Table tennis grips and playing styles

In contrast, the Chinese team maintained a wide variety of playing styles, equipment, and grip variations among their players.

The backhand weakness makes it much harder for penhold beginners to perform well against their shakehand counterparts, and so few stick with it to develop better technique.

However, this has not stopped top penhold players from winning the World Championships, the World Cup and the Olympic Games regularly, as the backhand weakness can be covered adequately by putting in the effort to learn good backhand technique (as Ryu Seung-Min has[5]), with excellent footwork allowing forehand coverage of most of the table (exemplified best by Ryu Seung-Min and Xu Xin), or by supplementing with the more modern Reverse Penhold Backhand innovation (exemplified best by Wang Hao).

This grip makes it awkward to hit shots using a standard handshake backhand using the opposite side of the racket.

Traditional penhold players can be two-sided loopers, but the backhand loop is a very difficult shot, requiring lots of training and extreme shoulder flexibility.

Counter drivers usually have a safe forehand loop as well, in case the opponent is a chopper and doesn't give topspins or easy kills readily.

Notable penhold counter drivers include 2000 Asian Champion Chiang Peng-lung and South Korean player Moon Hyun-jung.

Ma Lin, an incredibly well-rounded player, is also known to utilize this strategy when the opponent is lobbing the ball far from the table.

However, the lack of a topspin Magnus effect means that the shots are harder to place on the table since they don't follow a downward arc trajectory, and the lack of angular momentum on the ball means that shots are less consistent and more sensitive to small amounts of wind or air pressure, often giving a knuckle ball effect.

Notable penhold short pips hitters include 1996 Olympic Champion Liu Guoliang, 1985 and 1987 World Champion Jiang Jialiang, three-time Olympian Toshio Tasaki, Yang Ying, Kwak Bang-bang, Seok Eun-mi, He Zhi Wen, Lee Eun-hee, Wang Zeng Yi and Rory Cargill.

Shakehand loopers apply pressure and win points primarily with fast and spinny loops from the forehand.

Notable shakehand loopers include Jean-Michel Saive, Werner Schlager, Wang Liqin, Ma Long, Zhang Jike, Ding Ning.

Notable male two-sided attackers include Dimitrij Ovtcharov, Fan Zhendong, Liang Jingkun, and Darko Jorgić.

The shakehand counter driver blocks and drives various attacks back at the opponent, forcing errors through changing angles and rhythm.

Notable counter-drivers include multiple-time Olympic champion Zhang Yining, as well as Fukuhara Ai, Tie Yana and He Zhuojia.

The chopper returns repeated attacks with slow, floating backspin chops executed as late as possible, taking as much time as necessary to tire out and frustrate the opponent.

Notable twiddle-choppers include Koji Matsushita, Svetlana Ganina, Irina Kotikhina and Viktoria Pavlovich.

Notable non-twiddle choppers include Chen Weixing, Joo Sae-Hyuk, Ding Song, Kim Kyung-ah, Park Mi-young and Tan Paey Fern.