“Pimples are cheating”
Of all the equipment myths, this is the one carrying the most emotional weight. A player loses to someone using long pimples, feels the ball was doing things it should not, and concludes that the equipment —not the opponent— won the match. The complaint has variants: “that is not real table tennis”, “pimples take no technique”, “they should be banned”. None survives serious examination, but all of them feed on a real frustration worth understanding before dismantling.
The frustration has a legitimate cause: long pimples reverse the spin on the ball, and a player used to facing inverted rubbers does not recognise what comes back. The topspin sent out returns as backspin; the backspin, as topspin. Section 6.3 explains the physics of the phenomenon —the deformation of the topsheet cylinders, the absence of active grip— and a reader who has been through it knows there is no magic: there is a mechanical behaviour different from that of inverted rubber, predictable once understood. The problem is not that pimples cheat, but that the opponent cannot read what they do. An opponent’s ignorance does not make the equipment illegitimate.
The argument that “pimples take no technique” inverts the reality. Playing with long pimples demands a specific technical repertoire and a reading of the game the two-winged attacker rarely needs. The pimple user has to control the variation of spin being returned —which depends on the spin received, not on the spin they generate—, has to place the ball precisely for lack of offensive speed of their own, and has to keep changing the rhythm to stop the opponent settling. The player profiles that use pimples —the modern defender (16.5), the blocker (16.6), the atypical equipment player (16.7)— depend on a tactical management of the point more elaborate than that of the attacker who resolves things with power. The myth confuses “different technique” with “absence of technique”, and it does so by judging the opponent’s game by the standards of one’s own.
There is a regulatory aspect the myth also ignores. Pimples —short, medium and long— are ITTF-approved equipment, subject to the same general rules on composition and total thickness as any inverted rubber, and also to rules of their own on the shape and density of the pimples (3.4). They are not permitted as a concession or through oversight: they are permitted because they have been part of the technical diversity of the sport for decades. Successive revisions of the rules have restricted the most extreme pimples —the longest, the thinnest, the ones producing the least predictable effects— and the LARC list is updated precisely to keep the game within reasonable bounds. Whoever plays with approved pimples plays within the rules, without qualification.
There is one last argument worth addressing: “if pimples were legitimate, the professionals would use them”. They do. Long pimple defence has reached the quarter-finals of world championships and has produced elite players whose game is no less sophisticated than that of the attackers facing them. That most of the circuit prefers inverted rubbers does not mean pimples are inferior, but that the two-winged attacking style is the dominant one in the current era. The dominance of one style does not invalidate the others; it only makes them a minority.
What remains once the emotional charge is removed is equipment with a mechanical behaviour of its own, regulated by the same authority that regulates the rest, demanding a specific technique to use and a specific adaptation to face. Losing to someone with pimples is not losing to a trick: it is losing to a player who commands a system the opponent has not learned to read. The solution does not run through the rulebook but through training; section 6.3 gives the keys to what pimples do, and with that knowledge the player facing them stops feeling cheated and starts competing.