7 Pickleball IQ Tips to Outsmart EVERY Opponent

I'm creating this short pickleball video to forever elevate your pickleball IQ forever. Most players step on the court and they just play without much going on in their brain. I've put together a list of the seven must-know things in order for you to be a much smarter player and outthink your opponent in every situation. My name's Tanner. I have a duper rating of a 6.0 and I've won two professional APP tournaments. I've done thousands of hours drilling. I'm going to shortcut all of that for you and only tell you what you need to know to truly get better. Let's get right into it. Number one is if you're in a dink rally at the kitchen line and the ball is going back and forth, if your opponent nicks the net and the ball lands on your side like this per se, never speed that up. I see so many amateur players, ball gets nicked and they try to speed it up into the net or way out. The reason it doesn't work is when the ball hits the net, it loses all momentum and speed so it's next to impossible to make it. Instead, when the ball nicks the net, you should use that as an opportunity to take control of the rally and hit an aggressive dink to set yourself up to win the point. Number two, this is a professional level tip all the pro players are doing that I can guarantee you're not aware of and it's when they're in a dink rally going back and forth and they earn a dead ball, meaning a ball that sits up, instead of them rushing to dink it back, they actually hold their paddle underneath of the ball for an extra second and it gives them deception. This is what it looks like. Check this out. See that? See that? See that? Can't tell that it's coming. That's great and all, but to take that one step further, I want to expose you to this. This is where all the magic happens in pro pickleball. So let's say I'm dinking with Zach here, going back and forth, I'm dinking, whatever. I get that dead ball and when I hold it the first time, I'm actually going to look at what he's doing, okay? So Zach, let's dink normal. Dink normal. Give me that dead ball. Let's watch what he's doing. Okay, look, hold. Okay, so what I just noticed is when I hold that dink, Zach is anticipating a speed up. So look, he's going to his backhand. So now the next time I get a dead ball, I'm not even going to think. I'm going to hold it and then I'm going to speed it up to his chicken wing up there because he's backhand. He can't get up here. This goes for all areas of the game. So check this out. Let's do it, Zach. Here we go. Hold. Next ball. I don't even think I just do. That is a legitimate cheat code. My personal favorite use of this shot is actually the hold into the lob. The reason is when you hold, everybody's on their heels thinking they're going to get sped up and they're trying to figure out where. The last thing people think is a lob. So check this out. Hold. Lob. See that? That's excellent. So he's thinking attack, attack, attack. Oh shoot, I got lobbed. They have zero chance. I have like a 90% success rate on that. Not actually, but actually. Number three is being able to decipher when you should hit a third shot drive versus a third shot drop. There's two scenarios for each. First, we'll cover the drive. The first scenario is if the return bounces short in the court and high like this, that's a perfect time to tee off and apply pressure. Scenario two is if the opponent hits an aggressive deep return where you're off your back foot. This is when you would want to drive the ball to get an easier next one to drop. It's going to be mission impossible to try to drop a ball like that. Now for when we hit drops, the first scenario is if the return bounces shallow in the court, but low. I want to drop that ball. I don't want to rip it when it's down here. The second scenario is if the opponent hits a return that lands deep near the baseline, but doesn't have a lot of oomph on it, meaning it's coming in pretty soft. You're best off dropping that because driving that ball won't give you much of an advantage. Jumping out of the video for one quick second, the holidays are right around the corner and I have the perfect gift for anybody who loves pickleball. I've taken my knowledge that I've accumulated over the past two years, crystallized it, and put only the best info in this book to get you better at pickleball. It is a shortcut for you to get better. Give the gift of a 5.0 duper rating. Get this gift. Thank you so much. Let's jump back into the video. Number four is a mental tip if you get nervous, and that's you need to understand that your opponents are just as nervous as you are, no matter the level you're playing. Beginner all the way to pro, everybody feels the same amount of nerves as you are in the moment. The way we counteract that is we take the weight off our shoulders and put it onto our opponents. How do we do that? Super simple. First, when you're starting out the game, instead of trying to hit third shot drops when you're nervous like that, they're going to sail. I want you to hit third shot drives like this at like 70% power, that dip over the net. I'm trying to hit the ball like this, traveling through the air, but like this, that dip. That way, my opponent that's nervous has to handle my shot as opposed to me trying to hit that drop when I'm super shaky. Secondly, when players are nervous, they tend to speed balls up at the kitchen line when they shouldn't. They do it out of spite of them being nervous. What I want you to do is set a role with your partner and say, hey, look, we're coming in, I'm feeling a little bit of nerves, let's dink 10 balls minimum before we even think about speeding up. Oftentimes, you'll get up to the net, you'll hit a few dinks, and then your opponent who's just as nervous will do something stupid or miss it into the net. So by setting that role with your partner, you're both grounded and level and you know you're not going to attempt anything until 10 shots have been hit. Number five is I want to expose you to very basic patterns that pros use in order to think two steps ahead of their opponents at all times. The one that the majority of players use the most is they try to run around and find their forehand. So what that means is let's say I'm dinking cross court with my opponent here. Instead of me endlessly taking these backhands, the second they get a ball that they can run around and find their forehand, they do it because it's another look and it adds deception. From here, I can dink out that way, I can speed up through the middle, I can lob, I can go down the line. I have endless options where if I'm just off the backhand, not much is going to happen. The pattern that you use to set this up is you want to dink two balls out wide to condition your opponent that you're going out wide. And then on the third ball, you go to their inside foot. And oftentimes when you go to their inside foot, their ball is going to come back a little more neutral here and it's the perfect opportunity. Check it out. Here we go. See that? So from that position, I have so many options. Let's do another one. Check this out. Excellent. Look wide, wide, bam. See that? And then I condition him like a chess match. Oh, last time he ran around, he went middle. Oh, now he went there. He doesn't know what to think. Now he's throwing up a lob. So as the match gets later and later, if you use that, your opponents are going to be on ice skates. Number six is you want to do everything in your power to apply as much pressure as possible on the fourth ball. So what's the fourth ball? It's when your opponent is hitting their third shot drop. How do you handle that? This is the separator from amateurs to pro. This one shot. This is so important because the hardest shot in pickleball is hitting a reset from the middle of the court. It's really hard to get this ball down without your opponents attacking the next one. So when our opponents are coming into the court, if we're not applying pressure on this fourth ball, they're just getting a free ride into the kitchen. We're not making them hit the hardest shot. Whereas on the other hand, if we're up here really ripping the ball, making them earn their way, we're forcing them to hit hard shots from here, which is probably going to end in a pop-up and us putting it away. The mental checklist that we should be following as the game is happening and we're in this situation is this. Number one, the most important thing is can we take the ball out of the air? This takes time away from our opponents and we can hit harder. So first off, we're always looking to get that ball out of the air. However, number two, say we can't get it out of the air and the ball bounces. Instead of us staying and trying to hit the ball like this, what we want to do is actually turn sideways, step back as needed and drive the ball like we're playing tennis to apply that pressure. So this is what it would look like. Ball's coming, step back, bam, and you're ripping it. You just want to hit the ball hard to make them hit that reset. Here's a live example. So I'm going to be saying what's going through my brain when I'm in a game scenario, okay? Can I get it out of the air? Can I get it out of the air? Yep. Can I get it out of the air? Yep. Can I get it out of the air? Nope. Okay, I would have stepped back and ripped it. So that's the idea behind it. That's what's going through my brain. Number seven, which is arguably the most important tip of the entire video, and that's you need to dissect and understand your opponent's play style and reverse engineer that to use it to your advantage. So what does that mean? A prime example that my partner and I use in our professional level tournaments is let's say we have an opponent that's hitting a lot of two-handed backhand dinks like this. If somebody uses a lot of two hands on their dinks, that means that they're not looking to reach into the kitchen and flick balls because they're waiting for the two-hander. So when people are doing this, that tells me I should shrink the court, lean in, and look to take their ball out of the air and be aggressive to them because they're always coming here, coming here. They're not a threat here. The second scenario, which is if our opponents have the opposite play style, so instead of this, they're looking to lean into the kitchen, take all of our balls out of the air, and attack everything. That's a clear indicator that they're crowding the kitchen line and their weight's going super far forward. So how do we get out of that? We should lob them. We should body bag them because their weight's here, they can't get out of the way of a ball, or they can't run back for a lob because everything's so forward. Being able to dissect your opponent's gameplay and strategy is so big because it tells you what will work and what will not work before the match even starts. If you know somebody has this type of play style, you can go into the match with a plan formulated to play to your strength and their weaknesses. Congratulations, you've made it to the end of the video. Make sure to comment down below which IQ tip has helped you the most and is your favorite. I will catch you in next week's video. Let's all keep getting better. Don't forget to subscribe. YouTube thinks you should watch this video next, and so do I. Keep getting better at pickleball.