People new to pickleball are often confused why pickleball often ends up with four people at the net hitting it gently at each other. Even professional pickleball is often played at an incredibly slow pace, unlike any other racket sport.
The reason is because of how the standard doubles pickleball metagame evolves as players get better.
Level 1: Bangers
At low levels of pickleball, players who hit the ball fast tend to win points. It hardly matters where everyone is standing: if you bang the ball with any pace (and keep it in) your opponent will likely make a mistake and you’ll win the point.
This is a very stable equilibrium, and in fact there are entire play groups that stagnate here, never progressing beyond essentially degenerate tennis.
Level 2: Blocking
At some point, players figure out that they can 1) stand at the kitchen line, 2) block back pretty much everything, no matter how hard it’s banged at them, and 3) prevent their opponents from getting up to the kitchen, by blocking back low and deep.
The great advantage of doing this is that two players at the kitchen will almost always beat two players at the baseline: it’s harder to miss and it’s easier to hit good angles.
Now points tend to be decided by which team gets to the kitchen first; because it’s usually the return team, serving teams often have great difficulty at this level. Some stubbornly just try to bang the ball even faster, hoping to elicit a bad block in response. (These are called tennis players.) For others …
Level 3: Drops
They figure out the secret to getting to the kitchen themselves: by hitting a slow, shallow shot that bounces in the other team’s kitchen. Hit properly, an opponent at the kitchen can’t reach out and block it, and instead, because of the kitchen rule, has to not only let the ball bounce first, but also hit up on the ball to get it over the net. Both of those factors means that you now have the time to get to the kitchen yourself.
This shot is called a drop, and you’ll often hear it in the context of the serving team getting to the kitchen via a third shot drop or fifth shot drop. It’s a tough shot, requiring touch and finesse, but once learned it radically disrupts how the game is played. Now serving teams can reliably get to the kitchen, neutralizing the return team’s advantage.
Level 4: Speed-ups
When all four players at the kitchen, someone rediscovers the power of speed. Before, blocking was easy when the ball was coming from their baseline 29 feet away. But blocking is a lot harder if the person is banging it at you from their kitchen line 14 feet away (called a “speed-up”). At best you might block the ball back awkwardly and lead to another speed-up; at worst you’ll just lose the point immediately.
This is another very stable equilibrium, where everyone can get to the kitchen but points are decided by the first team to speed up, because most players are much better at speeding up than they are at dealing with speed ups. Until …
Level 5: Counters
Until players finally learn how to counter. A counter is when someone speeds the ball up at you, and you not only block it back, but you hit it back faster than it came at you. And this changes the game again, because now instead of speed-ups winning you the point, they instead become very dangerous shots to hit because you won’t be ready for the counter.
This is a very painful experience for players who have never had their speed ups punished before. Points can feel literally unwinnable, because every attempt to attack just loses you the point.
So instead …
Level 6: Dinking
We now reach the final evolution of the metagame. Two players that respect each other’s ability to counter will be hesitant to speed up, and instead focus on hitting dinks: slow shots intended to be unattackable.
But a good dink is more than just a softly-hit ball: a good dink forces the opponent into a difficult dink back. It might be aimed at their backhand, have significant topspin, be placed deep, or ideally all of the above.
All of that dinking has one goal: to force your opponent to pop the ball up with a dead dink. And now you’re finally able to speed up again, because the only speed-up that can’t really be countered is a speed-up down towards your opponent’s feet. Even if they hit it back, they’re hitting up while you’re hitting down, and you’re firmly in control of the point.
Why is dinking so common, then?
But wait, you say. If dinking is something that players should only really be doing when you’re at the apex of the metagame, why do you see so much dinking in casual play?
A few reasons:
- People are just mimicking pros, wrongly. In my experience, many players don’t understand this evolution of skill, and would win much more if they dinked less and sped up more, since most of their opponents simply aren’t able to counter well.
- People just like dinking. Historically, pickleball had an unusually strong cultural emphasis on everyone having a good time. Dinking is fun and inclusive, particularly with older players, and it was kind of rude to just smack balls all over the place even if it might have been optimal.
- The game is evolving. Dinking is becoming increasingly rare, as more tennis players start playing pickleball, paddles get faster and spinnier, and pickleball becomes more competitive. In particular, it’s increasingly common to see:
- Serving teams hit third shot drives with so much power and topspin that it’s difficult to block back.
- Speed-ups from even below the net, because topspin dips it low enough to prevent an effective counter.