Pickleball instruction: How to maximize your advantages

Tony Roig

Contributor

Last Edited

Oct 22 2025

Focus on the pickleball shots that matter most

We’ll start with one of the most popular shots players focus on: their serve. This shot probably takes the prize in terms of YouTube video attention. Players have created this vision in their minds of mastering multiple serves and strategically deploying them to befuddle their opponents and gain an advantage.

The reality, however, is that any advantage gained from having a bunch of tricky serves in the back pocket is marginally small at best. The evidence? Look at the pro game. There are a handful of pros who vary their serve from time to time. Even these players really use only 2 different serves. For example, Tyra Black likes to cut hers sometimes and Anna Leigh Waters will occasionally throw in a lob serve.

The majority of pro players, however, use one version of serve. All the time. The reason? Because they know that the costs of varying their serves are not worth the benefit. Otherwise, it would be safe to conclude that the best players on the planet would add variety to their serve.

A few years back I had the pleasure of interviewing Zane Navratil for our Pickleball Summit. Zane was the developer of a serve called the “chainsaw.” It involved applying a ton of spin onto the ball during the serve and provided a big marginal advantage to the shot.

During our interview, Zane made it clear that the most important characteristic to a serve – even when the super spin serve was still legal – was for his serve to be deep. A deep serve is what mattered most to the player who, at the time, had the most wicked serve in all of pickleball.

Translating that to our language: the largest marginal advantage for the serve comes from its depth. The rest – spins, placement, etc. – deliver smaller (if any) marginal advantages.

A fair question here would be: “OK, so it’s not the greatest of marginal advantages, but what harm can there be in learning different types of serves?”

Before answering, a quick side note: as pickleball is a game to be enjoyed, if hitting a short kickout serve makes you smile, then by all means master it. As a coach, my job is to deliver to you the information that will allow you to play better pickleball. Marginal advantages is one of those tools that you can then use to make informed decisions; if your decision is to continue working on the sweet-super-spin serve, then at least you’ll be doing it for the right reasons.

Back to the question: The harm in working on small marginal advantage parts of your game is that you are foregoing larger marginal advantage parts of your game.

Here is just one easy example of a part of pickleball that almost no player works on but that would have a tremendous impact on their results: Out balls. More specifically, not hitting balls coming your way that are likely going to land out.

I cannot tell you how many times I see players hit balls that are clearly going to land out – even balls traveling above their heads. Those are easily won rallies. Yet the player lets their opponent off the hook by sticking their paddle out.

If I had to put a relative number on the marginal advantage of having multiple serves versus becoming good at letting “out” balls go, I would do it like this.

1. Being able to serve multiple serves: 2 out of 10
2. Letting “out” balls go: 8 out of 10

Understanding pickleball court dimensions is key

If you play with a lot of bangers, the advantage of “out” balls increases to a 10 out of 10. This is because it is almost impossible to successfully deal with bangers if you don’t use the net to court ratio to your advantage.

This last statement “net to court ratio” illustrates another higher marginal advantage part of pickleball than adding a new serve variety to your arsenal: learning pickleball. I am not referring here to just knowing how to score and hit the ball across the net. I am talking here about really knowing the sport you play, including the fact that the court you play on has a high net/court ratio.

Because when you know this, you understand that as the banger’s distance from the net shortens, it becomes increasingly more difficult for them to hit the ball with power and keep it in the court. This level of understanding is available to you, but only if you spend some time focusing on the framework of pickleball -- how the game is built.

As you put the pieces of pickleball together, you start to see that there is a bigger picture than the one you are probably seeing now. From my perspective, a deeper understanding of pickleball is always a 10 out of 10 on the marginal advantage scale. This is because the better you understand the game, the easier everything else becomes.

Letting out balls go and understanding court geometry are just two areas of your game that offer far greater marginal advantage than switching between a high-arcing serve and a low, dipping one.

As you think about your game, consider the marginal advantage of what you are working on and then compare it with other areas. Focusing your limited time and energy on higher margin areas will improve your journey and your play.

And if you aren’t sure which areas are higher marginal advantage, you can learn through relevant actionable guidance, like the coaching we provide at Better Pickleball.

Tony Roig is a nationally-recognized coach, Sr. Pro Player, developer of “Respect the X” on the In2Pickle YouTube channel, and the voice behind the Pickleball Therapy podcast. Visit BetterPickleball.com for information on coaching from Tony and the BP team through their Camps, Academy, and No. 1 online training program: The Pickleball System.

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