What’s the Score?
In a sport obsessed with patience and the soft game, a radical strategic conversation has emerged following a match at the PPA Masters. When underdogs Zane Navratil and Blaine Hovenier faced the world’s best duo, Ben Johns and Gabe Tardio, they made a calculated decision to abandon the traditional dinking game entirely. Their philosophy? When outmatched technically, your only friend is chaos.
Hit it deeper!
The logic, dubbed “Zane Math,” is a brutal assessment of probability. Navratil reasoned that trying to out-dink Ben Johns—a player synonymous with technical perfection at the kitchen line—was a suicide mission with a “zero-percent chance” of success. He estimated that playing the standard “patient” game against a superior team yields a win probability of roughly 20%.
To counter this, the pair decided to speed up the ball 100% of the time. The theory is that while aggressive speed-ups are high-risk and might only work 40% of the time, that 40% success rate is still double the 20% chance they had playing the conventional way. The goal was to remove the skill gap inherent in long, complex rallies by injecting “randomness” into the match. “The odds even out in more aggressive points,” the strategy suggests.
While Navratil and Hovenier ultimately lost the match to the eventual gold medalists, the experiment highlighted a critical tactical alternative for teams punching above their weight class.
The World Pickleball Verdict
This story is a masterclass in game theory for the amateur player. The pickleball community is often dogmatic about “playing the right way”—which usually means patience, dinking, and waiting for a pop-up. However, “Zane Math” exposes the flaw in that thinking when the skill gap is too wide.
If you play a better team at their own game, you will lose slowly and politely. If you embrace chaos, speed up the ball, and force a reaction-based contest, you might still lose, but you increase your variance—and variance is the underdog’s only hope. This verdict is clear: Don’t be a martyr for the “proper” style of play. If you are going to lose, go down swinging (literally), because sometimes, making the game “messy” is the only way to clean up.
Chris Beaumont is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of World Pickleball Magazine. Chris follows the global game closely, reporting on the latest news, developments, stories and tournaments from all five continents. He also hosts the World Pickleball Podcast, interviewing people at all levels of pickleball. Chris is also an avid player, currently struggling to make the breakthrough from 4.0 to 4.5.