Authored by Tony Roig for The Kitchen Community Newsletter

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you already know about stacking in pickleball — when you and your partner decide the strongest formation for your team, then get into that formation every rally, regardless of the score.

The core concept of stacking is to give your team the highest chance of success on every point.

But is there more to stacking than just you on the left and me on the right every single rally? The answer is an emphatic “yes,” and I’ll explain why below.

Static stacking

“Static” stacking means stacking without further thought to the team’s formation. Once the decision to stack is made, the team’s court position is never re-evaluated to see whether better formations can address what’s happening on court.

Static stacking robs you and your team of the full potential of stacking. Static stacking can also lead to situations where the stack decreases your team’s chances for success.

When unwinding the stack hurts the team 

Let’s say you and your partner are on the return side. You put the open hand behind you, indicating a switch. The return is hit, and your partner moves across the court to fill the space you’re vacating.

Then boom — your opponents, who are savvy to the ways of attacking the stack unwind, drive the third shot into the open court. Your partner volleys a difficult ball from around shin height as they move up, but they cannot fully control the shot.

Your opponents move forward and finish off the point. Happens all the time at higher levels of play in the stack unwind. Even the pros suffer here. Watch any match featuring a heavy ball striker on an aggressive team when their opponents are trying to unwind the stack.

It’s like blood in the water for a shark. A few teams will eventually go to a stay signal and not unwind the stack (dynamic stacking), but most stubbornly keep switching. They lose point after point, putting their team in a worse position because of the stack unwind.

This unwillingness to adjust the stack in the face of court conditions is static stacking.

“We agreed to play in only one formation the whole game. So we must unwind the stack even when our opponents are pummeling us.”

In these situations, the stack, which is designed to make your team stronger, has the opposite effect and weakens your team.

Making micro stack adjustments

Static stacking also robs you of micro-strategic adjustments that could improve your chances. To understand how this works, we must start with the understanding that every decision we make on the court is driven by the percentage chance of success.

The premise of stacking is that your team’s percentage chance of success is higher when you stack than when you play positionally according to the score. The improved chance of success from stacking will almost always exist at the game level (the macro perspective).

But what about at the rally level (the micro perspective)? Here is where things get more interesting. The stack unwind we went over above is one example of how choosing not to stack reduces the risk of attack.

That would be a rally-specific adjustment that looks like this – and we are going super micro with it to demonstrate: Christian Alshon is serving. He’s been serving big all game. The wind is blowing straight into the returner. The returner has been struggling with their returns all game.

Should the return team unwind the stack here? The answer is almost certainly no. Not unwinding here would be a micro adjustment within the macro plan of stacking during the game.

And perhaps, when they return serve from the other end of the court, and Christian’s partner is serving, they can go back to the stack unwind. But not this rally.

This kind of thought process lets you make micro-adjustments within your overall stacking strategy to increase your chances of success.

Dynamic stacking in practice

Above, we used dynamic stacking to avoid a potential downside. By deciding NOT to use the stack in the case of the return unwind, we decreased the odds of being put under early pressure.

But you can go further with dynamic stacking; you can use the stack proactively to get you into a better, if unorthodox, formation: Say you prefer being diagonal from Player A. But your opponents are playing score position (not stacking). This means Player A is sometimes diagonal from you and sometimes straight across.

Give it a thought here for a moment: What if you could always be diagonal from Player A? Well, you can. Say you’ve been in your preferred stack formation for the past three serve rotations with zero points scored. What if you switched things up this next serve and came out of the stack?

Mixing it up sometimes can break things loose. During a Senior Pro Mixed Doubles Finals match at the U.S. Open a few years back, the players on the court used dynamic stacking to its fullest. By the end of the match, they were playing in completely opposite formations from how they started, each responding to the other’s stack move. That’s the level at which you can learn to stack.

During our October 15th Stacking Lab, I'll go deep into using dynamic stacking offensively, including personal stories of using this approach successfully for years in tournament play. I will be teaching the most advanced stack strategies available.

Words on a page do not do justice to the strategy. Seeing it unfold on the big board allows the strategy to come together. If you’re into the stack, there’s no better training. Click here to register.

I hope to see you there.

Coach Tony

Tony Roig is a nationally recognized coach, senior pro player, and developer of "Respect the X," among other widely used doubles strategies. He is the voice behind the weekly Pickleball Therapy podcast. To learn more about Tony and his coaching, visit TonyRoigPickleball.com, where you can access four free mini-courses. For on-demand lessons and structured training, visit YourPickleball.coach.

Written by human hands for human minds. No AI used (unless you count Spell Check ☺).