The short answer: In a one-point pickleball match, choose to receive if you get the choice. The two-bounce rule gives the returning team the edge: about 56% of rallies among professionals and nearer 59% in WPM’s analysis of club data. Then hit a deep return, get both players to the kitchen line, never fault your serve and keep your feet behind the line.
On Saturday 17 October, at CityPickle’s courts in Times Square, a doubles match ended and one team started celebrating. Then the replay on the court monitor showed a foot in the kitchen, and the point went the other way. At the Paddletek One Point Slam, that was the whole match.
“In a one-point match, replay review is not a nice-to-have,” wrote Ben Borton of PodPlay, whose software ran the night. “It’s the officiating.”
Every match was one rally, single elimination, for a $5,000 first prize and a $25 entry fee, across seven courts in about two hours, according to CityPickle’s press release. Forty-three points later, by PodPlay’s count, Mia Yu and Sheridan Kim were holding the cheque. They had signed up that morning, on the understanding that they would play it as “a $25 open play”.
Mary Cannon, CityPickle’s co-founder and co-CEO, put the pitch plainly: “You have one point and one chance to make it count, so truly anyone can step onto the court and have a shot at winning $5,000.”
She is right, which is precisely why your preparation for one should not be spent on your forehand.
Is one point just a lottery?
The conventional wisdom is that one point is a coin flip, so play your normal game and enjoy the party. Half of that is true.
Here is the Index number for this piece: 53. Take two doubles teams, one slightly better than the other, so that over a long evening the better team wins 53% of all rallies. That is an edge you would struggle to see from the balcony. Over a traditional side-out game to 11, WPM’s model has that 53% team winning 67% of the time. Over two games out of three, 74%.
Over one rally, the 53% team wins 53% of the time. Everything that sorts the better team from the luckier one is switched off.
Except one thing. In pickleball, the side that receives wins more rallies than the side that serves, and in a one-point match you can often choose. On the same model, our 53% team wins 59% of the time if it receives and 47% if it serves. Its skill is worth three points above a coin flip. The toss decision is worth twelve.
A quick word on the method
WPM’s club figures come from Jayan Gandhi and Dr Scott Powers’s study for The Dink of about 2,000 rallies at two US amateur tournaments in 2024, at DUPR levels from 2.5 to 5.0+. WPM combined their published deep- and shallow-return rows into one figure per level: 1,956 rallies in all, with the returning team winning 57.8% of them, and 59.2% at 3.5 and above. The professional figure, that serving teams win about 44% of rallies, is an estimate from 40 professional gold-medal matches by Xu (2022), as cited by DeFord and Ethier. The game figures come from a model of side-out doubles to 11, win by two, with fixed rally rates (the better team serves at 0.47 and receives at 0.59, against pro-style rates of 0.44 and 0.56), averaged over who serves first and checked against 200,000 simulated games. Real rallies are not independent, so treat these as illustrations, not forecasts.
Should you serve or receive?
Receive. This is the two-bounce rule doing what it was designed to do.
The serve must bounce, and so must the return. So the receiving team can walk to the kitchen line behind its return while the serving team waits at the baseline. Daryl DeFord and Stewart Ethier, mathematicians writing for the American Mathematical Society, found the rule gives the receiving team a small advantage, and they cite an estimate that professional serving teams win about 44% of rallies. Kyle Koszuta’s analysis of more than 34,000 professional rallies, reported by Times Now, reached the same place: the returning team starts the rally a shot ahead, and serving teams who fail to get both players to the kitchen lose 65% of those points.
At club level, WPM’s figures put the receiving side at 56% to 61% at every level from 3.0 upwards. Two honest caveats. At 2.5 to 3.0 the numbers flip: the returning team won only 46% of rallies in that sample, so if you and your partner are new to the game, serving is defensible. And DeFord and Ethier’s advice for a normal side-out game is to choose your side of the court, because the first server’s disadvantage over a whole game is tiny. A one-point match is not a whole game. The structural edge is all there is.
This is where pickleball parts company with tennis. At Melbourne Park in January, the Australian Open’s Million Dollar 1 Point Slam settled serve or receive by rock, paper, scissors. In tennis the server usually holds the advantage, and the runner-up, Joanna Garland, “consistently chose to serve”, in the Australian Open’s words. She lost the final to Jordan Smith, a 29-year-old New South Wales state champion, when “an errant backhand sailed wide”. Smith took home A$1 million, which the BBC put at £496,835.
In pickleball, the server’s privilege is that he or she gets to make the first mistake.
CityPickle’s rules turned the choice into a sponsorship joke with a sharp edge: the team carrying more Paddletek paddles won the toss outright and picked serve, return or side. Level teams flipped a coin. Either way, pick return.
What if you have to serve?
Get it in. That sounds too obvious to print, so here is the evidence.
At the 2025 Australian Open event, Andrey Rublev, the only top-10 player in the field, went out in the quarter-finals with a service fault, according to ABC News. In 2026, ranked professionals got one serve while amateurs got two, and Jannik Sinner, the two-time defending champion, dumped his into the net to send Smith through. Frances Tiafoe, the ABC reported, “lost his nerve and serve”. In pickleball you get one serve every time.
So serve deep, but not near the line. Aim at the middle of the box with plenty of net clearance, and accept that the return will come back. A serve that lands keeps you in a rally you will win four times in ten. A serve that misses wins none.
Then take your time. Geir Jordet’s study of 366 penalties in World Cup, European Championship and Champions League shootouts found that players who began within 200 milliseconds of the referee’s whistle scored just under 57% of the time, against just over 80% for those who waited a second or more, as the British Psychological Society summarised it. That is a correlation from another sport, but nobody gives prizes for hurrying.
How should you return serve?
Deep, and then forward with everyone.
In the Gandhi and Powers data, a deep return won the rally about 70% of the time for players at 3.5 and above, against about 50% for a shallow one. That is the largest swing in this article, and it is entirely in your control. Yet only about half of returns were deep, even at 5.0+.
“Deep” does not mean a line-painter. It means a high, slow return into the back half of the court that buys time to reach the kitchen line with your partner. Through the middle, it also gives the serving pair a moment’s argument about whose ball it is. The return that loses a one-point match is the one hit long, or so short and fast that you are still running when the third shot arrives.
Once there, stay there. Koszuta found that 90% to 97% of shots from the baseline are struck upwards. The team at the line hits down.
Drive or drop the third shot?
Whichever you miss less. The data has a refreshing lack of opinion on the rest.
Gandhi and Powers found no meaningful difference in outcomes between third-shot drives and drops at any amateur level. What did matter was failure rate: at every club level, at least about 20% of third shots failed outright, against about 5% or less at professional level, as The Dink newsletter reported. Drives failed between 18% and 33% of the time.
The third shot is the serving team’s one real chance to claw back the return’s advantage, and the easiest place to waste it. If your drop is reliable, drop. If you drive, drive at the body with margin over the net. A one-point match is a terrible place to discover a new shot.
The same goes for the speed-up. Our rusher versus resetter piece made the case for patience over a long game; over one point it is close to compulsory. Do not be first to speed up a ball you are hitting from below the net. Let them attack upwards. As we argued in The One-Decision Rally, most points end because one person makes one poor choice. Tonight, let it be them.
Who keeps their feet behind the line?
Back to Times Square. The team that celebrated too early lost on a foot inside the non-volley zone, not on a shot. The replay saw it.
When the point is the match, every rule becomes a tactic. Volley from behind the line or let it bounce, and do not let a volley’s momentum carry you in. Feet creep forward when the rally gets tense, which is exactly when a one-point match is decided.
What can you learn from Ben Johns?
Mostly how to lose without minding too much. Ben Johns, the most decorated player in the professional game, has said that the pressure players put on themselves “is definitely more than what other people put on you”, in an interview reported by Pickleball.com. On his own defeats: “Numbers-wise, it’s going to happen eventually.”
That is the right attitude, because one-point bracket arithmetic is brutal. A team that wins 60% of its rallies, a big edge in a mixed field, has under an 8% chance of winning five one-point matches in a row, and under 5% for six. A dominant 70% pair wins five straight about one time in six. PodPlay summed it up better than a spreadsheet: “anybody can win a point, and the best players still have to win all of them.”
So judge your evening by the decisions you controlled: did you receive, did your serve land, was your return deep, were both of you at the line, and did your feet stay behind it? Five yeses and a defeat means you were beaten by a better point. Our piece on the confidence loop is about what one point does to the next five. In this format there is no next five, which is oddly liberating.
For the longer game, see our guide to coming back after losing the first game.
Is one-point pickleball coming to your club?
Probably. Tennis Australia started with an A$60,000 event in 2025, won by Omar Jasika against Priscilla Hon, and raised it to A$1 million a year later. Carlos Alcaraz, who said it felt “a little like I’m playing a Grand Slam final right now”, went out when a drop shot failed him against Maria Sakkari.
The CityPickle event was inspired by Melbourne, and PodPlay says it plans to take the format on the road in 2027 to PodPlay clubs in more cities. “Honestly, it was even better than I thought it would be,” said CityPickle co-founder Erica Desai after the final.
Nothing stops a British club running one on a Friday night with a whiteboard and a referee with good eyesight. The court is the same size in Sheffield as in Times Square, and so is the kitchen.
If yours does, remember the 53. Being the better team will barely help you over one rally. Receiving, hitting deep and keeping your feet behind the line will. Somebody at CityPickle learned the last of those on the replay screen. Better to learn it from theirs.
Sources
Accessed 27 October 2026.
- PodPlay, Ben Borton, “One Point, $5,000: Programming That Tells a Story”, 26 October 2026: https://podplay.app/blog/one-point-slam-programming-that-tells-a-story
- CityPickle and Paddletek press release, GlobeNewswire, 26 October 2026: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/10/26/3388159/0/en/citypickle-and-paddletek-bring-high-stakes-one-point-slam-to-new-york-city-awarding-5-000-grand-prize.html
- Australian Open, “Aussie amateur beats AO champ for $1m payday at 1 Point Slam”, January 2026 (archived): https://web.archive.org/web/20260118125724/https://ausopen.com/articles/news/aussie-amateur-beats-ao-champ-1m-payday-1-point-slam
- ABC News (AAP), 15 January 2026: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-15/australian-open-one-point-slam-winner-jordan-smith/106230542
- BBC Sport, January 2026: https://www.bbc.com/sport/tennis/articles/ckgyl1ndw57o
- Daryl DeFord and Stewart Ethier, “Does the first-serving team have a structural advantage in pickleball?”, arXiv 2303.02942 (also AMS Contemporary Mathematics vol. 844): https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.02942
- Jayan Gandhi with Dr Scott Powers, The Dink, 23 October 2024: https://www.thedinkpickleball.com/do-deep-returns-win-more-rallies-what-about-drives-vs-drops/
- The Dink newsletter, 28 October 2024: https://newsletter.thedinkpickleball.com/p/the-stats-you-need-to-win-at-every-level
- Times Now, Kyle Koszuta on the kitchen line, 8 February 2026: https://www.timesnownews.com/sports/pickleball/explained-why-the-kitchen-line-decides-doubles-matches-kyle-koszuta-breaks-it-down-article-153581297
- Jordet, Hartman and Sigmundstad, Psychology of Sport and Exercise 10(6), 2009, via BPS Research Digest: https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/football-players-who-rush-penalty-kicks-are-less-likely-score
- Pickleball.com, Victoria Radnothy, “Inside Ben Johns’ humble approach to greatness”, 14 May 2026: https://pickleball.com/people/inside-ben-johns-humble-approach-to-greatness
