Penholder

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Penholder is a way of holding a racket in table tennis . It is the counterpart to shakehand , which is particularly common in Asia . In the beginning only one rubber was used and the hand was rotated 180 ° to play backhand. The Asian top players now also master passive and offensive backhand balls. The first world champions with penholder style were the Hungarians Roland Jacobi (1926) and Zoltán Mechlovits (1927 and 1928).

Styles

A distinction is made between the penholder stick position

  • Japanese penholder style - racket with a long, angular handle, the player's fingers elongated on the back of the racket and the
  • Chinese penholder style - bat with a short, flat handle, the player's fingers bent short on the back of the bat.

The different racket postures also result in significant differences in playing technique. The Japanese racket position favors the "spin-stressed" topspin game and makes active blocking on the backhand side more difficult. With the Chinese stick position, not only active blocks, but even hard hits are possible due to the greater flexibility in the wrist on the backhand side. The topspin game is also much more dynamic and more “fast-paced”.

Because penholder players do not have to make a decision between using the forehand or backhand side of their stick, there is a small advantage in reaction time when playing directly at the table. On the other hand, there is a small disadvantage from the shorter range - especially on the backhand side. It is difficult to assess whether the advantage in response time compensates for the disadvantage in terms of range.

Penholder in the GDR

The player Lothar Rönsch introduced the penholder stick position in the GDR in the 1960s. The final at the 1963 World Table Tennis Championships between Japan and China served as a model . Then he switched his own game to penholder. Later he worked as a trainer and led around 20 talents in penholder style and, in contrast to the classic one-sided penholder, trained them on both sides. That was a novelty at the time and also brought him criticism from the TT Association of the GDR, which did not appreciate this innovation at the time. Current Chinese top players like Wang Hao or Xu Xin play the two-sided penholder style.

Penholder players in Europe

In the European top class, the penholder game was and is hardly to be found. Exceptions were Milivoj Karakašević , Zoran Kalinić and Jesus Cantero .

Penholder successes 1996-2007

An evaluation of the medal winners of the 21 most important world title tournaments from 1996 to 2007 shows: The penholder players won 25 medals and the shake hand players 43 medals. The Chinese style dominates the penholder players with 19 medals versus 6 of the Japanese style.

literature

  • Cover story “Penholder”, tischtennis magazine , 2008/7, pp. 8-14

Individual evidence

  1. DTS magazine , 1952/7 issue West-Süd, p. 9.
  2. tischtennis magazine , 2008/7, p. 9.