Pickleball strategy is not a playbook you memorise. It is one question, asked of every ball that comes at you: can I attack this, or do I need to neutralise it? Answer that correctly and the rest of the game organises itself. Answer it wrong and you will hit lovely shots at the wrong moment and lose to someone who covers half the court you do. This is written for Australian players who already know what a dink and a kitchen are, and who want to know when to use them.
Nothing below is a secret. Most of it is the difference between a 3.0 and a 4.0 at your local club on a Tuesday night.
Every shot belongs to one of three states
Before you choose a shot, read the ball. There are only three answers.
Attacking. The ball is above net height and you are balanced behind it. This is the only state where speeding the ball up is the percentage play. Drive it, roll it, or put it away.
Neutral. The ball is at about net height, or you are in the middle of the court moving forward. Here you are not trying to win the point, you are trying to earn the next one. Keep it low, keep it slow, take the net.
Defending. The ball is below net height, or you are moving backwards. Your job is to take pace off and buy time. A deep lob is a legitimate option here against opponents who crowd the line and do not move back well, though in a Sydney afternoon breeze it is close to a coin toss. The safer answer is almost always lower and softer, not higher.
If you only change one thing after reading this, change this: stop attacking neutral balls. The most common error in Australian club pickleball is a player taking a ball at net height and trying to end the rally with it. You cannot hit down on a ball that is not above the net, so it goes into the tape or sails long, and the point ends with your error rather than their winner.
Get to the kitchen line, then stay there
Points are won at the non-volley-zone line, not from the baseline. Every soft shot you hit has one purpose, which is to buy you and your partner the time to walk forward and stand there.
Move up together. Two players side by side and level with each other, roughly two to three metres apart, can cover the whole width. One player at the line and one at the baseline leaves a diagonal corridor straight through the middle, and good opponents will find it every time. If your partner gets pushed back, you come back with them, then you both move in again on the next soft ball.
Once you are there, hold your ground. Retreating from the line to play a ball you could have taken out of the air is how you hand the net back. The rules about what you can and cannot do at that line are worth knowing cold, and we have written those up separately in our guide to the kitchen rules.
Drive or drop? The third-shot decision
This is the decision that defines your game, and it is not a preference, it is a read of the return.
If the return of serve lands deep and low, near your baseline and below your waist, you are not attacking it. Drop it. Soften it into the kitchen, follow it in, and start the dink rally from a position of equality. The technique for that shot has its own article, our guide to hitting the third shot drop.
If the return floats, sits up, or lands short, drive it. And understand what the drive is actually for. A third-shot drive almost never wins the point outright. Its job is to make your opponents pop the ball up off a fast, low, dipping ball so that the fifth shot is the easy one. Driving, then stepping in to take the weak reply, is a plan. Driving every third ball because it feels better is not.
Your serve is where the whole sequence starts, and a deep serve buys a weaker return. Depth beats pace on the serve nearly every time, which we cover in how to serve in pickleball.
Who takes the middle
Most unforced errors in doubles happen in the middle of the court, and almost all of them are avoidable, because they come from two players either both going or both watching.
Decide before the point, not during it. The standard answer: middle balls go to the player whose forehand is in the middle. The other player covers their own sideline and does not reach across. If you are both right-handed and you are the one on the left side, the middle is yours.
Then say it out loud. Mine, yours, switch. Partners who talk during the rally beat partners who are more talented and silent. Serve order, who is where, and the legal ways to arrange yourselves before the serve are all in our pickleball doubles rules guide, including stacking, which is worth learning once you have the basics here in place.
Resetting is what separates the levels
A reset is taking a hard, fast ball and dropping it dead into the kitchen so the rally goes back to neutral. It is the least glamorous shot in the game and the one that most reliably moves you up a grade.
Three things make it work. Paddle out in front of your body, where you can see it. A loose grip, because a tight hand sends the ball back as fast as it arrived. And no swing at all: you are absorbing, not hitting.
Equipment genuinely helps here. A thicker, softer, control-leaning paddle takes pace off for you. The Honolulu J2CR Crystal Blue in the regular handle ($308) is the one we reach for to demonstrate this: a multi-density foam core (EPP and EVA), a swing weight of 110 to 114 and a twist weight of 7.0, which is high. A ball you catch slightly off-centre still goes roughly where you aimed it instead of squirting off the face. Once the ball is dead in the kitchen you are in a dink rally, and that has its own article too, our guide to the dink.
Topspin is a strategy, not a trick
Players treat topspin as showing off. It is the opposite: it is the thing that lets you hit harder and still keep the ball in. Spin makes the ball drop, so a topspin roll can be struck at a pace that would otherwise sail long, and it kicks forward low off the bounce, which is unpleasant to answer.
Brush up the back of the ball with the face close to vertical and accelerate through it. You are not chopping across it and you are not scooping under it. Low to high, fast at the end.
How much spin you get is partly the paddle, because a gritty face bites the ball for longer. The Six Zero Coral Pro 16mm ($300) is our spin reference point, with a Diamond Grit face on Diamond Tough carbon and a recorded 2,481 spin RPM, at 228 g and swing weights of 110 for the widebody up to 117 for the elongated. If spin is the part of your game you want to build, the whole range of spin pickleball paddles we carry is tagged for it.
The hands battle at the net
Sooner or later someone will speed the ball up at you from the kitchen line, and you will have about a third of a second to decide what to do. Do not swing. Get the paddle up, in front of your eyes, face slightly closed, and block.
Here is the pattern worth knowing: the first speed-up almost never wins the point. The second one, hit off a floating block, often does. So the whole skill in a volley exchange is making your block land low and soft enough that their second ball is not a free attack. Keep the paddle still and let the ball do the work.
Twist weight is the number that matters for this, because hands battles are won with the edges of the face, not the middle. Our stocked paddles run from 5.68 on the Six Zero Sapphire ($149.99, a 13 mm Toray 700K build and the cheapest sensible way into a carbon face) up to 7.0 on the J2CR above. The higher number holds its line better off-centre.
Singles is a different game
Almost none of the above survives contact with singles, so if you play both, keep them separate in your head.
In singles the court is a width problem, not a net problem. Serve deep, follow it in, and take the centre, because standing in the middle means you are never more than a few steps from either sideline. Then hit behind your opponent: the hardest ball to retrieve is the one sent back to the side they have just left, because they are already moving the other way. Patience beats power, and the player who makes the other one change direction twice usually wins the point. The serving, scoring and side-switching rules are different too, and those are in our pickleball singles rules guide.
Does your paddle match the game you want to play?
A paddle will not give you a strategy, but the wrong one quietly fights the strategy you have chosen. If you want to reset and dink your way to the line, a head-heavy power paddle makes that harder every single rally. Everything below was in stock when this was written.
| Paddle | Price | Core and face | Swing weight | Suits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Honolulu J2CR Crystal Blue, regular handle | $308.00 | Multi-density foam (EPP and EVA), Crystal Blue Endurance carbon face | 110 to 114, twist 7.0 | Resets, blocks, soft hands at the line |
| Six Zero Coral Pro 16mm | $300.00 | 16 mm Tectonic Core Suspension, Diamond Grit face, 2,481 spin RPM | 110 to 117 by shape | Topspin rolls and heavy dinks |
| RPM Q2 Elongated | $357.50 | EPP full-foam core, CarbonBite carbon face | 114, twist 6.1, balance point 248 mm | Drives and reach, a baseline game |
| Six Zero Coral 16mm | $275.00 | Propulsion Core, Toray 300K carbon | 114, twist 6.7 | All-court, if you have not picked a style yet |
| Friday Fever 102 Gen 3, Snow | $175.00 | 16 mm honeycomb with dual edge foam, triple-layer Toray T700 | 118, twist 6.4 | Players who want more mass behind the ball |
| Six Zero Sapphire | $149.99 | 13 mm PP honeycomb with foam-injected perimeter, Toray 700K | 112, twist 5.68 | A first carbon paddle |
If you are still deciding which direction to go, the three style ranges are the fastest way to narrow it: control pickleball paddles for the reset-and-dink game, power pickleball paddles for the drive game, and all-court pickleball paddles if you want one paddle that does not specialise. Two specs decide more than the marketing does, and both have their own guides: 14mm versus 16mm core thickness and elongated, widebody or hybrid shape. If your current paddle is close but not quite right, you can often fix it rather than replace it: see how paddle weight works.
Free AU shipping over $150, which every paddle in that table clears on its own except the Sapphire, by one cent.
Pickleball strategy: what to work on first
Do not try to add all of this at once. In order:
- Stop attacking neutral balls. Costs nothing, wins games immediately.
- Get to the line and stay there, together. Move as a pair, every time.
- Learn to reset. This is the one that takes real practice, and you can do it alone against a wall. We have a solo practice guide for exactly that.
- Then add topspin. Once your soft game holds up, spin is what makes you dangerous rather than just reliable.
Work through that list and your results will move before your technique does, which is the whole point of thinking about strategy at all.
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Got a tactical question we have not answered, or disagree with the drive-or-drop rule? Hit reply on any of our emails, or come and find us. We would rather argue about it than guess.
Chris
