Pickleball Lies: Errors While Serving

On multiple occasions I’ve heard experts say that if you are going to make a mistake, make it when you are serving, because the other team cannot score.

That’s a lie.

Of course the other team cannot score. But when you make a mistake while on the serving team, you take away the opportunity to score future points.

I’ve charted numerous PPA matches … in 2022, the serving team has a 45% chance of scoring a point when serving in the (1) position, and a 45% chance of scoring a point when serving in the (2) position. This allows me to create a distribution of expected points from an individual server, and a team. Your mileage will vary.

Say I am serving and the score is 0/0/1. How many points can I be expected to generate while I am serving?

55% of the time I will not score a single point while I am serving.

26% of the time I will score one point.

11% of the time I will score two points.

8% of the time I will score 3+ points.

In total, I can be expected to score 0.776 points when I am serving.

So when I air mail my serve out the back, I cost my team 0.776 future points. Sure, we might have lost the point, so nothing is lost. But we might have scored 3 points off of my serve, and we’ll never know if we would have scored those three points.

Remember – you cannot win unless you get to 11 points. You cannot waste points while serving.

The logic doubles when both players get to serve … you can expect to score 1.552 points off of your two serving chances.

Little details matter. If you increase your odds of scoring a point from 45% to just 48%, you increase the expected 1.552 points off of both of your serves to 1.655 points. Over the course of a game, that equates to about 0.7 points. Increase your odds to 50%, and you’ll score 1.724 points off of both of your serves.

You’re being told to worry less about making mistakes while serving. That is incorrect. If anything, your odds of winning increase if you are more thoughtful about mistakes while serving, increasing the expected number of points you’ll score, getting to 11 faster.