How to Win a Pickleball Tournament: 3 Key Strategies from the Pros

Most people think that winning a pickleball tournament requires some sort of divine intervention or a flawless performance where every third-shot drop kisses the tape and every drive finds the corner. Yeah, that’s just not how it works in the trenches. The reality is far grittier, far more exhausting, and honestly, far more instructive than any highlight reel could ever capture.

In a recent video, professional player Kyle Koszuta takes us through his journey at the APP Fort Lauderdale alongside partner Ryler DeHeart. This wasn’t a highlight reel of perfection; it was a gritty, sweat-soaked battle where they faced match points in nearly every round. If you’ve ever wondered why some teams seem to “find a way” while others crumble when the pressure mounts, this run offers a masterclass in the unglamorous side of winning.

What makes this tournament run particularly valuable for recreational and competitive players alike is that it strips away the mythology around tournament success. You don’t need to be the most talented team on the court. You don’t need to hit perfect shots every time. What you do need is a mental framework that keeps you in the fight when things get messy, when your partner is struggling, and when the scoreboard says you should probably just pack it in and head home.

Understanding Tournament Success: A Primer for New Players

Before we dive into the specific strategies that Kyle and Ryler employed during their tournament run, it’s worth taking a moment to understand what makes tournament play so different from recreational pickleball. When you’re playing at your local courts on a Saturday morning, the stakes are low. You might be competitive, sure, but if you lose a game, you just rotate off and wait for the next one. The mental pressure is minimal, and the physical demands are spread out over several hours with plenty of breaks.

Tournament play is an entirely different beast. You’re often playing multiple matches in a single day, sometimes back-to-back in brutal heat or wind. The pressure ramps up with each round because you know that one loss could end your entire weekend. Your opponents are actively studying your weaknesses and trying to exploit them. And perhaps most challenging of all, you’re spending hours on end with a single partner, which means every emotional fluctuation, every moment of frustration, and every spark of tension gets amplified.

The mental game becomes just as important as the physical one, if not more so. This is why players talk about “grinding” through tournaments. It’s not just about playing good pickleball; it’s about managing your energy, maintaining your composure, supporting your partner through rough patches, and making smart tactical decisions even when you’re exhausted and frustrated. The teams that succeed at the highest levels aren’t necessarily the ones with the best strokes or the most power. They’re the ones who can maintain their mental edge for hours at a time, who can reset emotionally after a crushing loss in one game and immediately refocus for the next point.

When Kyle talks about facing match points in nearly every round, he’s describing a scenario that would mentally destroy most recreational players. Match point means you’re one point away from elimination. Most people tense up, start playing cautiously, and ultimately hand their opponents the win. But the teams that consistently succeed in tournaments have learned to treat those high-pressure moments the same way they treat any other point. That’s not a natural skill; it’s something that has to be developed through experience and deliberate practice.

Strategy One: The Art of the Zombie Point

The first thing you notice watching Kyle and Ryler play is their absolute refusal to let a point die. Kyle describes this as playing “zombie points,” and it’s one of the most underrated skills in competitive pickleball. The concept is simple but brutally difficult to execute: you make your opponents win each point multiple times. You think you’ve hit a winner? They dig it out. You think they’re out of position? They reset. You think the point is over? It’s just beginning.

During one particularly grindy match in their Fort Lauderdale run, this “extending points” philosophy was the difference-maker. While their opponents were going for big shots and trying to end points quickly, Kyle and Ryler were content to stay in rallies, get back to neutral when things went wrong, and wait for their opponents to make mistakes. It’s exhausting, sure, but it’s absolutely demoralizing for the other team. There’s nothing more frustrating than hitting what you think is a great shot, only to see it come back again and again.

This approach requires a fundamental shift in how you think about pickleball. Most recreational players are trained to think about winning points. They practice their attacks, their speed-ups, their put-aways. But the best tournament players think first about not losing points. That might sound like a semantic difference, but it’s actually a profound philosophical shift. When your primary goal is to not lose the point, you start making very different decisions. You’re less likely to go for the hero shot. You’re more likely to hit one more reset, one more high dink, one more lob to buy yourself time.

The physical demands of this style are significant. Playing zombie points means running down balls that most people would let go. It means bending your knees and getting low even when your legs are screaming at you to stand upright. It means fighting through cramps, through exhaustion, through the voice in your head that says “just let this one go.” But the mental demands are even greater. You have to genuinely believe, on every single point, that you can extend it. You can’t let your body language telegraph that you think a point is over, because your opponents will smell that weakness and go in for the kill.

What makes this strategy so effective in tournament play is that it compounds over time. In a single game, playing zombie points might not make a huge difference. But over the course of a long tournament day, when you’re playing your fourth or fifth match, the team that’s been willing to grind and extend points has a massive advantage. Your opponents start to feel like nothing they do works. They start pressing, going for too much, making unforced errors. Meanwhile, you’re just doing what you’ve been doing all day: getting one more ball back, hitting one more reset, staying in the point one more second.

Strategy Two: The ‘We’ Over ‘Me’ Mentality

We’ve all seen that team. One person misses a dink, and the other rolls their eyes or stares at the sky. That partner hits a ball out, and their teammate’s shoulders slump in frustration. That is the fastest way to a zero-and-two exit from any tournament bracket. Kyle and Ryler, on the other hand, stayed locked in with each other throughout their entire run, and that partnership was just as important as any technical skill they brought to the court.

Communication in a tournament isn’t just about being “nice” to your partner, though that certainly helps. It’s about reducing the amount of brain power required to make decisions in real time. When you’re constantly calling “yours,” “mine,” or “watch it,” you’re removing the hesitation that leads to errors. You’re creating clarity in chaotic moments. You’re ensuring that both players know their roles on every single ball. This might seem like a small thing, but in the heat of a tight match, these tiny moments of confusion, these split-second hesitations about who should take a ball, can be the difference between winning and losing.

Beyond the tactical communication, Kyle and Ryler were on the same page with their energy and their strategy. They picked each other up when the wheels started to wobble. When one player was struggling, the other stepped up with encouragement rather than criticism. This is much harder than it sounds, especially when you’re tired, frustrated, and feeling the pressure of a close match. The natural human instinct when things go wrong is to look for someone to blame, and your partner is the most convenient target. Resisting that instinct requires emotional discipline and a genuine commitment to the partnership.

And then there was what Kyle calls the “socks incident.” In the heat of a brutal semifinal against Richard Livornese and Tanner Tomasi, Ryler’s shoes were literally squishing with sweat from playing in the oppressive Florida humidity. Kyle’s wife was offering fresh socks from the sidelines. It sounds ridiculous, and Kyle acknowledges that, but that kind of support, and the ability to laugh through the absurdity of playing in what he described as a Florida swamp, keeps the mental fatigue at bay. If you aren’t having at least a little fun with your partner, if you can’t find moments of lightness even in the most intense competitive situations, you’re doing it wrong.

The partnership dynamic in doubles pickleball is unique in sports. You’re not just teammates in the way that basketball players or soccer players are teammates. You’re essentially joined at the hip for hours at a time, standing just a few feet apart, sharing responsibility for every single point. There’s nowhere to hide, no way to diffuse responsibility. When something goes wrong, you both feel it immediately. This intimacy can be a tremendous strength if the partnership is healthy, but it can also be a massive vulnerability if there’s any tension or discord.

What successful tournament teams understand is that the partnership itself is a skill that needs to be developed and maintained. It’s not enough to just be good individual players who happen to be playing together. You need to actively work on your communication patterns, your energy management, your ability to read each other’s emotional states and respond appropriately. Some of the best doubles teams in professional pickleball aren’t necessarily the most talented individual players; they’re the partnerships that have figured out how to function as a single, cohesive unit.

Strategy Three: The Decision-Making Matrix

The third pillar of tournament success is decision-making, which Kyle admits is the hardest part to master and the most difficult to teach. If you’ve ever watched professional pickleball and wondered why the pros always seem to have so much time, this is the answer. It’s not because they’re faster, though many of them are quite quick. It’s because they recognize patterns earlier than recreational players do. They see the situation developing before it actually happens, which gives them what appears to be extra time to react.

Kyle describes his decision-making process as having three distinct steps. First, you need to recognize the situation before it actually happens. This means reading your opponents’ body language, court position, and paddle angle to predict what shot is coming. Second, you need to know the mathematically correct response to that situation. This is about understanding percentages and probabilities, knowing which shots have the highest success rate in which situations. Third, you need to reinforce that pattern through repetition until it becomes automatic, until you don’t have to consciously think about it anymore.

When Kyle and Ryler played against one of Kyle’s former roommates, the match turned into a high-speed chess game. Because they knew each other’s patterns and tendencies so well, it wasn’t about who could hit harder or who had better hands. It was about who could break the other’s rhythm first, who could disguise their patterns better, who could set traps and avoid falling into them. This is pickleball at its highest level, where the physical execution is almost taken for granted and the entire match becomes a mental battle.

What makes decision-making so challenging is that it requires you to process an enormous amount of information in a fraction of a second. You’re tracking four players’ positions, reading body language, remembering patterns from earlier in the match, considering wind and sun conditions, monitoring your own physical state and your partner’s, and trying to execute a precise shot all at the same time. For new players, this is completely overwhelming, which is why they often just react instinctively rather than making deliberate choices.

But as you gain experience and start to recognize common patterns, the decision-making process becomes faster and more automatic. You start to develop what psychologists call “chunking,” where you recognize entire situations as single units rather than having to process each individual element. A professional player doesn’t see “opponent at the kitchen line, paddle high, weight on front foot, partner out of position” as four separate pieces of information. They see “speed-up opportunity” as a single chunk of information that automatically triggers the appropriate response.

This is why simply playing more tournaments is so valuable for developing your game. Each match adds to your mental database of patterns and situations. Each decision you make, whether it works out or not, gives you information about probabilities and percentages. Over time, you build up this massive library of experiences that your brain can reference instantly when similar situations arise. The players who seem to have the best “court sense” or “pickleball IQ” are usually just the ones who have accumulated the most pattern recognition through experience.

The Bittersweet Reality of Competition

Here’s the kicker that makes Kyle’s tournament recap so honest and valuable: despite fighting through match points in multiple rounds, despite executing all three of these strategies at a high level, Kyle and Ryler didn’t actually win the whole thing. They lost a heartbreaker in the semifinals to Jack Munro and Will Howells. After all that grinding, all that partnership, all those smart decisions, they still came up short of the ultimate goal.

But that’s the beauty and the brutality of tournament sports. You can do everything right, from extending points and staying connected with your partner to making the correct reads, and still come up short against a team that just plays a little better on that particular day. This is a reality that every competitive player has to come to terms with. Winning isn’t just about executing your game plan; it’s also about what your opponents do, about how the matchups work, about a thousand little variables that you can’t fully control.

What separates the players who succeed long-term from those who flame out is how they process these setbacks. Kyle and Ryler didn’t win the tournament, but they gained invaluable experience facing high-pressure situations. They proved to themselves that they could fight back from match points. They strengthened their partnership through adversity. They identified areas where their decision-making could improve. All of these things make them better players and better competitors going forward.

The mindset that Kyle describes for approaching the next tournament is beautifully simple and profoundly practical: “Don’t suck.” It’s funny, but it’s also revealing. He’s not talking about winning every tournament or never making mistakes. He’s talking about maintaining a baseline level of solid play, about avoiding the kind of mental collapses or partnership breakdowns that lead to embarrassing losses. In some ways, this is the most honest competitive advice you can get. Don’t worry about being perfect. Just don’t suck.

Applying These Lessons to Your Game

If you’re a recreational player or someone just starting to dip your toes into tournament play, these three strategies, playing zombie points, maintaining a strong partnership, and developing better decision-making, are directly applicable to your game right now. You don’t need to be playing at the professional level to benefit from these approaches. In fact, these strategies might be even more effective at the recreational level because fewer players are implementing them consistently.

Start with the zombie point mentality. The next time you play, make a conscious decision that you’re not going to give up on any ball. Run down shots that you’d normally let go. Hit one more reset when you’re tempted to try a hero shot. See how your opponents respond when they realize that nothing they hit is actually putting the ball away. You’ll be amazed at how many “winners” your opponents hit that aren’t actually winners when you commit to tracking them down.

Work on your partnership dynamics, even if you’re just playing recreationally. Practice your communication. Make a commitment to stay positive even when your partner is struggling. Notice how much easier the game becomes when you’re not carrying the mental burden of frustration or tension with your partner. If you’re serious about tournament play, consider choosing a regular partner and actually practicing together, not just showing up and hoping things work out.

And finally, start paying attention to patterns and decision-making. After each match, think about the situations that gave you trouble. Were there certain shots or patterns that you struggled to handle? Were there opportunities you missed because you didn’t recognize them quickly enough? This kind of deliberate reflection is what builds the pattern recognition that separates good players from great ones.

The Process Matters More Than the Outcome

What makes Kyle’s tournament recap so valuable is that it focuses almost entirely on process rather than outcome. Yes, he and Ryler wanted to win, and yes, they were disappointed when they fell short. But the real story isn’t about whether they took home the gold medals. It’s about how they competed, how they supported each other, how they made smart decisions under pressure, and how they refused to quit even when the situation looked hopeless.

This process-oriented approach is what allows players to improve