Red or black on your forehand?

Red versus Black table tennis rubbers – does it really matter?

These days a question commonly asked is why certain players, or even whole teams, always use one colour rubber on the forehand, and the other on the backhand. Are red and black rubbers, even identical brand and type, inherently different?

Well the consensus is that they ARE different, but for some rubbers it’s much harder to tell than others… For Chinese tacky rubbers the difference is usually most obvious; the red rubber is a little less tacky, and the black is a little softer and tackier. The tacky surface slows the ball down a little, so this also makes the red a little faster than black. So you would chose the one that suits you better on the forehand.

This difference is believed to come from the manufacturing process. The raw rubber used to make the rubber topsheets, is naturally tacky and black. The dye needed to make the rubbers red, makes it lose some of its tacky characteristics and softness. For some rubbers, the different characteristics are quite obvious. For example the black 729 Geospin tacky is a lot tackier than the same rubber in red.

However for most Euro or Japanese rubbers, most of which are inherently non-tacky (but grippy), the differences usually hardly noticeable…