How to Beat Choppers in Table Tennis

Last Updated on July 10, 2024 by Alex Horscroft

Choppers are a tricky bunch. While chopping is a blanket style, they are many sub-styles within it, and this heavily affects how they play and what you should do to counter them.

Many players hate facing choppers, but I have to say, I’m all for it. In a game that is ever-narrowing towards the looping style, I love coming up against defenders, well… those with inverted rubbers that is! Long pimple choppers can be a bit of a nightmare to play against.

In this post, I’m going to cover everything I have learned in the last 10+ years of playing against choppers. It’s a biggy, so buckle up.

How to Beat Choppers in Table Tennis

1. Assess What Rubbers They Are Using

First things first, you need to determine what types of rubbers they are using, as this will influence your strategy. Fortunately, the task is simple. Ask to have a look at their racket.

Yes, it may seem strange, and they may even say no, but they are obligated to do so. The ITTF rules are quite clear on this. Once it’s in your hands, all you need to do is identify which of the four types of rubbers they are using. And make sure you check both sides, the most problematic players use different types of rubbers on each side.

Inverted Rubbers

Long Pips Rubbers

Short Pips Rubbers

Antispin Rubbers

2. Fast to Crossover

While wide angles are often the placement of choice for most players, the middle of the table is the best place to hit the ball against choppers. This may seem strange as it is right at them, but trust me, it’s where they will have the most trouble.

This is because you or I would likely opt for a block if we didn’t have enough time to attack. However, most choppers are steadfast with their chops, so they’ll try to chop these balls at their crossover. The issue is that to chop the ball they have to move their body quickly to the right or left to play either their forehand or backhand. If they don’t move, they can’t play a chop!

What’s more, if the ball is fast enough, a poor chop is likely to come your way. This is the one you want to attack with conviction!

3. Vary Depth

Another excellent strategy for giving choppers hell is to vary your depth — this is often called an in-and-out strategy.

Ideally, choppers want to be a comfortable distance from the table so they have time to react to your shots, enabling them to generate a lot of spin on their chops. What they don’t want is to constantly be brought inwards to the table with pushes. It does little to help them win points.

Furthermore, by bringing a chopper in close, you put them out of position if you follow up with a loop. This causes them to quickly backpedal to play from their ideal distance. Keep this up and they are bound to make a mistake sooner or later.

I recommend using your full arsenal of shorts: long loops, short loops, pushes and drops will all serve you well in the goal of having a chopper running around like a headless chicken.

4. Work Angles

While hitting the ball at a chopper’s crossover is one of the main places you want to attack, you can’t hit every ball here. You should also try and play the ball wide to make them cover the entire table. It’s harder than you think to put a ball past a chopper by playing wide, but you will still have some success with it.

If you also work on varying your depth you should find that playing wide is rather successful.

5. Be Patient!

Playing against choppers can be frustrating, “Just look at them over there. It doesn’t even look like they are trying!” yet you need to maintain your composure and play methodically. Don’t smash the ball out of frustration. Instead, try to exploit their weaknesses.

Opportunities to put the ball away will come if you play smart, but it’s always about waiting for the correct opportunity. If you try to go for too many kill shots you’ll likely miss more than you will win.

6. Overwhelm Them With Topspin

One of my favorite methods of dealing with choppers is to overwhelm them with heavy topspin — especially to the crossover. I take off all the pace on the ball and solely rely on my spin to do the work.

This works beautifully against the majority of inverted choppers. They simply can’t handle it. Sometimes they will try to block the ball instead which I equally welcome.

Yet generating this amount of topspin with slow rollover loops is tough if you’re not an advanced player. What’s more, this shot does not work anywhere near as well with long pips choppers. Often the ball comes back with an ungodly amount of backspin which is pretty darn scary!

7. Vary Topspin

While extreme topspin is optimal in many scenarios, as with all things in table tennis, variation works wonders. Experiment with producing less topspin to counter chops. I can almost guarantee that your opponent will over account for the amount of spin and put balls into the net.

To execute these reduced spin loops, you need to open your racket angle a little and hit the ball more directly.

8. Sometimes Use Flat Smashes

While flat smashes are generally a bad idea against choppers, they certainly have their merits in some situations. You see, choppers are all about rhythm, it’s why much of our overarching strategy is to vary the balls we give them.

And by implementing flat smashes in our game we seriously disrupt rhythm. Imagine you’re a chopper happily dealing with controlled loops and then a powerful flat smash comes your way. Sounds pretty brutal, doesn’t it?

Chopping smashes is hard work and the last thing a chopper will expect is a smash if you play a predominantly looping-based game.

Of course, you have to be careful with flat smashing chops though as it’s very difficult. Only go after chops that are high enough and use flat smashes sporadically, we don’t want your opponent to start expecting them.

9. Take Your Time in Between Points to Assess

Assessing outcomes in between points is something you should be doing irrespective of who you are playing. But I feel it’s particularly important if you’re playing a chopper with tricky rubbers.

Often you go in with a strong game plan and it largely gets thrown on its head, forcing you to adapt mid-match which is no easy task. With tricky rubbers such as long pips, short pips, and antispin, you likely have less than ideal experience, and poor muscle memory which makes playing the shots you need to even more difficult.

Therefore it’s important to assess what mistakes you are making. For instance, I often have a tough time playing long pips due to my spin-heavy game. Therefore, I re-assert what I learned from each rally to tinker with my strategy.

Usually, this is in the form of how much spin the ball has after pushes, blocks, and chops. I have more than enough pace to put the ball away, but this pace means nothing if I can’t read the ball correctly.

Strengths of Choppers

1. Consistency

When it comes to consistency, few styles are better than chopping. Choppers are more than content chopping all day long and waiting for you to make mistakes, and unless you have a solid game plan, you likely will.

They slow the game down with heavy backspin which makes it difficult for you to produce a fast attack. This gives them a nice controlled loop which is very easy for them to deal with.

2. Shutting Down Flat Hitters

The style that suffers the most against choppers is probably the flat hitter. As they don’t have any heavy topspin shots in their locker, they’re simply stuck. All they can do is push and wait for a ball that goes a little high. Alas, this shot will likely never come — backspin balls are a chopper’s bread and butter!

If you don’t have a loop in your arsenal, my advice is to learn one. Without it, your chances are slim to none. You’d have to have very high-quality serves and be more consistent than the chopper you face which is very unlikely.

3. *Counter-Attack

While most choppers are content chopping and doing not much else. Some are pretty skilled when it comes to attack — and it’s these choppers you should be afraid of.

For some reason, you don’t see hybrid players who chop and loop very much. All I can say is THANK GOD. Having the risk of a loop or smash coming your way at any moment makes them far more dangerous. It significantly shifts how you play and forces you to be on guard always.

4. Deception

Depending on the rubbers being used, choppers can be sneaky little devils when it comes to spin. And if you’re not familiar with all of these types of rubbers, you’re going to make a lot of unforced errors. There’s simply no getting around it.

For instance, the notion of a chop generating topspin is a mind-boggler, and you’ll feel like a fish out of water if you’ve never faced it before. These tricky rubbers turn the rules of spin on their head, and in my opinion, they are the hardest types of players to play against.

The Chopper in Action

For many table tennis fans, Joo Se Hyuk will need no introduction. He was one of the best choppers to ever grace the sport.

The man really could do it all. He used inverted rubbers on his forehand and long pips on his backhand and would attack with powerful loops and even twiddle. This made him a nightmare for many high-level players.

Just take a look at the speed of his twiddle at 00:42 in the above video. This gave him access to a spinny loop on his inverted rubber which he took right off the bounce, catching his opponent completely off-guard.

Closing Thoughts

The ever-diminishing chopping style is often tricky to play against, especially if your opponent is using unusual rubbers or switches between attacking and defending.

Yet there are plenty of ways to beat choppers in table tennis. There is a reason there are fewer choppers than ever before, and that’s because the style is not optimal.

A good foundation is to play the ball to the crossover and focus on forcing in and out movement by varying your depth. You should also exercise patience but avoid being too controlled. All of your attacks should be strong to make chopping difficult, yet you should only go for kill shots when a poor push or chop comes your way.