The serve in pickleball is seemingly a simple thing, and in watching both beginners and professional players, the accepted mantra seems to be “don’t miss”. In fact, way back in February 2020, when I got into the sport, I started a little pickleball journal. The first entry, item 1) reads, “No service errors – deep but safe”. The second line item as you can see below says not to miss service returns, so you can see I was starting off with the basics!
The standard wisdom is simple and intuitive – a missed serve is a free point for your opponents. If you play 10 games of pickleball and serve ~100 serves, what is an acceptable number of misses? At the time I wrote the note above I was missing 4 or 5 serves a day, often 1 per game, which felt like a lot. I told myself I should try to get down to 1 or 2 missed serves per day max. But the 2nd part of my note is also important, a deep serve is very nice and if you can force a weak or missed return that’s really valuable. So where does the risk/reward line sit?
One thing not taken into consideration with the standard thought process is that the returning team has an inherent advantage over the serving team, starting at the net, and not having to hit the difficult 3rd shot. That means points are harder to win as the serving team, and therefor more valuable. For the sake of this thought experiment, I am assuming the teams are evenly matched, and estimating 55% of points are won by the returning team, and will plan on doing an actual analysis at some point in the future.
Let’s take a look at some made up #’s.
| Service team points won (of 100% of points played) | |
| Opponent miss return of serve | 5% |
| 3rd shot drive winner or clear setup | 10% |
| Successfully get to net, and win rally | 30% |
| Total % of points won | 45% |
| Return team points won | |
| Service error | 5% |
| 3rd shot mistake or too high setup | 20% |
| Opponents get to net, but you win rally | 30% |
| Total % of points won | 55% |
But what about going for a bigger and more aggressive serve?! Could an increase in the number of weak returns push that 45% win rate up closer to 50% even with more service errors in the mix?
| “Aggressive” Service team points won | |
| Missed return of serve | 10% |
| 3rd shot winner or clear setup | 15% |
| Get to net, win rally | 25% |
| Total % of points won | 50% |
The idea here is to increase the % of weak returns and misses, while accepting that you will also likely increase your service miss % as well. Because the return team has the rules advantage, “trading free points for errors” is potentially +EV if it is done at a ratio better than what you normally win from the serving position.
I am guessing that this idea COULD be effective in certain situations. Zane’s pushing the boundaries on serves in singles, but it hasn’t seemed to cross over to doubles play yet * (EDIT – Spin serve is sort of bringing this idea forward – people are accepting missing more serves for the chance to win cheap points on their serve potentially). I would guess that having a team where both players are dangerous and capable drivers of the ball would be important for capitalizing on weak return opportunities.