At Racket Insight, we’re a team of passionate racket sports players. We’re here to share that passion for table tennis with a wide audience, helping people fall more in love with the sport.
That means making sure our content is useful for everyone, from beginners to professional players.
That means making sure we are honest about the products you do / don’t actually need.
That means appropriately sourcing information from our own experiences & other trusted sources.
You should always be able to trust every single word written on Racket Insight. The content will always remain free, never hidden behind a paywall.
Our editorial process
You can learn more about our team on our About Racket Insight page. We have a golden rule:
All articles are written or edited by someone who plays competitive Table Tennis.
That means that every word on this site has been written or reviewed by somebody with more than 10,000 playing hours and 10+ years of experience playing table tennis.
Before being published, all articles are reviewed by David, a qualified table tennis coach and umpire. This means we can stand confidently behind everything written across Racket Insight.
We strive to ensure that all articles are transparent, honest, and accurate as possible. However, we aren’t perfect. If you see a mistake, let us know by reaching us on our Contact page. We aim to rectify any mistakes within 24 hours.
Our review process
Equipment is a critical part of playing table tennis. Your racket becomes an extension of your own body, allowing you to bring incredible shots to reality. Tables are an expensive purchase, along with robots easily costing many hundreds of dollars.
That’s why we want to help people make the right buying decisions.
Purchase & test the product
Where possible, we will always purchase any product we review. These purchases are an investment in producing the best, most detailed, unbiased reviews available anywhere online.
We do not have any arrangements with specific brands or shops.
Once we have the product, we spend at least 5 hours using it before coming to our final conclusion. Sometimes first impressions just don’t stick past the first few uses, so we make sure our testing is thorough.
Some examples of our playtesting include:
Reviewing other customer feedback
Whilst we could base an entire review on our playtesting, we recognize there are many different players, styles, and environments that products operate in. Just because we love a product, doesn’t mean that everyone does.
To help provide a more balanced review, we check online reviews from places like Revspin and TableTennis-Reference. We try to understand the context of feedback from users around the world to ensure our review is as complete as possible.
Sometimes, it just isn’t feasible to try every product. There are challenging logistics associated with products like tables, which means we may need to rely on 3rd-party information for our review.
In this scenario, we use our experience to look for the right product features and trusted brands. In many cases, these are products we’ve used at various clubs/tournaments over the last 20+ years.
A useful rating system
We want to be innovative at Racket Insight and provide genuinely useful ratings for products. Ratings that help provide an informed purchasing decision based on the characteristics you care about.
A racket might be one of the best in the world, but we want to help you identify whether it is right for you.
For example, when testing rubbers we rate their effectiveness at the 5 core shot types in table tennis – serve, drive, loop, block, and chop.
We continue to develop new systems for reviewing products. We love to hear any feedback, or if there’s any information missing in our reviews that you would find useful.
Selecting & ranking products
We compile lists of the top recommended products in each category. For example:
These lists are compiled based on our experience of playing table tennis. We analyze every product available from the major table tennis brands, focussing on the products that are widely available to our readers.
Instead of identifying the top-rated products, we look instead for products that meet different needs exceptionally well.
For example, all the top-rated shoes are expensive. To make this sport more accessible, we will also recommend a couple of more budget-conscious options.
Rankings can not be paid for
We do not have any paid arrangements with brands or manufacturers to move products up/down our recommended products lists.
These are the lists we are comfortable sharing with our friends and club-mates. Our faces and reputations are on these lists, so we will only update lists in the following scenarios:
- A new product is identified that belongs on the list (either in addition or instead of existing products)
- A product becomes unavailable permanently and needs to be replaced.
- There are material changes to the product or service.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us or email directly to david@racketinsight.com.