How To Avoid Embarrassment

If you’re a beginning or intermediate player, you may find yourself with three others who are all very good players. If you’re typical, you will do one of three things, badly losing every game:

1. You’ll try really hard to drop balls into the kitchen, but it’s not working very well, because that’s beyond your skill level right now.
2. You just try to return the balls as well as you can, but they consistently go high and get smashed back to you or your partner.
3. You are oblivious, wondering why the opponents are smashing everything to your partner so hard no one can return them. It seems your partner isn’t so great after all! By the way, how are they managing to smash everything?

The best response is to disregard any advice to try harder to drop things into the kitchen. You know this won’t work. So instead, just focus on one thing: keep the balls low. Very good opponents can offensively handle most balls driven low and hard, but you’re still better off keeping everything low, even if it isn’t a gentle kitchen drop.