The forehand stroke in table tennis is a stroke that begins on the right side of the body for a right-handed player and on the left side of the body for a left-hander. If a player uses the handshake grip, the hand holding his or her racket moves with the palm facing opponent.

All kinds of strokes, defensive, neutral, or attacking, can be performed from the forehand side. For active strokes, some players tend to favour their forehand over their backhand, so they play forehand, not only from the right half of the table (for right-handers), but often from the center and sometimes even from left half of the table. These are players with a strong forehand who have built their main strategy around the stroke. They play in a way so as to set themselves up to have a good chance of striking a powerful forehand to win the point. Often they will move to their left corner (for right-handers) in order to perform a so-called cross-table forehand.

Playing forehand, you are able to give the ball all kinds of spin, like topspin, backspin, sidespin, side-topspin, or side-backspin. During forehand rallies, right handers usually generate sidespin in a counter-clockwise direction and left handers usually generate sidespin in a clockwise direction.