The Real Secret Behind the Penhold Hook Serve
About This Column
This is a brand-new, technique-focused column in Q&A format. The experts answering your questions are two former national team players — veteran coaches who prefer to stay anonymous. They just want a quiet life and a good night’s sleep, with no interest in fame.
Sharing these technical insights with readers felt genuinely valuable, and so the “Peak Performance” column was born.
What Is the Core of the Penhold Hook Serve?
Some coaches emphasize the wrist snap when cutting down on the ball; others stress the body rotation and the toss-and-turn motion; still others say the paddle arm should lift upward. All of these tips mainly focus on generating heavy spin. But the real purpose of the hook serve is deception, not maximum spin.
The more arm and wrist movement you show, the less deceptive the serve is. Less arm and wrist movement, with more torso and core involvement, gives you relatively stronger deception.
If the hook serve doesn’t use the body, it loses its point. On its own, the serve is not particularly spinny; the wrist action can even be minimal or absent. From a pure spin standpoint, a conventional serve can actually produce more spin. What matters is the deception.
Does Harimoto Stay Close to the Table to Hide His Forehand Weakness?
This is a misunderstanding. Harimoto Tomokazu’s forehand was never bad. Like Zhang Jike and Wang Hao, his backhand is more aggressive, faster, and higher-scoring than the average professional — which creates the illusion that his forehand is a weakness. It isn’t.
When you play into his forehand, he uses his forehand to pressure your backhand, and you end up in a worse spot than if you had gone backhand-to-backhand — at least in that scenario you have a chance to sidestep and counterattack. After all, a backhand drive may not fully penetrate your defense, but a forehand shot might go through you in a single ball.
Relatively speaking, he used to be lighter and could not step back from the table — if he retreated, his speed and power dropped dramatically, shrinking his effective coverage. The moment he retreated, he would slip out of the elite tier.
Against Europeans who typically play from mid-distance, Harimoto’s speed and power advantage becomes less pronounced — his strengths are less visible. And unlike Ma Long or Ma Lin, he lacks that superb short-ball control at the table. So facing European mid-distance players is genuinely harder for him, though not hopeless: when opponents hang back, you can open up wider angles.
Does Ma Long Have Any Weaknesses Left?
Ma Long’s current weakness is similar to the classic penhold problem: “press the backhand, then flip to the forehand.” But when you redirect to his forehand, you have to do it at high speed — fast enough that he cannot recover in time. Otherwise the quality won’t be there: even a slightly slow ball to his forehand gives him time to explode into a topspin loop. That’s why everyone knows the strategy but can’t execute it against him. Fan Zhendong and Harimoto have occasionally pulled it off, which is why they’ve beaten him.
One caution: when you try to exploit someone’s weakness, if you can’t pull it off consistently, you may end up handing them easy points instead.