What to Do When You're Playing a Much Better Team

"When you're playing against a team that's better than you, you want as much randomness as possible"

At the PPA Masters, first-time partners Zane Navratil and Blaine Hovenier ran into a buzzsaw in the round of 16: top-seeded duo (and eventual gold medalists) Ben Johns and Gabe Tardio.

The beauty of pickleball, like any sport, is any team can win on any given day.

On this particular day, however, Blaine and Zane were facing very heavy odds. And they knew it.

"We weren't going to out-dink that team," said Zane on The Dink's PicklePod. "There's a zero-percent chance we do that.

Here's the full clip:

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Here's the Zane math:

• This might be a strategy that only works 40% of the time
• But dinking against a much better team, he estimates, only works about 20% of the time
• So... you should be speeding up 100% of the time

You get all that?

The lesson Zane and Blaine took into this match – and one you can replicate when facing a better team across the net – is a far superior team is going to beat you at the net the majority of the time. You're just not going to grind them down in one endless dink rally after another.

Instead, opt for chaos and unpredictability.

"Anything can happen when you speed that ball up... the odds even out in more aggressive points."

Pickleball is a beautiful game. But sometimes, you've got to get messy to tip the scales in your favor.

(In case you're wondering, no: Zane and Blaine didn't beat Ben and Gabe. And it wasn't particularly close. But what matters is they had a plan. And we can all learn a valuable lesson from it."

Watch the full PicklePod episode below: