BadmintonGuy.com

Today, I’m going to talk about the best way to improve your badminton game. It’s not how to hit backhand. It’s not how to smasher harder. The most important thing in badminton is “footwork”.

Regardless of how hard your smash, or how deceptive your shots are, you will not get to perform those if you are on the other side of the court On the other hand, if you can get there earlier, you have more time to pick and choose where to attack, plus you are going to be in more balance posture after that shot, versus running to a bird on the other side hitting the bird with outreach arm and let momentum carries you out of the court. Getting to the bird early benefit you two folds!

So how to practice to improve the footwork? Running the court is the way to go. If you watch badminton single match, you will see that they almost making steps in the exact same way to reach either side of the court all the time. They practically almost step in the same place that they step before. They don’t shuffle they feet too much, so the movement is efficient and elegant. It’s all muscle memory. That’s how. Practically speaking though, it’s pretty hard for weekend warrior like most of us to get time alone on the court, just to run the court.

Another way to improve your footwork, or to precisely saying it, to improve “getting there” is to loose weight. No kidding. I tried that and it works. I gained weight after having a child and didn’t have much time to exercise. I noticed that my game suffer in many dimensions. I reacted slower to the smash. My touch was not as sharp. My friends improved. Those I couldn’t do anything about it. It was about playing time. However, I decide to see if I can improve my “getting there” by loosing weight, and it works wonderfully. I can start off my toe much faster. I don’t loose balance after I hit a bird. I can stop on a dime, and change direction quicker. I can hang back for a hard smash, allowing more react time, knowing that I can still go to the net to retrieve a drop if I have to. Try that and let me know.

The problem a lot people face the most when trying to purchase a racket from eBay is determining who are selling fakes, and who aren’t. I would say that you should purchase from reputable seller with at least 100 positive feedback. You should also make sure that he achieve that feedback selling rackets. Some sellers sell many inexpensive items to achieve high ranking then pull scam on customers by selling high price item and ship fakes, or not shipping them at all, before bailing out of eBay (and come back with different user name) You can also check on badminton forums to see what other people say about a seller. One of the best forums is BadmintonForum.com.

Beside that, don’t be cheap on the racket. As a power seller on eBay, I can tell you right off the bat that if the racket price is lower than $100, it’s right out fake. I know that because my cost is way more than that. Besides, Dollar continues to devalue which make it impossible to import racket at lower than $100. If you go for a cheap one and found that it’s fake when it arrives, I consider that purchase to be a very expensive one, because you are paying for something that you do not want at all. Of course, you will say that, since I’m a seller, I’m writing this to get to you to buy from my Badminton store. Honestly, I just express my opinion, because I would not want to buy a fake product myself whether it’s badminton racket, or computer, or anything at all.

Enough said.

I have some pictures that I want to share with you. This one credit to ants of BadmintonCentral.com. These are pictures of fake Yonex Armortec 800.

Figure 1 - The fake shaft is slightly longer than the authentic one. Also the fake has just regular cone cap, but the authentic Armortec must have CSC cap.

Figure 2 - The fake has all round grommets. The authentic one has rectangular grommets.

Figure 3 - The authentic one has green and red strip in the last zero of the “800″. The word defense of the authentic one has the letter D connect to the dark green, while the fake one is a bit off.

If you happen to have fake racket, and want to share them so others can avoid it, please send me the pictures with some information about where you get it from, at my email address at tum98.ebay@gmail.com. There is nothing feeling better than helping others out and nailing the bad guy at the same time.

Today, I was browsing around on internet, looking for some things to write about. Why not searching for “Tony Gunawan” then? So I google it, and found many articles about him, but not thing interesting, until I go to WikiPedia. I found that he has his website which he still update it regularly. In the news section on TonyGunawan.net, it’s basically his blog that still get updated very recently. Check it out.

Also I would like to post this link to and article that I like. It’s written shortly after the World Championships 2005 in Anahiem.

Recently, he changed his racket, but I cannot make out of the picture or video what model it is. I can only guess that it’s Yonex Armortec 900 Power based on the color of it. If anybody know what it is, I would appreciate if you can leave me a comment about it. Previously, he used Muscle Power 100 (my favorite), and Nanospeed 9000 Type S.

I was listening to the podcast Net@net when they mentioned this website called FaceBall.org. Basically, it’s a game playing in your office, hitting people with the beach ball. The crux to it is that you have to take a picture of the ball hitting someone face and post it on Flickr.

That kind of get me thinking. What if we take picture of birdie hitting someone during the game. Sometime the birdie hit at one’s body at, um.., not-all-too-welcome spot. Or he try to defense but his arm all jam up? Or he makes faces that’s funny when he gets hit. I know this is going to be tough to do. But just a thought.

This blog may sound like the tip for a successful business, especially the real estate here in Southern California, butg it is not. It’s actually about one of the effective way to improve your skill. On the list of things to do to improve your game, this one is on the hard side and probably require a lot of time, a lot of patience.

Back when I was a beginner, I practiced a lot and overtime, I was able to smash harder and harder. My wrist was getting stronger, the timing was getting better, and the impact felt really good. I was confident that my smash was hard and fast and in fact, during practice, the smash looked and sounded fearsome, according to people in the club. But when I play games, often my opponent returned my smash back, and sometime went back to my trouble spots, which I had to scramble to retrieve it back. That exchange usually ended with me getting smashed instead.

There are many factors to be considered. First of all, my opponents were usually experienced men, which don’t winch by a hard smash. They had seen this before. A strong smash is just faster and require more anticipation, faster preparation and quicker reaction. Second, my drop posture wasn’t deceptive enough yet, so they could tell well before I hit the bird if it’s going to be a smash, or a drop. I smashed most of the time, so they were hanging way back, knowing that I less likely will execute a drop. Third, I did not really pay attention of much of where I hit to. I just knew a ball park of where the bird would go, but I had no precise control to make the bird go within even 6 inches of where I aimed.

The first factor, being the amount of experience of your opponents, you have no control over that. Unless, you rigged the tournament, or have an insider.

The second one, there is more to be said on that, and I’ll blog about it later.

The third one is something I have been working on. You need to be able to control where your shots are going to. Not only the smash, but every kind of shot. Badminton is 3 dimension, and the shot placement also has to be precise on all dimensions for it to be effective. Since we already started talking about smashing, let’s discuss that here for a minute. I’ll blog more on placements of other shots later on.

There are 3 dimensions you have to care about, the depth (how far/short the bird will land), the width (this is left and right on your target), and height (how high above the ground is your target) When smashing, you don’t really have to worry about the depth that much, because it’s governed by how high you aim your smash. You can only aim left/right and the hight.

Now, there are a couple places that you can aim at. Body shot is a good one providing that you have a strong smash. This shot usually prevent your opponent from taking a big swing because his body is in the way, creating a short lift for an easy kill in the next shot. However, you try that, and your opponent returns it easily, that means the smash isn’t fast enough to jam him, and it’s time to try something else. It’s either down the line or down the middle. The middle is preferred over down-the-line for many reasons. First of all, it confuses your opponents of who should take that smash, if the smash is really right between them. They may also afraid of clashing rackets. Second, even if the smash is off, it’s still a good one because you allow your partner to have a chance to intercept the return better than down-the-line smash.

Down-the-line or to-the-side smash should be used discretely. If you are so good at your aiming down that pipe, go for it. It might surprise your opponent and get a weak return back, allowing easy kill. But if it’s not well place, and not fast enough, your partner is in for trouble. Your opponent can drive down-the-line back at your. He can flick a cross to your backhand, making your run to retrieve it. He can also do a weak return cross court, making your partner retrieving it. He can follow up on it and forcing your partner to lift, switching the offense immediately. Go to the middle is a much safer bet. That’s why Pro eight go to the body or down the middle most of the time.

I hope that this can give you something to try this weekend. If you have any comment, suggestion, you can post it on this blog by clicking the comment link below. Game on.

Lately, I don’t really have much time to catch up on things, let alone watching badminton matches. Today, I have some time in my hand, I search on YouTube for matches. I must confess that I’m a big fan of Tony Gunawan, so I search for him and found that he is in the Semi of All England this year. (That’s old news already for most of you) It’s a battle between 2 of my favorite teams,

Tony/Chandra vs Cai/Fu because both of them play really fast. More importantly, the net game of both Tony and Cai is something to behold. Both of them have very good anticipation and lightening reaction. Chandra and Fu, on the other hand, play superbly from the back, pounding the opponent with their power smashing. In my opinion, they both play very similar, with and edge to Tony/Chandra a bit that Chandra playing a bit better defense than Fu.

Enough said, here is the video, and more link to the other videos of this match below.

Badminton 2007 All England MD Semi Final [1/6]
Badminton 2007 All England MD Semi Final [2/6]
Badminton 2007 All England MD Semi Final [3/6]
Badminton 2007 All England MD Semi Final [4/6]
Badminton 2007 All England MD Semi Final [5/6]
Badminton 2007 All England MD Semi Final [6/6]

When I answer my customer’s emails, there is one type of questions that I receive all the time. It is about where the racket is made in, and why I claim that they are made in Japan, but the serial number ends with TH.

Let’s take a look at the serial number of a Yonex badminton racket. There are 2 parts of it. One is on the shaft. Another is on the cone of the handle. It looks something like 2752123 070275TH. The first part (2752123) is the actual serial number which is unique per racket, increased with each manufactured racket. The second part is the date code which is encoded the information about the date the racket is manufactured. The date code follow DDMMYxCC pattern where DD is the date, MM is the month, Y is the year after 2000, x is some arbitrary number, and CC is the distribution code.

Now, let’s move on to the next topic, which is the distribution code. It is the code of the country in which the racket is intended to be distributed in. For example, TH means the racket is intended to be sold in Thailand. This has effect on, for one thing, the term of the warranty of the racket. The Yonex of that country is the one who will honor the term of the warranty. The most important of all, this distribution code is not where the racket is made in.

Hopefully, this can clarify things up a bit.