Palio Expert 2

This is an excellent premade bat for beginners! Leave the other premades at the big box stores. Pros: excellent control, quality rubber, safe speed for beginners, blocks and drives easily, helps stroke mechanics, spinny serves, easy to remove rubber, comes with case, affordable. It's a good allround bat. Cons: slow speed, takes a fair amount of effort to smash hard or loop from med/far distance, tough to negotiate incoming spin due to tacky rubber (for beginners). The rubber (Palio CJ8000) is tacky enough to pick a ball off the table for a moment but not nearly as tacky as DHS Neo Hurricane3. The rubber is also soft enough to generate spin even when the tack starts to wear out. After a year, I put on DHS NH3 for FH and Mark V for BH. That was a pretty good combo for this bat, but I noticed that's where I needed more speed in my game. It took way too much energy to sustain a topspin rally at a far distance from the table. Maybe it's my amateur mechanics and fitness level, but let's be honest, I don't have time to train hard. So I eventually upgraded to a faster setup. It's been 2 years since upgrading, and I'm still able to have great success with the Expert 2 whenever I pull it out. This bat is my backup one.