On winning the coin toss at the start of any pickleball game, the one burning question is, is there any real advantage or disadvantage to serve first or to receive first.
It is a choice that many may believe they know the answer to but may be surprised with the answer below.
To get the obvious out of the way, we are assuming we are on a great pickleball court and have ideal weather conditions and there is no advantage to being on one side compared to the other due to factors such as wind conditions, or sun in your eyes etc.
So the big question is do you take the first serve, giving you and your teammate a chance to potentially score first or do you select to receive and have the advantage of being able to get to the non-volley zone before your opponents?
Selecting to serve first and taking early control of the game might have some psychological value that ultimately influences the initial part of the game. However, seeing how most rallies are won by the team that can position both players on the non-volley-zone line first, do you select to receive first as it is typically easier to do just that?
Maybe having the first serve gives you the best chance to strike first. You may even try a riskier-than-normal first serve. Why turn down a free point or two? Even if this aggression fails, what damage does it do? You simply just become the receiving team without giving up any points.
But maybe that is not the right way to think of it.
You may think that it is more difficult for the serving team to win the first rally because the double-bounce rule makes it harder for them to get to the non-volley zone line. So why start a game with a disadvantage?
Now believe it or not Cornell University has undertaken some analytical research.
Their analysis is entitled “Does the first-serving team have a structural advantage in pickleball?”
The researchers use something called “Markov chains” – models that describe a sequence of events in which the probability is determined by the state reached in the previous event.
Suffice to say that their 25-page paper is far more difficult to master than a third-shot drop. In case you are wondering, with “n” representing the number of points needed to win a game, a game to “n” can be modeled by a Markov chain in a “state space” with 4-n-squared plus 10 states.
Surprisingly, the researchers’ mathematical models disclosed that the advantage of serving first is dependent on the number of points needed to win.
“In a game to 11, the first-serving team has a very slight disadvantage, whereas, in a game to 15, the first-serving team has a very slight advantage,” the researchers wrote. But these advantages are basically negligible.
“It should be noted that these advantages and disadvantages are so small that they cannot be detected by simulation and are revealed only by an analytical solution,” they continued. In other words, they practically don’t exist.
“The practical implication is that a team that is offered the choice of side or serve should probably choose side,” the mathematicians concluded.
The bigger take-a-way from all the math is that it acknowledges the beautifully engineered design of this game we love. By limiting the first serve to one player, the pickleball gods had stumbled into a magically neutral way to begin games and it has left us with nobody but ourselves to blame if we lose.