Learn 80% of Pickleball Strategy In 12 Minutes

If you're newer to pickleball, there's a chance you have heard tips on how to get better. But the problem is a lot of times after you hear that thing, your mind goes blank when you get back out on the court. So our goal in this video is to help make pickleball strategy the most important strategies, the 80 percent. Extremely simple for you and easy to remember. So you can actually go on court and use it the next time you play. I'm here with my buddy. This is Tyler. And it's not really my buddy. It's my future wife. This is Ashley and she's working. She is kind of my buddy. She's working on getting better at the game. So she's going to be learning alongside you. I'm Kyle Kizuta, a pro pickleball player. I've meddled numerous times on the pro tour. It works. It works. She may be your future wife. She's my future partner. BAM! So the first strategy is all about serving strategy. And when you're thinking about serve strategy, instead of just thinking about the technique of your serve or where you stand on your serve, we want to think about this sequentially in sequence. What's the definition of a sequence? It's something that happens in a specific order. So when I hit my serve, that's my first shot in the sequence. And then this is, we'll call it the third shot, but it's really my second shot in the sequence, but it's the third shot because it's the third shot of the rally, just to give you terminology that will be used. That's my first, third sequence. And so when you start to think about your serve strategy, if you think about them in sequence, you'll be able to remember them more. If you can remember them more, you'll be able to use them on court. So with the serve strategy, first is you want to hit it deep to the backhand side because deep will keep them away from the kitchen line longer. And that will help us if they're away from the kitchen line. The second part of this is serve and stay. So a lot of times what happens is you serve, you step into the court, and then you have to back up and hit the ball on your back foot. Basically, every shot in pickleball is better when you're on balance or slightly moving forward. If you're ever unstable, backing up, like you just saw, not ideal. So I want to serve the ball, stay here, and then I can move in after the fact. I promise you, you will have better results if you serve deep to the backhand side and serve and stay. Do you remember what those two were? Fiance? Serve and stay. What was the first one? Deep backhand. That's where it can go. Now, where do we hit our next shot? When you go out and play next, this is what you should do. Of course, is there a nuance? Sure. There's other targets. Sure. But this will work 80% of the time. I want to hit the ball. I want to hit a deep to the backhand side, stay. I want to hit the ball to the person who is coming in to the kitchen. Why? Well, JT here is already stable. So if I end up hitting a ball at JT, it's very unlikely he's going to make some type of mistake because he is stable. He is balanced. He is ready. If I hit the ball to Tyler, as Tyler is coming in right here, it's very likely that he's going to do something like he just did where he reached because he's off balance. He's concerned about coming in. He's afraid of us. Now here's where a lot of people make a lot of mistakes. After I've served it deep to the backhand, they like to hit it as hard as humanly possible at the person coming in. Why? Because they're excited. Like I was excited to meet you for the first time. So instead of going at a hundred percent, Tyler kind of come in. There's really two shots you can hit. You can hit a drop that kind of lands in the kitchen. That's a much more difficult shot. And then this one, which is what I think most people should start with. Cause I just find it to be the easiest is the 80% ball right at the body. Okay. Now, before we move on to the next strategy, a lot of people ask me what paddle do I play with? In fact, what paddles do all of us play with? We play Friday paddles. In fact, we have a different paddle on the court. Three different styles. This right here is the Friday original. It's a crazy deal. You can get two paddles for how much Ash? $99. That's an insane deal. Turn that around. Let me see that color. That's incredible. Tyler's using the Aura Pro, which is the newest Friday paddle. It's the most powerful paddle I've ever seen. You didn't hit that hard. Felt pretty hard. So those are the main points of the serve strategy. And again, we're thinking in sequences. You think about your first shot, everything you have to do with that. And then your third shot is connected to that shot. And then what comes after that will be connected to what you did prior. And now it's going to be the exact same thing on our second strategy, which is our returning strategy. So there's only a couple of things to remember. And again, we're thinking in sequences. Second shot, fourth shot sequence. This will help you remember it better when you actually go on court and go on court. So when it comes to the return, don't be standing right on the baseline. If the ball comes at your feet, if it's a pretty good curve. Exactly. I just forced myself to hit it, right? So put yourself one or two feet behind. If it's short, you can go get it. So I'm two feet back. JT goes to hit the ball. Now I give myself a little more space. The first thing is just return it deep into the middle. You don't need to worry about the sidelines. If you want to get a little more specific with a target, I might go, again, to keep it to a backhand because most backhands are a little bit worse than people's forehands. I might put it on JT's backhand. And then to add to the sequence, I go deep into the middle. I'm going to do this. Return and run in. So JT hits the ball. I'm going to return it deep into the middle and I'm going to run in. Why? Well, if I return and stay, which happens a lot, and I understand why it happens at first. You might not know the rules. You might be a little too nervous to get up to the kitchen line, but getting to the kitchen line in pickleball is where the money is made. If I return it and I stay here, he has all of this target in front of me to be able to aim. His accuracy is going to be much better because he has all of this space. Then if I pop it up, I might leave my partner who's already up there hanging. And I don't want to leave my partner hanging. That's my fiance. Right, fiance? So instead, I'm going to return deep. I'm going to run in and I'm going to give him less targets to work with. Now we hit a pretty dang good shot, but when you move forward, it's almost like trying to throw a dart. If you're throwing a dart at a dart board and you're trying to hit the entire dart board, it's going to be fairly easy to hit the dart board. Your accuracy is going to be quite a bit better. The moment you say hit the bullseye, accuracy is going to diminish because it's such a small target. And that's what I'm trying to do here with JT is give him a smaller target to hit to, to make his life a little bit more difficult. Now, pause right here. Where we're at right here, I would say we're in the advantage. This is an important concept to know. We call this the advantage scale, something we teach in our online pickleball school. Yes, that is a real thing. Here's what this means. Every single rally you're in, you're in one of three phases. You're either in advantage, disadvantage, or we call it neutral, like you're tied. No one really has an advantage. So right now, what do you think? Yeah, we are in the advantage. I would call this a plus two advantage because we are controlling the kitchen line. We're still in a plus two advantage. We have two people up at the net while they have zero people up at the net. This is the place you want to be. When we start out in pickleball on the serve, the receiving team actually gets a slight advantage to start the point. Again, why? We have one person up at the kitchen line while they have two people back away from the kitchen line. So we just call this a plus one advantage. So if I can return it, run in, I can turn our plus one advantage into a plus two advantage. If I stay back, it's pretty easy for them to flip their disadvantage. All right, I come up. Now, boom, look at this. Keep it going, just keep hitting to me. Now, they right now are in a plus one advantage. They have taken over control of the point. And this would not be ideal. It's working for us right now because they're being nice to me. But in the long run, we're going to lose more of those points than we win. So the recap is on your second shot, give yourself space to hit the ball. Hit it deep to the middle as best as you can. It's easier said than done. Then return and run to the kitchen line so you maintain your advantage throughout the point. Now, here's the third strategy. I was really thinking about what is one of the more important things you could know as you first start playing pickleball? What is one of the 80% things, the big piece of information that will have a big payoff? Well, I went to my online pickleball school and we have over a thousand people in there. It's really for obsessed people who are just really trying to understand the nuances of the game. I went to them and I said, what advice do you have for someone who is just starting out? If you could go back and give your one month in self some advice, what would you say? And many people said, here's what Diane said. Stop hitting the snot out of the ball. Here's what Steve said. Stop hitting the ball so hard. Here's what AJ said. Stop slamming every shot. Here's how I think about it. In pickleball, there's a power threshold. So if I hit the ball past a certain level of power, I will lose accuracy. So if Tyler's hitting me the ball, it's pretty easy for me to make every single ball just go right there. I don't, you know, I've been playing a while. I'm never gonna miss really hitting the ball there. Now it might not help me a ton, but I'm not gonna miss it, okay? But the moment I start to ramp up my power, right? I lose a level of accuracy and control that eventually will hurt me. Same thing on the other side. If Tyler and JT are back there and they're trying to just put pressure on us, they're trying to keep us away from the kitchen line. It's pretty common that they'll get a ball around shin height and they'll try to hit it quite a bit too hard. Have you ever felt that before? And if you haven't, you will. Let me see what you got. Tyler's over there like, I don't have a power threshold. I've never felt this power threshold that you speak of. So it's like. Yeah, so when Tyler's actually doing something that I recommend, I'm gonna give you two different rhymes that you can remember, okay? Number one, above the face, hit it with pace. That is when you do have free reign to really go after a ball. Ow, that hurt. Below the chin, hit it with spin. I gotta shout out my guy, Jason, who gave me that line a long time ago. Above the face, hit it with pace. Below the chin, hit it with spin. Don't hit it with a ton of pace until you've earned a ball that you can do that with. How do you do that? You often do it by attempting to hit shots. Like that? Into the net, just like that. So this is a shot you'll wanna work on is hitting it with spin, but that's a line you can remember. Here's the second line. First, when I wrote this down, I thought, this is an oversimplification. And then I thought, no, it's not. Keep it in and you'll win. It's so common that people get off balance, right? And they just start hitting. Oh, keep it in and you'll win. That's also common. It's so common that as you start to play, it's so much fun to hit the ball so extraordinarily hard because of the dopamine you get, the adrenaline that you feel. But as you're out playing, you can remember to keep these sequences of serve strategy, your first shot and your third shot, your return strategy, your second shot and your fourth shot. And the idea that if you just keep balls in and you don't over swing, the other team, I promise you, will make mistakes, hit dumb shots, try to do crazy things off balance, way more and earlier in points. And you will just win by existing out there and not being an idiot. Quick test here for my fiance before we end this video. All right, number one, this is for you all too. Number one, come over here. What are you walking away from me for? Number one, okay, serve. Tell me what you remember on the serve. Hit it to the backhand, hit it deep, hit it in the middle. Hit it in the middle? On the return, yeah, hit it in the middle. You only said two things about the serve. Serve. Serve and stay. Serve and stay, yeah, 100%, you got that one. Return, no, hit it deep. Hit it deep. And then return and run. Return and run. Return and run, okay. And then what was the, on the last teaching here, what was it? Run to the kitchen. Run to the kitchen, yes. Run to the, exactly, you get it. All right, guys. This is why you need the strategy. This is why you need strategy. I'm gonna be marrying this girl and she's not listening to anything I say. We got a lot of work to do. All right, hey, also, we just took a love languages test and I don't know if you guys have taken a love languages test, really helpful, but then we started thinking, man, this would be great if we had a pickleball love languages kind of thing. We call it a personality test. So we actually just developed a personality test. You can, I don't know why I'm so close. Sorry if it's too, you can take a pickleballpersonalitytest.com. Find out what your natural play style is and where you need to grow, what type of partners you play well with and what type of partners you don't play well with. Links in the description. See you next video.