LKT Red diamond table tennis rubber with golden cake sponge

Submitted by John Bozi on Sat, 10/13/2012 - 05:59

Before using Red Diamond - Hey I forgot to say when I bought my red diamond I had 2 choices of the normal sponge which was pink and looked like a normal chinese sponge and the other choice was "golden cake sponge" and I looked at it and I swear I can't see any difference to the tenergy sponge with this one. I took it out of the packet now and was feeling it with my fingers and guess what? It released the same kind of chemical that makes my fingers kind of dry and white powdery as no other rubber ever has except tenergy and this happens with absolutely every sheet of tenergy although I found the tenergy sponge even more chemically to my fingers.

So here goes the next question, where the hell do I get this golden cake sponge!? The sheet I got was 2.1 in red and the last one of its kind in that shop.

Day one 2 hours of using red diamond golden cake sponge.

I am the type of table tennis player that can tell if they will like 90% of rubber in the first few minutes of forehand to forehand. In that moment I get a great idea of its ability to spin up the ball, hit, loop from dropping, from off the bounce etc.

I knew this is the first Chinese rubber that played to my tenergy stroke immediately.

First thing to notice is:

RED DIAMOND IS NOT AS FAST AS TENERGY!

It is tacky, there are virtually no length on the pips and you can barely see a space between the pips and the sponge which means there is no bounce. So everything YOU do with the ball YOU do with the ball. The rubber just holds the ball for almost the perfect amount of time. Not too long like some chinese rubber. You can also take the ball from almost anywhere and do a tenergy 05 kind of shot.

Blocks

Thors < tenergy < RD gcs

Now this is a hard one to simply say especially with tenergy but I put it as this.

When I blocked with thors just as when did an out of position shot it is hard to use with a small window. I found my blocks could just hit my side since i had to go to extreme angles to block top.

tenergy 05 is not you orthodox blocking rubber but I put it up higher because I block with side spin kind of Kenta style. and still to date I have never seen another rubber that can pull of this unique "shot".

Finally from an orthodox blocking idea and adding to that the contrast of speed to blitz or any faster backhand rubber. I was delighted to find how easy I could block even incoming bomb loops to almost double bounce short and low.

rd gcs may be very different to the ones you tried but it is a gradual kind of logical rubber to use and although I missed the first couple of blocks the rest killed my opponent because my backhand ones were fast and long and my forehand ones so slow and short.

Pnatchwey I could indeed use this rubber instead of tenergy 05. I need to give it a season of fixtures to confirm it though.

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