• the bullet: maximum speed & distance, aiming for the back corner cross-court or down the line on the white lines. These are usually surprisingly easy to return. Top players love to receive them, but they can work as a surprise sometimes.
• the ultimate dink: backspin or corkscrew with at least 3 bounces beyond the net, with the 2nd, dead bounce below net level. These are great: always hard to attack, and when unexpected, hard to even return. But if the 2nd bounce is an inch above the net, you are toast; a decent opponent will flip it aggressively.
• the ambiguous dink, where the second bounce (third if you include the near-side bounce) barely hits the far edge of the table. Ambiguity generates confusion over the choice of whether to hit above the table or out past the end of the table. Confusion produces errors. This is your bread and butter for high level play. Use it 70-80% of the time, varying spin and placement. Top level players can flip a very short ball, or loop a ball that's two inches off the table, so a double-bounce-on-the-line serve is the only safe serve: deep enough to reduce the effectiveness of a flip, and impossible to loop.

Angle

• corner to corner: "extreme" means within 6 inches of each corner
• from the corner down the line: "extreme" means both bounces are within two inches of the white lines. With outside sidespin the opponent thinks it went off the table and gives up, but then it hits, and you smile.
• short hard cross: from the near corner, just barely past the net and quickly off the side of the table, preferably with sidespin to make it curve even farther away, and with good speed to make it unreachable. Opponents are embarrassed, thinking that it was their fault because they didn't get ready before the serve or didn't respond quickly enough. But it was less their fault than your watchfulness and strategic thinking: you waited to see when they were out of position, then you made an offensive move; by the time you touched the ball, the point was already over.
• mid-line to wide-angle service: although the range of angles is wider serving from the middle of the table than from the corner, still I consider this weak. Less surprised than with a down-the-line serve, opponents can also cut off the sharp wide angles. Serve from the mid-line if you're working more on spin than on placement.

Spin

• not just topspin & chop
• not just left and right sidespin, although these are cool & fun
• The main thing is GET A CORKSCREW SERVE. Do a high toss and then make a lifting contact on the side of the ball. Start with a medium high toss.

  Corkscrew spin is just what you think, the ball rotates around its own line of travel. Corkscrew means the axis of the rotation is (more) parallel to the line of travel, instead of perpendicular. Topspin, sidespin, underspin, all have the axis of rotation of the ball perpendicular to the line of flight. With topspin and underspin, that axis is parallel to the ground. With sidespin, the axis is vertical. But with corkscrew, the axis is in the line of travel.

  The way to produce corkscrew is to do a medium or high toss, so the ball has significant downward momentum at contact, then contact the ball on its side with a forward and lifting motion. The forward motion makes it travel forward; the lifting combined with the ball's downward momentum gives it a rotating spin. Different combinations of these vectors can give the ball more or less corkscrew, more or less forward velocity; it is possible to have only a little corkscrew, or a lot, and to do many-bounce dink serves as well as medium-fast serves.

• Now we're getting hot. It turns out you can COMBINE CORKSCREW WITH TOPSPIN or corkscrew with chop. When you do that, it's basically impossible to detect whether your return will go high or low by watching the contact motion. I can't even describe how to do it, but if I think about topspin or chop when I do a corkscrew serve, the opponent's return goes long or into the net, pretty reliably. I don't know anyone that can judge their return to these serves reliably, especially if they are mixed up with each other. So get good at these, and mix them up, and they will become your bread and butter serves.

Unpredictability

• Develop a variety of serves so you can avoid being predictable.
• Distinguish weaknesses from one-time errors. If you have served into a weakness, then repeating your serve there over and over is the correct strategy! But if they adjust on the second try, with an accurate and confident return, then it's not a weakness and you can't use that serve again soon; wait for 10 or 15 points, and don't repeat it twice in a row: thoughtful opponents will adapt. However you can re-use one of these after they have forgotten to expect it.
• After a mixed-spin winner, combining topspin or chop with sidespin or corkscrew, use a similar one but switching from chop to topspin or vice versa. If the opponent is re-calibrating their return by correcting against their own errors, and if you can deceive them into thinking this is the same serve again, but actually instead of topspin-corkscrew it's chop-corkscrew, then they will hit it into the net and feel more than twice as frustrated. After a few of those, they will be really confused and when you toss a flat, no-spin serve at them they will have recalibrated themselves into total confusion and won't know what to do with it. I love that.
• Measure how close they are to figuring you out. If they're close, then don't repeat the same pattern of changing the service from one to the next. If you hide topspin in your corkscrew one time, don't do it again for several serves or they'll get wise to the pattern.

Invisibility

• paddle motions during windup and follow-through can be hidden behind your body or below the table.
• develop a back- and side-angled topspin serve, particularly with a high toss, so that the difference between chop and topspin becomes extremely subtle and hard to see even when you're you're looking straight at it.

Develop Heavy Spin

Concentrate on the bounciness of the ball's contact with the tackiness of the rubber, and feel it tug at your paddle as the tackiness bites into the side of it. Enjoy the miracle of spin, and play with it until you feel you know intuitively how to produce it.

When working on heavy spin, don't worry about where the ball goes, just think about the power and tackiness and spin and the whippy, tugging, slicing action through that contact point. Only after you get good spin should you think about pointing it in the right direction. Then you can use that slicing motion to really put the juice on it.

Then once you get a good set of hyper-spin-generating stroke motions, you won't need any more advice from me to figure out for yourself how to control shots that hit the extreme distances and angles. It's just a matter of practice. Fortunately you can practice all you want, even with no practice partner: I've gotten a lot from hanging a blanket around a kitchen table, to catch the balls as I spin them.

Stance

It can be an adjustment to get the feeling of a hyper-slicing, spin-tugging stroke in a new posture.

For forehand serves, use a wide stance perpendicular to the table, and weight-shift your body sideways over your feet in the direction of your opponent, shifting a good 8-15 inches during the forward stroke. This will improve your power and consistency.

Pingpong is a hand-eye coordination sport. Therefore getting your eyes close to the ball will improve your quality of play. This means bend your knees, bend your hips, because if you're 6'2" like me, you can't get your eyes close to the ball if you're standing straight up. Stand like an athlete, playing a sport: bend your knees!

When serving, bend your knees and hips enough to bring your eyes close to the level of the table. You'll feel like this is silly, it's only pingpong, how can I do that, but it's a sport, so bend down and get your head at the level of the ball.

Super-short serves

The serve-and-kill game is extremely effective: if you have a super service game, then even if you can't get them to miss every shot, you can often get them to pop up a high percentage of those they do return. So if you have a really great serve, you need to also develop great consistency in killing easy pop-up returns, otherwise all your service skills will go to waste producing squandered opportunities.

Develop the Hidden Serve

• Face 3/4 of a turn AWAY from the opponent. The rule is that the ball contact point cannot be behind ALL of your torso, so that means that only some corner of your shoulder must be behind the ball contact point, the rest of your body can be blocking the opponent's view of the ball. Don't turn just sideways, turn almost entirely away!
• HIT the ball basically BACKWARD through your armpit. Practice this until you know which direction to hit it, using lots of balls, without worrying about whether it goes over the net or not; get the under-armpit direction under control before you worry about accuracy. Remember to rotate very far away.
• LOWER YOUR BODY (bending your knees a lot!), so that the top of your armpit is not very far above the table. The goal is to make the ball come through a small gap, so the opponent can't see much of what's going on behind the gap, and if the armpit is far above the level of the table, then they have lots of space to look through and see what you're doing. So GET LOW.
• Keep your eyes close to the ball. Liu Guoliang often lowers his head, and raises his paddle arm so that he contacts the ball just inches away from his eyes during the serve. This gives better control, because you can see so well.
• Keep your body rotated away from the opponent during the follow-through, so that the follow-through isn't visible either. This means after you hit the ball, don't let use the stroke momentum to rotate you around to face the opponent. That's natural, but it's wrong. Instead, STAY FACING AWAY even through the follow-through.
• If you're using the V grip, raise your paddle ELBOW AS HIGH AS YOUR SHOULDERS, behind your body from the opponent. Then the upper arm, lower arm, hand, and paddle can all be hidden.
• Use a mirror, a video camera, your imagination, or best of all a helpful practice partner to tell you how invisible your stroke is. The windup, contact point, and even the follow-through should be as invisible as possible. If they can see anything, ADJUST yourself more, by turning even farther away, by raising your paddle-hand elbow higher (they can't see your arm behind your body!), by hiding more of the follow-through, by tossing the ball farther from the table so that the contact point is further behind you and the follow-through better hidden, or by using a stroke where the follow-through remains hidden (e.g., sidespin).
• HIT THE BALL WITH THE LOWER CORNER OF THE TOE END OF THE PADDLE, so that only that small lower corner can possibly be seen passing behind the corner of your armpit.
• After the follow through, do a two-feet-at-the-same-time rotating-in-the-air hop, spinning all the way around and landing with your feet apart, facing your opponent, fully set in your ready position. If you separate the serve-and-follow-through, all facing away, from the rotation-all-in-one-hop, then you can still get around quickly and have plenty of time to respond to the opponent's return ball. But this hop is not simple or natural, you have to think about it, figure out what you need to do, and then practice it. You do the same hop no matter what the opponent's stroke is going to be, so as soon as the stroke is completed, DO YOUR FAST ROTATION-HOP and watch for your opponent's stroke.
• Contact the ball not an inch or two behind the table, but a good 8-15 INCHES AWAY FROM THE TABLE -- so that the covering armpit is in front of the ball enough to cover the follow-through in addition to the windup and contact point.

Develop the Visible/Invisible Serve

• The point of contact must be visible to the opponent
• The arm or body cannot hide the ball from toss to point of contact
  This means that under-the-armpit serves are illegal.
• The requirement that the paddle be above the table from toss to contact point has been removed.
• There is no requirement that the paddle be visible between toss and point of contact. Only at the point of contact must the paddle itself be visible (and only because the ball itself must be visible).
• The requirement that at least some part of the torso be behind the ball at point of contact has been removed.

The optimally-hidden serve is now the serve in which the paddle and paddle motion are invisible or disguised during as much as possible of the stroke.

I consider Ma Lin to be the master of the visible/invisible serve. He contacts the ball with the paddle horizontal, and either it cuts heavily producing strong underspin, or it touches flatly producing no spin. The movement of the hand and paddle in the direction of the line of sight of the opponent make the movement essentially invisible. Therefore it is possible to put either heavy underspin or no spin on the ball without the opponent being able to tell what happened.

I have developed a visible/invisible serve similar to Ma Lin's, with some changes:

• The player stands to the side of the table with most of the body in front of the end line, so that the stroke is behind the body and can largely be hidden.
• The paddle is behind the body and invisible to the opponent from toss to just before the point of contact.
• The paddle is below the table from just after the point of contact throughout the follow-through.
• The contact point is either spinny (underspin) or dead (no-spin).
• This has the appearance of a side-of-the-waist tomahawk chop from behind the body to underneath the table. Practice it without a paddle to get the motion and orientation and distance correct, so that you do not hit the end of the table in your follow through, but so that you are pretty close to it, within a couple of inches, consistently. Slice just under the end of the table.

On the down side, the point of contact must be farther away from the table in order both to sweep under the table in this forward stroke and to contact the ball high enough that it can bounce gently over the net in the usual two-bounce dink serve. This gives the opponent a little bit more time to see what's coming and to respond.

Another problem of this serve is that it requires a lot of practice to get it right: heavy underspin while stroking from high to low is a harder than if stroking entirely horizontally. If you want, use the Ma Lin technique of horizontal stroke above the table level, but the opponent will be able to see your follow through. Eventually, though, it is possible to do a strong spin / no spin alternation which is very difficult to see.

• AVOID THEIR SWEET SPOTS. No middle-distance middle-forehand and middle-backhand serves. Everyone can pound you when you give it to their sweet spot.
• MAKE THEM REACH. Extreme characteristics win: Hit to the gap if they are anticipating one direction. So WATCH THEM! Force them to make errors by making them reach out of their grooves.
• MAKE THEM THINK HARDER. Hit to the armpit -- the forehand/backhand decision cutpoint, which isn't always in the same place with every player, so you have to find it. Better yet, use heavy sidespin to curve across the cutpoint: aim to the forehand side (say) of the cutpoint but add sidespin that curves the ball back to the backhand. Then when they decide to go with forehand, they have to really make a difficult accommodation when it curves pretty far to their backhand side. If there's anything else the least bit hard about it, they'll flub it up and you'll either win the point outright or get a popup that you can kill.
• Mix in a couple repetitions of each of several different serves and DISCOVER WHAT THEY CAN'T HANDLE. Then pound on their weakness. Usually they can adjust if you repeat the same attack, so use it in a mixture with other serves so they can't calibrate. You have to keep track of what they can and can't handle, just like a blackjack player counting cards.
• DEVELOP STRATEGIC THINKING. This means that you need to play with and study all kinds of players, and think about what you find out. Your job is to develop a good mental model of all the patterns of strengths and weaknesses that different kinds of players can have, and then when you play someone new (like for example at almost every tournament, where it really matters) then you need to try to figure out their particular pattern of strengths and weaknesses, so you can avoid the one and pound on the other.
• LOOK AT YOUR OPPONENT BEFORE EVERY SERVE. Don't just do your thing, going through your routine all by yourself, but also take a good look at where your opponent is standing during your windup. If their position is unbalanced (leaving a lot of forehand table open, for example, or standing back from the table), then a far-wide and spinning-away-from-them serve on the open side, or a dink shot they can't reach can totally smoke them. If they leave a hole, you have to pound them, so you have to check every time for a gap. That's your job, every time.