The Truth About Boosting or Not
1
Hurricane 3 — boost or not? I recall when I played the Guangdong University Games, with Hurricane 3 on one side and Tianji 2 on the other, but it really was not boosted. I just changed to fresh rubber two weeks before, brushed two coats of organic glue, and glued it. Though some teammates were pros, retired former national players, who boosted heavily before each match, for us amateur Group A, not boosting was fine then. The hall had a coach retired from the provincial team; teaching kids, he said you can glue low-hardness Hurricane but do not boost. Just keep the hardness low. Boosting, he feared, would be too springy for beginners. My NEO blue national Hurricane 41°, I oiled once over a year ago. Then when gluing it to the blade, each time I just brush two coats of inorganic glue and glue it.
For Hurricane 3 and even NEO Hurricane 3, oil or glue boosting mainly points to two things: one, after boosting, it is easier to drive through; two, enhanced rebound speed. This makes playing more effortless, and the speed faster. Boosting of course makes it easier to play, but if the blade’s spring feel is strong enough and the Hurricane sponge’s hardness is not high, you do not have to boost. It is just that the current wind is boost, and boosting really can enhance power. For rubber hard to drive through, boosting is indeed one solution. For example, for players of average power level, who may find an un-driven-through T05 Hard junk, boosting can improve it a lot.
2
Why do the rubbers foreign players use also have such strong pip texture? First, many Japanese and Korean players use Hurricane on the forehand and boost it too, and some, like our amateur enthusiasts, pursue aged oil. Second, we see some Butterfly-signed players’ forehand T05 Hard with full pips — besides possibly self-boosting, the factory may have processed it, with a more obvious built-in-energy effect. If you carefully observe different T05 batches, you find: all freshly opened, some curve differently, because the pre-set base before the factory has quality-control variation. And some are fresh, some have sat a while. Even more extreme, I once bought a player-custom white-shell D05, and right after opening, the sponge had discolored. Overall, boosting enhances the sponge’s transparency, rebound speed and even wrapping feel, but shortens the tensor’s lifespan. And the tensor’s built-in-energy lifespan has a limit — these foreign rubbers are best bought as fresh as possible. Rubbers with good rebound speed and built-in-energy feel often owe it to the pre-factory base, but at the same time, lifespan is affected too. For example the Butterfly Tenergy line — what is affected is not the sponge’s built-in-energy elasticity (that is fairly durable), but that the surface scales very easily. When we oil it ourselves, we find: the more oil brushed, the more easily the surface scales. ESN German rubbers’ boost-free nature essentially means the factory boosted it for you in advance. So the lifespan can hardly be that long. If the same product claims improved lifespan, either it changed the sponge or surface, or the built-in-energy base level was lowered.
3
Basically, the easier-to-play an imported built-in-energy tensor, the more easily it is short-lived. Either choose domestic rubber and boost it; or choose a boost-free tensor, which is slightly-tacky. High-tack and boost-free are hard to unify. If there is such a thing, it is hard to combine perfectly. Currently Guobiao 3, Beidou 5, Tibhar K2, and the Gaobo Power AMG version are among the better high-tack, boost-free ones, but no one says they surpass fully-boosted Hurricane 3. D09c and Jinghai C55.0 are actually not high-tack — more like slightly-tacky. High-tack, boost-free is hard to make very fast, but slightly-tacky more easily ramps up speed. But we need not be confined to high-tack — as long as the surface friction is enough to add spin, it is fine. Quite a few people have successfully transitioned from boosted Hurricane to D09c, Jinghai C55.0, Hurricane ZGR, K2 Pro, DNA Hybrid.