How to Hit a Side Cut Serve in Ping Pong

Video Transcript

"SCOTT BROWDER: Another serve that works really well and I've had high success with is the side cut. It's actually, you can go either way with it. You could start outside and cut, basically, your paddle across the ball from outside to in or you can actually start in and push out to the outside wall with your hand, putting the exact opposite spin on the ball. And all that's going to do is put an extreme side spin on the ball, making it difficult once it hits, the ball will not do that much on the table, but when the man, your opponent, hits the ball, it'll actually catch his paddle and send the ball going the opposite way that hopefully that he thinks the ball is going to go. If you put enough on it, it's very hard to get the ball on the table, especially with somebody that's maybe intermediate, beginner or somewhere in between beginner and intermediate, they're going to have trouble with it. Even an intermediate type of player is going to have trouble with somebody that puts a massive amount of spin on it, especially if you can hide the direction of the shot. Again, that's kind of critical, to be able to hide it. So we're going to try one. We're going to go from the outside to the in, brushing across the ball and trying to put some spin on it and also keeping the ball low to the net. As you can see, I have to really come across it with my body. Now let's try the push shot. Same thing, going the opposite way. And that's almost the same type of shot that we started with which was the curl shot, but you're kind of coming out pass that, whereas the curl shot, you just kind of want to curl down into the corner. This actually puts the exact opposite spin or somebody that is going to make contact is probably going to hit it off the table to your right whereas if you're coming across the ball like this, there you're going to end up hitting the ball off to the table to the left or on that side of the table and you can predict and be able to be ready for it. If you have a strong backhand, you may want to hit that type of serve to be able to set up a lot of backhand shots, because the guy can't get it to your forehand. So that's the side slice shot."