Tour Mako: A New School of Control

Tour Mako is an all new string from Grapplesnake featuring bespoke additives, a unique string texture and a playing experience that I’ve simply never encountered before. The goals for Tour Mako are the same for any string that Grapplesnake produces: make a string that helps tour level players win more matches. In this article, I’m going to test Grapplesnake Tour Mako, compare it to my favourite string of all time, Tour M8, share my findings on durability and tension maintenance and tell you where this string ranks on my list of over 100 strings.

Full disclosure, I have been an affiliate partner with Grapplesnake for several years so it is in my best interest to share positive feelings about this string, so consider this video as more of a showcase rather than an unbiased review. As will any piece on create, I always try to share my honest opinions and experiences on court.

What Do Pro’s Want?

Well, I’m not a professional tennis player, but knowing how finicky even low level rec player’s are, I think it’s safe to say that pro players want strings they can trust. Think about the people in your life that you trust. They are consistent, day-to-day, you know you can expect them to have your best interests at heart, often you can predict when they are going to say or do. The same goes for strings.

You want the string to perform as strongly as it can for as long as possible. You want the string to perform predictably when grinding out heavy defense or when going for a finishing forehand. You want to feel connected to every shot so you can adapt your game to play harder, smarter, faster… But you also want a little something for free.

Sure, a piece of wood would probably play pretty consistently, but in the modern game, you are screwed if you don’t have some free power and spin to bail you on breakpoint. In my opinion, this is where Tour Mako stands out. It offers what I’m calling “new school control.”

New School Control

Old school control delivers predictability and consistency at all costs. This is the Kevlar school of thought, removing all free power and spin so that the player is the sole force behind every shot. We’ve seen similar approaches with poly’s like Luxilon 4G or Kirschbaum Max Power. With polyester strings, the best control came from the stiffest strings, busting elbows and robbing power in the process. It’s a classic example of mutual exclusion. Just can’t have more power and more control, right?

Wrong, this is why people love two of the most decorated tennis strings of all time: natural gut and Luxilon ALU Power. Somehow, both of them are relatively high in power yet offer superb directional control for directing big pace or finding precise depth. A natural gut mains, ALU Rough hybrid is probably the best example of a high power, high control setup. The gut gives you great feel and free power outside the sweetspot. The rough poly helps you grip the ball to counteract incoming spin and apply huge RPM’s yourself. Redirecting pace is a breeze due to the gut’s energy return and everything feels crisp and connected from the ALU material. To this day, no string setup has combined power and control in the same package the way Champion’s Choice does.

Some setups have introduced better longevity and control, like a full bed of 4G or Lynx Tour, some offer huge durability, power and spin at the cost of control, like Zero or Ultracable but in the last two years I think the niche poly market has made some huge strides into developing high-power, high-control strings.

Tour M8, released in 2022, led the way. The first string to offer big snapback for spin and durability, outstanding tension maintenance for long-term consistency and way more power and forgiveness outside the sweetspot when compared to control GOATs, like Lynx Tour, 4G or their own Tour Sniper. M8 was the first string I tried where it felt like the harder I swung the more I was rewarded, earning better ball feel, more court penetration, explosive spin and easier accuracy.

Recently, Toroline released O-Toro, designed for professional use, offering even more power and spin than Tour M8 but hiding it behind a higher threshold for swing-speed generated control.  Swing at 60%, and you might not access the spin you need to keep the ball in. Stay on the gas and bring that swing speed up to 80%, and that ball comes diving down before the baseline.

Tour Mako is Grapplesnake’s latest foray into dual maxing power and control, offering considerably more power and ball-pocketing than Tour M8, better directional control and a more connected feel than O-Toro and ultimately, seriously impressing me.

Feel

Feel was my number one concern with Mako. Mako is, after all, an evolution on Grapplesnake’s previous string, Paradox Pro. While Paradox Pro delivered the most connected feel in any string I’ve ever tried and some of the best directional control in any poly, it remains the only string to ever give me tennis elbow, knocking me off the court for 3 weeks.

To remedy this, Mako has ditched the metal additives that induces the high-vibration feel of strings like Paradox Pro or ALU Power. Instead, we are dealing with more of a Tour M8 hitting feel, but softened substantially. It’s certainly more connected than anything from Toroline, Yonex Polytour Pro or Hyper-G, falling more in line with Confidential, RPM Blast or 4G, but feeling way way softer.

Since switching to the ultra-stiff Pure Aero Rafa, Tour Mako is the softest feeling and best ball-pocketing string I’ve tried in this frame. It even makes M8 feel stiff in comparison, offering both a trampoline effect and a bit of a ball-compression.

One issue I have with O-Toro, which still might be my #1 string in this Aero, is that the hitting feel is too muted. This is quite common in high snapback strings, as the low string-on-string reduces stringbed vibration, reducing audible feel. Tour Mako fixes this, offering a lot more feel, due in part to the string’s texture.

Abrasive Surface

With polyester strings there are two common textures. The first is a shaped string. This is by far the most common, with RPM Blast being a 8 sided flower petal or Lynx Tour being a hexagon. Then we have rough strings which have little divots carved out of the extrusion. ALU Rough has divots taken out of the round string and Tour Bite Diamond Rough has divots taken out of a shaped string. Tour Mako takes its texture from its predecessor, Paradox Pro, a texture Grapplesnake is calling “an abrasive surface.”

Mako, much like Paradox Pro or Babolat RPM Power, is a round string with a sandpapery feel. You can hear it while stringing and feel it with your finger tips, but it’s pretty hard to capture on camera. Especially when fresh, you can hear the string snapping back on itself during the shot, which for me, increases my connection to the ball. You also get a nice boost in ball bite without compromising predictability. This is another common flaw with shaped strings.

During stringing, shaped strings can twist giving you an inconsistent topography on the stringbed. You might hit the ball on the sharp edge of the string or on a flat side. Further, if the cross is twisted, the strings can’t glide on themselves as easily, so you could run into inconsistent snapback. On the other hand, round strings are the most consistent profile in my experience but they lack ball bite.The abrasive texture offers the best of both worlds when it comes to ensuring consistency and creating ball bite.

Spin

Despite the above average ball bite, or perhaps, because of it, the snapback is not the best. So if you really care about snapback, you can probably skip this one. You need to find a certain level of swingspeed before the string will snapback and create spin for you. It did take me almost an hour to realize how much spin I could actually produce with Mako if I just committed.

I do think I hit more spin with strings like Tour M8, definitely way more with O-Toro, but I didn’t feel like I wasn’t getting enough from Mako. For example, I felt more confident playing high level tennis with Mako than I did with Tru Pro Pure Rush, a phenomenal budget string I tried last month. Slices are probably the shot that takes best advantage of the abrasive surface. You get that great ball grip but you never have to worry about catching an edge and floating the slice deep.

Comparison to Tour M8

Here I want to do a quick comparison to the playability I found with Tour M8:

M8 feels like a traditional poly. Mako feels like something new.

Even though the dynamic tension was the same and the tension loss was comparable over time, Mako feels like it was strung 5lbs lower. That’s how much easier it is to find depth and power. That’s how much more Mako pockets the ball.

The traditional control with M8 feels higher, making me feel dialed in with M8 from start to finish. With Mako, I had to find my confidence. I had to trust myself to swing out and find the spin, whereas, with M8, the spin is just there.

As much as I love M8, Mako did something other strings haven’t.

It helped me hang in there against Ale. Ale usually destroys me pretty badly. She’s been training all Summer and is currently in Tunisia playing some ITF’s. A typical score lately, feeding in rally points to 10, would be her winning 10-5. On the day of recording, I pushed her to 18-16. In the set, I stayed on serve until 3-3 and then she had to go teach a lesson.

And yeah, I’ve definitely been playing better too, and the Aero Rafa helps me a lot, but something about Tour Mako gave me the confidence and free power to hang in there and push Ale as hard as I could.

So where does Tour Mako rank all-time?

Final Thoughts

Well, I’m not sure yet, because we still need to do my favourite segment, Everything BAD.

The durability does not seem that great to be honest. The abrasive surface eats into the soft string pretty fast and notching occurs much quicker than it would with M8. That said, I haven’t actually broken Mako yet. I assumed it would snap in 3 hours since I hit about 30% notching on the first day I used the string but it’s been about 6 hours now and I still haven’t broken it.

My other criticism is that I would like some more free spin. We will see if I can unlock a little more snapback and durability by using a slippery cross string in a future test.

Player Recommendations

I’d recommend this string to players who want comfort and consistency. Those player’s need to have enough swingspeed to find reliable spin or should be flatter hitters. If you are a natural gut hybrid user, I think this is also worth a look.