Butterfly Ilius S

I've been extensivly using Butterfly Ilius S 0.5mm for last 6 months on Victas koji Matsusita ZC. I like this pips. Attack is great. Chops are nice too. Overall, Illius S is pretty solid All-round long pips that offers control in both, attack and defense. I now winning more points with my attack than ever before, and believe me, I tried many long pips prior to the Illius S rubber.

I started to play with this pimples two months ago. I play that on Diode V blade in 1,1 mm sponge version. Sponge and topsheet are really hard, what will not make that suitable for beginners. I never had enough practice with Curl P1 to make a comparison, but my feeling is that they are alike. Chopping from far distance - very consistent. I would say that throw is medium, the ball returns back medium above the net. Along with a little bit dead bounce, it makes returns sometimes very unexpected, and opponents tend to make mistakes not knowing what to do after - push or spin again. If the decide to spin, second attack is much weaker. After doing several mistakes to the net, I found that a lot of opponents do not play hard topspins against this pimples. They prefer to loop with medium force. This gives a room for counter attack. Reversal is very severe. Sometimes these pimples produce unexpected balls back from yourself that you will have to deal with. Because of the hard sponge attack from the backhand should not be done with a wrist. The only disadvantage of this rubber that I found, is extreme complexity while pushing on the table. I guess this is due to hard sponge. When you chop topspins from the far distance, the ball bounces with power and you can feel good what kind move you have to do. When you just push on the table, the ball bounces weakly without giving a feeling of any vibration/stiffness /etc because you can not feel that behind the hard sponge. Thus, it is hard to estimate the power and the length of your move. My opinion is that pimples are for players who plan to face really strong opponents with fast and aggressive attacks. Ilius does not make much sense playing with mediocre level opponents, as you might make more mistakes than them. I think this rubber has a lot of potential and people with start playing more with that with the time. It would be interesting to read more comparisons between Ilius and Curl P1 from seasoned players.

The hard dampening sponge and extra grippy top sheet is a fairly unique combination. It is easy to chop against back spin balls with this rubber, and even short pushes with it can produce a decent amount of spin. The sponge gives it a lot of gears. it's possible to make short chop blocks and fast line drive chops. However it is also fairly sensitive to spin, you need to use fairly thin contact and account for incoming side spin. It has almost no reversal, and blocking produces no spin balls without any wobbling, but it is easy to keep blocks on the table. The first chop in a rally tends to go back a lot heavier than most pips, but it is a bit harder to control against very spinny loops. Bumping is definitely not this rubbers strong suit, but can be done with a quick side swipe motion. Finally it is very good at adding subtle amounts of sidespin and adding more or less backspin. Overall a great chopping pip, but a bit tricky to use.

Ilius S 1.1 on Joola CWX. This pip is a game-changer! In opposite to Feint Long 3 which I used for long time this time We got a completly different rubber. Package is a typical one from BTY. Carton covered by foil with a sheet of paper inside. Pips coming in large square, so IliusS should fit to any defensive blade. Chops works very nice, pips are grippy, so attacks are also nice. Low reversal, but come on, its not a rubber for on table blocking, of course sponge is dead, so You can block on table, ball goes very short but with almost no spin. Overall very solid and good rubber for a low (compared to FL3) price!