If you are looking for a stocking filler for a table tennis fanatic, then a book on tactics by a leading coach may be right up their street.

Larry Hodges is a former top-20 US player who he has served on the Board of USATT, edited the USATT magazine and received the association’s lifetime achievement award in 2018.

But it is as a coach that he is best known in his native USA, holding the highest qualification and having coached the US national junior team.

And it is that experience, allied to his prolific writing career including blogs, articles and books about table tennis, which led him to write Table Tennis Tactics for Thinkers.

The book has sold more than 11,000 copies in the USA and France and is available on Amazon in the UK, where it has an average rating of 4.7/5 from almost 200 reviews.

Larry said: “I collect table tennis books with 332 currently in my collection – and this is part of the reason I decided to write this book. 

“Years ago, I noticed that while many instructional books would have a short chapter on tactics, there was no book on table tennis tactics.

“We often call table tennis ‘chess at lightspeed’, and yet there’s little written on the actual tactics. So, I decided to write it.”

The book includes 21 chapters encompassing tactics across all aspects of the sport, ranging from separate sections on serve, receive and rallying to different types of shot. There is a chapter aimed at ‘choppers’, while doubles, hardbat and tournament strategy are also covered.

Click here to visit the book’s page on Amazon