Review JUIC Neo Anti

I tried this rubber last weekend since a friend kindly lend me his bat to try (cheers mate!)

This rubber has a very slippery feel on the surface, but the topsheet is thin and the sponge is very soft. JUIC description of the rubber is given below, and I find this quite accurate:

'Juic Neo Anti kills the spin of your opponent's ball, and with its dead, slow speed gives incredible control. But the elastic surface combined with special sponge gives the added element of tricky spin when the ball is hit hard.'

For chopping the control of this rubber is excellenet, similar to long pips, but it does not allow as much variation as some of the grippier long pips out there. Still I felt I could generate some spin, and it had decent spin reversal.

Close-in it blocks remarkable well against fast loops... it seem to take the pace out of even the hardest loops, and return it real slow, mid-table with no spin. The soft and slow sponge is no doubt the key here...wish they used this sponge on some long pimple rubbers.

Similaryl against slow loops, attacking them with a quick closed-bat action (as I do with long pips) worked very effectively.

Against slower spinny shots or serves, if you make light contact the spin reveral is big and it's very insensitve to incoming spin. Hit a little harder and it grips a bit, and it seems to take a lot of the spin off.

Against no-spin it's very easy to control and keep low. I could attack quite well with, but hitting it to hard does not work, since the real soft sponge just bottoms out, and you're hitting with the wood. You can certainly lift the ball with it if you dig the ball in a little, and attack with a slow mild topspin...

This rubber is far more versatile than the antispin rubbers I've tried before, and gives you a lot more options that just getting the ball back... Although it's not a long pimple rubber, it's properties are a lot like it, much closer than they are to inverted. The real slow sponge is something I look for in long pimple rubbers, but does not seem the common.

This rubber would have to be a real contender for those that are used to slow frictionless rubbers, and are finding it hard to adjust to the much faster and springier grippy long pimples...

For more details see here writeup here: Review JUIC Neo Anti

Review XIOM Guillotine .S long pimple

A friend (thanks Greggy) kindly lend me his sheet of XIOM Guillotine.S 1.0mm black. Here are my first impression, followed by a review when I've had a chance to try it.

The sheet looks of good quality, and in very good condition considering it's almost a year old! Pimple are long and narrow, probably a bit shorter than max length. tips are rough and quite grippy. The pips are fairly soft, probably not quite as soft as Cloud & Fog III or Dawei 388d-1, but definitely softer than my galaxy 955. Running my finger over the tips it feels very grippy, meaning you can probably generate decent spin with this rubber. Bounching a ball on it it also feels quite bounchy.

I immediately noticed the tensor mark on the topsheet, meaning that at least the sponge, or possible the whole rubber is made in Germany. The sponge feel a little firm, but not hard. I would expect it to be more of a choppers rubber away from the table, because of the soft grippy pips, but the tensor sponge my well give it some decent attacking ability. I will probably play similar to something like JUIC Leggy or cloud & Fog III...although the sponge may bring some surprises...

I will see when I try it.... to be continued....

TSP Curl P1-R vs Galaxy 955 Long pimples rubbers

I've finally got an opportunity to try this famous rubber, thanks to my friend LawOCG!

Well this is another remarkable rubber from TSP, I've been impressed with ALL the ones I've tried! The word out there is that this is one of the hardest rubbers to control but also among the most dangerous. Well the sponge must make quite a difference. I suspect that the word out there refers to the thicker sponge version, because I found the control on the 0.5mm very good!

On my Energy wood blade, I actually found this rubber relatively slow with very good control. It was a fair bit slower than the 955, even compared to OX!

It's most remarkable property that I found was blocking against fast loops... I got so many more on, and the sink was very good! It does require a positive and forward stroke, and simply putting the bat there made it really grip, and fly over the end of the table... But with a slow forward and upwards stroke, the ball landed on the table even against fast loops, with a real nice sink effect... they did not come back....

Attacking against backspin was not quite a easy as with the 955, but still pretty good. Since the pimples seems more grippy the further the dig the ball in, you can't afford to let it dig in too much or you'll give up spin reversal.

In general it was good in the short game, producing more LP effect than the 955... some good wobble balls too. I wasn't to sure why the ball was doing what it was doing on a few occasions...

Chopping against backspin can be done effectively, but you need to compensate for the incoming spin...

Away from the table it perform very well too, good ability to manipulate spin. The control in general was almost as good as the 955. I found it easier to keep the ball shorter, mainly bacause it felt slower... Against loops I still preferred the 955, but I need more time to find out why...

I think I'll need a few more sessions to draw conclusions on whether it's better for my game, but it's the best I've found so far since the 955.

There are a few more details on the forum that seems to have turned into a long pimple forum
It's another nice long pimple rubber from TSP.

Testing out long pimple rubber strokes

I decided to test some of my long pimple strokes against the ball machine, to get a better idea of exactly what and how much spin was being returned off a backspin ball using my Galaxy 955 OX(close to the table).

Although I sort of know what it did, i never looked this closely... I set the machine on heavy backspin;

• Chopping hard produced a moderate amount of backspin, not enough to stop it from reaching the end of the table, but enough to slow it down. You need to adjust the bat angle since heavy backspin does bite in a little...
• Chopping lightly seemed to produce a dead ball. The ball grip just a little, giving very good control of where to put the ball.
• Swiping / Chopping the ball with a sideways motion puts a fair amount of sidespin on the ball combines with a little topspin. The curve on the ball was quite obvious, and directing to an opponent so that it curves into the body can be quite effective.
• Scooping the ball lightly produces a light amount of topspin, once again with very good control over placement.
• Hitting the ball (fast scooping action) seemed to produce the most spin reversal. This is to be expected since the reduced dwell time give the rubber less time to grab the ball. It is quite easy to attack backspin this way, and this rubber is particularly good at this. Although it's probably not fast enough to hit is past people, it is very effective since most players intuitively don't expect a 'fast' hit against a heavy backspin. A deep and heavy push to someone backhand to try and draw a weak return is a common strategy, so if you can attack this, it's a real asset.

I will have another go with this, but this time against topspin. i will also try it against no-spin to get a better idea of what spin I can produce with this rubber...