com