Fang Bo Falls in Qualifiers While DHS Users Advance
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At WTT Zagreb, Fang Bo — returning to international competition after five years away — fell in the final qualifying round, losing 1-3 to India’s Ankur Bhattacharjee, the U19 men’s singles champion at a junior regular challenge event last year.
Has Fang Bo’s level simply dropped off?
In terms of ability, Bhattacharjee’s highest singles world ranking is 156 — not impressive on paper. But Blackhorse noticed two things. First, in the previous qualifying round, Fang Bo beat Robles — a Tibhar-sponsored star with a career high of 28 in the world. That tells you Fang Bo’s baseline level is still solid. That said, years away from the game mean footwork, pace, and adjustment ability all face real challenges in the short term.
Second, even though Bhattacharjee’s ranking isn’t high, his match results are quite erratic. Against Chinese players specifically, he has some experience with upsets. At his worst, he can lose 0-3 to teammate Manav Thakkar or even lose to Australia’s Lin Wenzheng. At his best, within the past year he’s beaten national team members Chen Yuanyu and Zhou Kai.
My analysis: he genuinely doesn’t seem intimidated by Chinese players. And his signature serve is frankly annoying. Fang Bo lodged several complaints during the match without much effect — the “cover” during the motion is legitimately frustrating.
Beyond that, Bhattacharjee was flicking as many receives as possible, held his own in rallies, and ultimately the DHS-equipped player had the last laugh. He runs Li-Ning shoes and uses the W968 with two sheets of Hurricane — his standard setup.
Fang Bo’s blade appears to be the Bo Fang Carbon — not DHS’s Fang Bo Carbon. It’s a custom blade by the content creator Quanshibe. At least that’s what the handle suggests. Whether it’s a handle swap is beyond my ability to judge.
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How do you assess the blade quality of setups used by pros, social media personalities, streamers, and bloggers? Generally speaking, even though each creator can bring their own vision, the ceiling and floor of any custom blade’s quality are most likely determined by the factory that makes it.
You can bring your own ideas, suggestions, and understanding of how a blade should feel — but the blade’s upper limit isn’t set by you. It’s set by what the factory is capable of. Everyone has a rough sense of what a given factory can produce. The same applies to big brands. Which factory handles the subcontracting is fairly easy to figure out. Take the Double Fish Zhou Qihao Project Z blade — Double Fish blades have never been especially prominent, but after being manufactured by Korea’s ADK, the baseline quality is guaranteed. After all, it comes from the same factory as Tibhar Alex, Yula Hugo, and Stiga Luma mixed carbon.
Whether a content creator’s product sells well depends on all kinds of factors. Price matters, of course. Whether you personally buy into the creator’s philosophy also matters.
Or sometimes — and this is worth saying plainly — some streamers and bloggers aren’t even targeting equipment enthusiasts like us. Their real audience is “people who have absolutely no idea about gear.” And that’s a sizable market in itself.
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The ZYRE-03 user base keeps growing like weeds. Here are a few images from TTL showing players who have switched from D09C or D05 to Z03 on the forehand.
In actual play, Blackhorse’s take remains the same. This rubber suits an aggressive forward-looping style but lacks layering in spin variation. If you like to brush the ball, you’ll find it a bit flat and airy — the spin just isn’t there. Nowhere near high-tack Chinese rubbers like Hurricane 3 or Big Dipper, and not up to D09C, T05 Hard, or T05 either.
At the end of the day, whether a rubber suits you is something you figure out by playing it.