Of the two best known, free video players in which you can watch the videos that illustrate this tennis lesson on the topspin-slice serve, the Windows Media Player (for WMV) has an advantage over the RealPlayer (for RM) in that you are free to replay a video without reloading the clip. These tennis videos take only seconds to download.
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The topspin-slice serve is the most common first serve used at the intermediate and advanced levels in tennis. As the name implies, it uses a combination of topspin and slice (which on serves is sidespin, not backspin). The topspin increases the margin of error over the net, the height of the bounce, and the effective speed of the serve (by decreasing deceleration on the bounce). The slice makes the ball curve to the left (for right-handed servers). The topspin-slice serve can generally be hit with the most power of any of the spin serves. This serve is often called a "slice serve," which causes an unnecessary confusion with the pure slice serve that only has sidespin.
