How to Beat Four Major Types of Tennis Player

No two tennis players have exactly the same game, but most of the opponents you're likely to face can be placed into one of several major categories. Learning to adapt your strategy to a wide variety of opponents is one of the keys to becoming a tough competitor. If you succeed at becoming this adaptable, you'll enter an elite minority -- those players who can be any one of the major player types as the situation demands.

The Dinker, a.k.a. Pusher, a.k.a. Human Backboard: The dinker almost never hits hard, but gets everything back. "Dinker" is a somewhat misleading name, because one would normally think of a dink shot as something short and soft. The best among this breed can keep most shots deep, lob effectively, and aim fairly well. Dinkers drive a lot of opponents crazy, because they win by getting you to make all of the mistakes. (It's a lot more frustrating to make a mistake than to have an opponent hit a brilliant shot that no one could have got.)

Winning Strategy:

1. Attack at the net. Even the quickest players, who can run down almost anything you hit from your baseline, won't be able to run down an aggressive volley or overhead. Tennis is largely a matter of time, and by being at net, you cut in half both the time between your opponent's hit and yours and the time he has to react to your shot.
2. Get him to cough up a short ball. This might not be easy, but experiment. One tactic very likely to work is making the ball bounce above his shoulders on the backhand side. Most players can't hit deep off these shots effectively.
3. Be patient. He can't hurt you with his shots, so wait for the right ball before going for a winner or attempting an approach shot.
4. Pull him to net with a drop shot or good, low short ball. If he's not much good at hitting an aggressive response, you'll have an easy opportunity to pass him.

The Moon-Baller: Once a major contingent on the pro tours, especially on the women's side, the moon-baller is like a more skilled and specialized human backboard. She won't hit hard, but she will hit high, deep, and with strong topspin. If you're not used to this kind of shot, it can be tough to handle, and she can keep hitting them all day long.

Winning Strategy:

1. Attack at net, but be ready to hit a lot of overheads and to chase a lot of balls back toward your baseline. You'll need to come in on a better approach shot than you would against an ordinary dinker.
2. Try some sneak volleys. Start trading moonballs back and forth, then, when you've hit a nice deep, high one, sneak in toward the net and take the next ball in the air. It's hard for your opponent to see what you're doing while watching a deep, high ball, so she might not see you until you're about to pound the smash or swinging topspin volley.
3. Learn to hit on the rise. Moonballs are toughest if you let them bounce way above your comfort zone. By hitting them on the rise, you'll take them at a more comfortable height, your ball will come back at your opponent earlier, and the ball will bounce off your strings harder, giving your shot more power with less effort. The timing required to do this is tough, though.
4. Pull her to net. She won't be able to hit a moon ball off your drop shot or low, short ball, so she'll probably feed you an approach shot you can handle with ease.

The Power Baseliner: This is the most common type on the pro tour today. As opposed to an all-court player, the power baseliner would much rather go for winners from near his baseline than at the net.

Winning Strategy:

1. Keep your shots deep. If you give a power hitter a short ball, you'll have less time to react to his shot, and he'll be able to create sharper angles.
2. Try to keep the ball out of his "wheelhouse," the height at which he can most comfortably hit the ball. Either slice the ball so that it skids quite low or use a fairly high topspin that kicks up above his shoulders.
3. Make him hit a lot of balls. Keep running his shots down, because a hard hitter doesn't have much margin for error, and he'll eventually miss one.
4. Pull him up to net with good drop shots or low, skidding slices. This is a risky play, because if your short ball sits up at all, he'll put it away. If you hit a good short ball though, you'll force him to try to play the net, and a lot of power baseliners don't volley well.
5. Mix up the speeds and spins on your shots. A power hitter needs good timing, and the more variety you throw at him, the more difficult his timing will be.
6. See what happens if you attack at net. A lot of baseliners aren't used to hitting passing shots and make errors such as hitting the net by aiming too low.

The Serve-and-Volleyer: A good serve-and-volleyer has a big advantage: rarity. Even among the pros, this is a diminishing breed. At the typical club, only a handful of advanced players serve-and-volley. A true serve-and-volley player will come in behind virtually every first serve and most second serves, and when you're serving, she'll often try to come in behind either her return of serve or another approach shot early in the point.

Winning Strategy:

1. Concentrate on aim. Don't look at the incoming opponent or at where you want the ball to go. Keep looking at the ball while you aim either down the line, at the corner of the service box crosscourt, into her body, at her feet, or lobbed over her head.
2. Use topspin to make your returns drop in. Topspin allows you to hit harder at a given height without hitting long. It will also make your sharply angled crosscourt passes drop before they go wide or make the ball dive down at the feet of the incoming opponent.
3. Try some low chip returns at the server's feet.
4. Step in on the return to take the ball early. This will get the ball back sooner, giving the server less time to set up for a volley.
5. If your opponent is coming in behind her returns, too, try some serve-and-volley yourself. Take the net away from her by getting there first.

Winning Tips (Singles)

At any level of tennis competition, you'll fare best if you focus on having fun and improving your game, not on whether you win. Part of improving is learning how to win, but you should be happier about losing a match in which you played well against a better opponent than winning a match in which you played poorly.

The essence of your strategy early in your tennis development should be to win with consistency. At every level below advanced, players miss the vast majority of attempts at hitting a winner. If you get lots of balls back, giving an opponent more chances to make a mistake, he'll usually make that mistake and hand you the point. Most players run out of patience after a certain number of shots within a point. The more patient player has the advantage.

At the more advanced levels, a strategy centered on consistency requires good foot speed, but at the beginner level, your opponents won't get many hard shots in, so the balls you actually need to chase will usually be moving pretty slowly. You can win with consistency well into the intermediate level even if speed isn't one of your strengths. Approaching the advanced level, a slower player has to learn a more aggressive style, but we'll address that when we get there.

For beginners through early intermediates, here are five key tips for winning matches:

1. Hit groundstrokes high to hit deep. Unless you hit hard, aiming your forehands and backhands between three and eight feet above the net will almost guarantee that you'll get the ball in, and it will also help you keep the ball deep. Very deep balls can often draw an error from an inexperienced opponent, and depth in general will limit your opponent's options. You'll want to hit some short balls on purpose, but your standard shot should be deep.
2. Hit second serves high to hit deep. Aim your second serves two to five feet above the net for reliability and depth. The pros do this too, but they use heavy topspin that allows them to add quite a bit more pace than you'll be able to. If you know you have a reliable second serve, you can experiment more with an aggressive first serve and probably earn a few easy points. Until you start learning to spin your first serve, not too many hard ones will go in, but experimenting will help you judge how much speed to attempt.
3. Pull your opponent forward, then hit past her. This is one of the easiest and most reliable tactics you can use. Hitting a short ball to an advanced player is extremely dangerous, because she'll usually reply with a winner, but beginners will most often just hit the ball right back to you. Beginners get caught in "No Person's (formerly No Man's) Land," the area between the baseline and service line, all the time. When you see your opponent there, just aim the ball to either side of her and several feet deeper than she is standing, and you'll almost certainly win the point.
4. Recover your court position quickly. This is your defense against tip #3 and a lot of other difficult situations. Unless you're attacking at the net, which isn't easy as a beginner, you should get back to a spot somewhat diagonally opposite your opponent and roughly three feet behind your baseline after each ball you hit.
5. Use full swings. Full swings don't have to be fast swings. It's tempting to poke at the ball as a way to keep from hitting too hard, but you'll find that a longer swing is far more reliable, and it will be much better for your arm and your rate of improvement. If you want to take some speed off your shot, just slow down your full swing.

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Top Five Mistakes of Inexperienced Tennis Players

1. Poking at the ball due to over-caution: It's surprising how many players have two sets of strokes: their long, fluid, practice strokes and their short, choppy, match strokes. When these players get into matches, they become so over-cautious, they're afraid to take a real swing at the ball. They just poke at the ball, as if enough gentleness will coax it into behaving properly.

Of course, you learn long strokes not because they look pretty, but because they work better. When you poke at the ball, your racquet is in the process of decelerating when it meets the ball. This makes it unstable, and the result is an unpredictable racquet angle that can send the ball all over the place.

In addition, short, pokey strokes generally don't produce any topspin, which is the best tool for consistency, and they don't generate any pace. Failing to generate good offense is a great risk in itself, because you prolong points you should have already won. You'll have no offense with pokey strokes.

2. Getting caught in "No Person's Land": When you move inside your baseline to get a ball, you have to either get back behind your baseline or move to the net right away. From inside the area between the baseline and the service line, you can't volley effectively, and any ball that lands behind you won't be playable with a groundstroke. If you're good at the net, move forward whenever you can hit a strong approach shot. If not, learn to backpedal quickly, but still go to net if you don't have time to get all the way back before it's time to hit the next ball. You don't want to get caught retreating when the ball

3. Hitting to your opponent: At every level of tennis, the easiest direction in which to hit the ball is the direction from which it came. This is one of the main reasons players tend to hit back to their opponents. We also tend to hit toward whatever we're most focused upon. By far the most conspicuous thing on the other side of the net is your opponent, so your attention, and thus your shot, tends to be drawn in that direction. To overcome this, try to focus your eyes on the ball while visualizing target zones on the court.

4. Not attacking dinky serves: Against many opponents, the easiest balls coming your way will be second serves. Inexperienced players hit truly dinky second serves that are just begging to be attacked. You can hit them hard and deep, at a sharp angle, or very short (drop shot). If you keep punishing these dinky serves, your opponent will probably start trying to hit a better one than he can, and his resulting double faults will drive him nuts. Frustration will increase his errors, giving you lots of bonus points.

5. Admiring your shot: Yes, hitting a good shot is central to tennis, but you can't rest on your laurels--at least, not right away. If you stand there watching the beautiful flight of your shot, you'll be way out of position when that beauty comes back. Generally, you need to start moving immediately back toward the middle of the range of angles your opponent could hit next. This position is somewhat diagonally opposite your opponent if you're at your baseline, and it's somewhat toward the ball if you're at the net.

Credit to Jeff Cooper

5 Great Shot Combinations

One of the marks of an experienced tennis competitor is thinking beyond the shot you are about to hit. Your odds of hitting a winner are far greater if you set yourself up for it than if you try to create it spontaneously out of sheer shot-making brilliance.

Here are five shot combinations that work especially well:

1. Hit short enough to force your opponent to move ten or more feet forward into her court. When she fails to get back behind her baseline, which most players at this level often do, simply hit the next ball deeper than her position and at least eight feet to either side of her. As long as your opponent isn't good at putting away short balls, this is a fairly safe tactic, and it can yield a ton of points. Keeping your short ball low will make it even safer--harder to put away.

2. Hit a high, deep topspin, preferably to your opponent's backhand side, that will kick above her shoulders. Most players can't generate much pace on a ball above their shoulders on the backhand side, so you'll usually get a high, floating ball that's easy to put away at the net. When your shot kicks especially high, your opponent will be looking up and to the side as she hits the ball, so she often won't see you moving in to volley. With this "sneak volley," you can catch your opponent sending what would have been a fairly safe shot (if you had stayed back) but is, instead, a perfect setup for your volley.

3. Hit to your opponent's "side pocket," the outside corner of the service box, then put the next ball away to the opposite side or, as your opponent hurries back toward the center of the court, hit behind him (wrong-footing him). This is a classic shot combination that can be started with a slice serve, a sharp crosscourt topspin groundstroke, or a delicately angled slice groundstroke, usually a backhand. One hazard though: if your opponent gets to your widely angled shot in time to set up a good reply, he'll be able to create an even sharper angle than you did, because of his wide position on the court.

4. The drop-shot-then-lob combination is always fun, but it takes considerable finesse to execute safely. If your drop shot is too deep or your lob too short, most opponents will easily take the point, but you'll find some otherwise solid players who have a lot more trouble putting away short balls and/or overheads than they should. When you practice drop shots, try to get them to bounce at least three times inside the service line of your opponent's court. A good lob should land no more than four feet from your opponent's baseline, and against some taller opponents, your margin might shrink to less than three feet.

5. If you want to try a combination shot your opponent might not have seen often or at all, the sidespin backhand approach shot should be fun. Hit a backhand combination of sidespin and backspin as you start toward the net. Usually, your opponent won't be able to resist trying to see what you're doing as you're coming in. With some of his attention diverted from the ball, he won't be quite ready for its sideways skid, and he'll hit off center if at all, giving you either an easy volley or no need to volley.

Five Mental Toughness Tips (For Tennis Players)

Most tennis players are all too familiar with the difficulty of the mental half of tennis competition. The power of the mind is evident at every level, from Roger Federe or Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon to an eight-year-old afraid to use any of her full strokes in her first tournament. Tennis is a gold mine for sports psychologists, and some players spend several hours each week just doing mental toughness exercises.

Here are five simple techniques you can try right away:

1. The best all-around mental repair tool is the simple phrase, "only the ball." It cures, at least temporarily, most of the big pitfalls. Whether you're upset, angry, nervous, or just distracted, repeat this phrase to block out negative thoughts and return your focus to where it belongs, the ball.

2. Probably the hardest time to concentrate is when you're getting ready to return serve. Your opponent has the ball, so your mind seems to sense that this is an opportunity for a little time off. The next thing you know, your musings about which movie to watch tonight are rudely interrupted by a chunk of rubber and fuzz coming in at 90 m.p.h. A combination of three devices can help keep your mind on the job:

While your opponent is preparing, try to focus on something undistracting, like your strings. (Strings get readjusted a lot more than needed because of this little trick.)

As she tosses the ball, try to watch it come out of her hand and say to yourself a long, drawn-out, "baaalll."

As she hits the serve, say "hit," followed by "bounce," then on your return swing, "hit."

The "baaalll" device seems to work well for most players without much of a downside. The "hit, bounce, hit" phrase is also popular, but for some players it distracts more than it helps.

3. It's possible to become too analytical in the middle of a match, which will keep you from letting your strokes take their natural flow, but you don't want to shut down your analytical abilities, either. If you miss a shot you shouldn't have, you'll dwell on it less if you take a moment to figure out what you did wrong, then say to yourself, "Okay, I won't do that again." It's usually a good idea to repeat the stroke right away with the correct motion. You might very well make the same error the next time the stroke comes up, but just go ahead and apply the same process. Eventually you will get it right, and in the meantime, a little extra optimism won't hurt.

4. Learn versatility. If you have only one playing style, and it's not working, your lack of strategic options also creates a shortage of mental safety valves. A key factor in psychological health in general is feeling empowered to choose different courses of action. If you have a Plan B, C, and D on the tennis court, the failure of Plan A is unlikely to cause despair. Tennis players often lose because at least a part of them secretly gives up. You won't give up while you have something else to try. Learn to play every part of the court and hit every kind of shot with every kind of spin. You'll likely uncover a weakness in a seemingly invicible opponent. Variety makes the game more creative and interesting, too.

5. Look alert, energetic, confident, and happy. Looking so will actually help you be so to a significant extent, and it will keep you from giving encouragement to your opponent. If your opponent is at all prone to choking, your look of ready confidence on the verge of seeming defeat might keep just enough doubt in her mind to make her cave under the pressure of closing out the match.

Good luck.

Nikolay Davydenko-Juan Martin Del Porto ATP Final Match Analysis

Nikolay Davydenko won his first ATP Finals Championship by beating Juan Martin Del Potro 6-3, 6-4. Davydenko was clearly the more aggressive player and possibly even fresher than Del Potro.

Here are some of the key points of the first set:

1. Davydenko started extremely focused as he didn’t commit an unforced error until the 6th game and still managed to hit 7 winners from the baseline in that period of time.

2. Del Potro on the other hand saved himself twice mostly with first serve winners as 7 of the 8 points needed to win his first two service games came from his service winners. Had Del Potro not served that well, the first set would be over in 20 minutes for Davydenko.

3. Davydenko had one lapse of concentration at 4-2 up where he committed 2 unforced errors and a double fault but stayed aggressive and saved the game with 2 service and 3 forehand winners.

4. Davydenko in the end made 23 points through winners and forcing shots and gave only 6 points to Del Potro through unforced errors. That’s a +17 margin. Del Potro’s first set margin was +5.

5. The stats also showed that Davydenko played 40% of the shots inside the baseline in the first set and Del Potro only 20%.

Second set

1. Del Potro started the second set more aggressively and more focused as he made 7 winners and only 1 unforced error in the first three games but Nikolay was strong enough to hold his serve.

2. Davydenko’s level of play dropped just once in the second set at 2-3 when he made 4 unforced errors but Del Potro was just not aggressive enough since the stats show that Davydenko also made 4 winners / forcing shots in that same game.

3. Davydenko played a perfect game at 4-4 where he broke Del Potro’s serve on 0 by hitting 3 forehand and 1 backhand winner. There were no unforced errors from Del Potro but Juan Martin definitely played too slow and allowed Davydenko to dominate the rallies.

4. Davydenko’s margin in the second set was +13 and Del Potro’s +7. This tells us that Del Potro still played reasonably well as he made more winners than unforced errors but his game was slightly too passive and that allowed Davydenko to control the rallies.

In summary, this was one the best tennis performances by Davydenko that we have ever seen him play and he really deserved to win the tournament.

Juan Martin Del Potro was just “flat” after a tiring semi-final match with Soderling and was just unable to produce the same high level play so quickly after that match.

Credit to tennis thoughts