Tennis Tactic: Easy Points Off Slice Serve

There is a difference between "tactics" and "strategy."  A tactic is something you do physically to achieve an end.  Like if you use a backhand slice purposefully to stop an opponent from being powerful or a moonball to make a player run back.

A strategy is when you use one or more tactics to force and error or outright win a point.  Like if you know your opponent has a bad backhand off a low ball.  So you used your slice to get a weak reply.  Then when you have a short ball, you hit the ball to the other side and approach the net for a volley.

I will ATTEMPT to explain how to use the slice serve as an effective tactic.  However, you need a powerful flat serve to make this tactic supremely effective.

For those of you that don't know, a slice serve is when you put a sidespin on the ball that causes the ball to curve away from your dominant arm (right arm slice breaks to the left).  A slice serve is usually the first serve I teach because putting sidespin on the ball is actually the easiest serve to do.

A flat serve is just you hitting the serve as hard as you can without missing.  No spin.

The way to do a tactical slice serve is to hit it easy with mostly slice so that the second bounce happens on or before the baseline.  If the opponent is standing on the baseline, they will have to lunge forward to hit it.  However your slice is breaking to the left.  Their brain will register the curve before the shortness of depth.  Thus they will run towards the curve along the baseline and not forward.  Right???

The tricky part is that the ball can't have too much energy.  If so and your opponent is ready for it, you are open for an aggressively angled ball.

 You can get away with a weak dink serve too.  But it would be much better if you have it short and sliding away.

That is the tactic.  To use it really effectively you have to use the powerful flat serve to keep them honest.  This way if your opponent gets smart and moves up to receive your serve, you blast a fast one so they can't react.  Every lefty learns this trick early but it works on everyone.

Counter Tactic: The counter (the reversal move) for this tactic is to fake like you are expecting a flat serve by standing back behind the baseline.  Then making a big jump forward to receive once the server tosses.  Since the server is determining the serve from your positioning, you can control what serve they are using (NICE!).  Take that time to try and distinguish the differences in form between the flat and slic serve.  If you want to really mess with them you can start anywhere.

Hope that works out for you guys :)

Questions and comments at the bottom please.