The importance of being a good liar

I’ve been working on many different aspects of my squash game lately, and it’s starting to come together well. I’m not putting any expectations on myself to win any tournaments, but I definitely feel like I have a shot if I continue to play well, and I think I’ll be ready to move up into the next division (A’s) by the end of the squash season this year.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately, and which I think is a valuable skill to have, is good deception. Squash, at its core, can be reduced to two parts. There’s a physical component (anyone that has stepped on a squash court for a game without ever having played before can confirm that the horrible things that the game does to your ass alone are enough to prove this point), and a mental component. I’ll delve into these two ideas first.

Physical

Squash is played in a very confined space, but playing the game well is about making your opponent cover as much of that space as possible. As you continue to improve at the game, you get better at anticipating, and better at covering more and more shots, and this means that you have to learn more patience and be willing to rally longer. The longer you rally while controlling the T, the better your chances of winning the battle of attrition against your opponent become.

Some people may read this and immediately disagree – what about winners? What about errors that your opponents hit? Well, guess how you get to the point where you’re able to hit a winner, or force your opponent to make errors? That’s right – you keep them under consistent pressure, and let them either hit the error themselves, or hit a loose or weak return from one of your shots that you can then attack. Rallying and patience is what gets you to this point.

I actually just finished reading a Magic-related strategy article that I felt really applied to this scenario, describing the process of knowing when to apply pressure to your opponent, and when to regroup and play defensive and patiently waiting for a more opportune time to attack. Squash is the same way. You need to play safe shots until you achieve an opportunity to attack, and then consistently apply pressure to your opponent until they either hit an error, allow you to hit a winner, or they can get back into a rally (in which case you go back to playing safe shots and repeat this process).

Mental

Again, as squash is played in a very confined space, you need to constantly be looking for ways to move your opponent around that space as much as possible. If you wanted to take a very technical approach to the game, you could look at each shot you make as a way of maximizing the amount of running that your opponent has to do. If you can consistently apply this rule to each shot you make, you will no doubt have played the best game you possibly could have, and your opponent will have to follow the same rule themselves in order to defeat you.

As I mentioned above, the farther along you move, the more difficult it will be to simply hit winners, and the physical game will no longer be enough to win you a game. I was reading an article that my friend Rob sent to me in which Jonathan Power had written about the fact that the more you improved, the more you have to start thinking multiple plays ahead. If your opponent can start to read your pattern, they can start to cheat and anticipate your shots, and now you’re no longer maximizing the distance they need to run. Actually, if we get really technical, we want to maximize the amount of energy that our opponent has to expend – running in a straight line towards the ball forces them to generate some momentum and use up some energy. Better than that, moving in one direction, then stopping and changing that direction requires even more momentum and thus requires even more energy (simple right?).

In essence, you now need to not only make your opponent physically cover the most amount of ground, but also to cover the most number of shots mentally – by preventing your opponent from eliminating any one particular shot as something he might have to cover, you tax him more mentally, and cut down his ability to reduce the distance that he needs to run. Anticipation is one way of reducing the amount of space you have to cover, because you can use it to control the T and cheat over towards the direction your opponent will shoot – the more you cheat, the less you have to run. Clearly there is a connection between the physical and mental aspects of the game, and part of this connection, to me, is deception.

Deception

Alright, we’re finally getting to the point. So, we’ve reached a point where our opponents are getting better and better at anticipating the shots that we are making. We are no longer maximizing the amount of running that our opponents are doing, and so we need a way to tax them more.

By presenting the opponent with one shot, then hitting another, we have achieved one of two outcomes:

• Best-case scenario – they start to cheat towards the shot that you are presenting, and are forced to overcome that momentum, change direction, and chase after the shot you’ve made.
• Worst-case scenario – they are forced to remain stationary until the last moment possible: when you hit your shot. I call this the worst case scenario, but that’s a misleading name, because there’s nothing bad at all about this. By delaying our shot and forcing our opponent to wait until the last minute, you have forced them to generate overcome their inertia. They have to come to rest on the T, then need to generate more momentum to begin moving again once you’ve made the shot. It’s a lot easier to run straight from the back forehand corner to the front backhand corner, than it is to run from the same corner to the T, stop, then from the T to the front corner.

You can see that there is clearly value to playing with good deception. This is all very new to me (there’s no point in studying good deception if you aren’t able to hit a good shot – you may be able to send your opponent in the wrong direction once or twice, but after he starts to wait a little longer for your shot, he’ll just cover the bad shot and put you away) so take what I’m saying with a grain of salt. These are the techniques that I have noticed contribute towards good direction.

• Body/Head/Racquet positioning and posture

Think about what you look for when you see you’re waiting for your opponent’s next shot: The way they prepare their racquet, the way they have their body positioned, and the direction they look after they make their shot. There’s probably more, but these are the main ones I observe.

So we’ve got three things straight off the bat that will help us out. By presenting our body posture in a certain way, we can lead the opponent towards believing that we’re going to hit a certain shot. Think about a boast in the back corner. Typically you position yourself with your shoulders facing towards the corner, allowing you to swing your racquet at 45 degrees towards the wall, boasting into the front backhand corner. If you have the space and time, you can approach and set up your shot this way, but instead of hitting a boast, use your wrist to pull the racquet head through earlier than normal and hit the shot straight down the line.

This trick doesn’t always work, but it is important to remember that our goal is not to trick our opponent and win a point. It is to make them cover the maximum amount of distance and momentum for any given shot – remember that point whenever you apply deception to your shots and then think “Oh, that didn’t work, he covered the shot”.

• Shorten your swing

I came across this one serendipitously (one of my favorite words right there. Go out and use it today!). I was taking a lesson with Stu, Jeremy and Tim, and Stu told me to focus on making my swing more compact, and using my wrist more to snap the racquet through. Think about the difference in swings for a drop shot and a drive. How about a hard, low crosscourt, and a lob? You not only want to provide the same body posture for all of these shots (and thereby increasing your deception), but you also want to be able to lead up to the shot using the same racquet approach.

The shorter and more compact you can make your swing, the more you closer you come to bridging the gap between the swing you prepare for your drop shots and for your drives, and the more difficult it will be for your opponent to get a read on you.

• Build your rallies and earn your deception

Anyone that has played squash before knows the importance of building a rally. We all go back to play the straight drive down the wall and treat that like our foundation. This is exactly analogous to dancing – I have a basic set of movements that I use as my dancing foundation, and I can slip into and out of these movements easily. They provide the palette from which I draw the rest of my dance on. The same is true for squash – you should have a good foundation made up of drives, which you can move in and out of as needed. When you’re in trouble, you return to this foundation until you can once again regain control of the T and start a new round of attacking.

Deception in squash is the same as it is in poker. You need to present a pattern to your opponent before you can start to throw them off by deviating from that pattern. If you go in and use deception on every shot that you make, you’re going to train your opponent to watch very closely for your shots, and wait until the last minute before they move to cover whatever you hit. As I said, this isn’t a bad thing, but remember, we want to maximize the amount of energy our opponents expend on court, so we want to aim for as many of those best-case scenarios as possible.

In order to accomplish this, you need to draw your opponent into following the pattern of your foundation, and then applying deception to force them off the pattern they’ve gotten accustomed to. This has the added benefit of forcing your opponent off their mental game. If you can settle into a pattern, you aren’t forced to think about the game as much, and can play a little more naturally. Causing your opponent to think along a certain pattern, then throwing off that pattern can be jarring, and will tax them mentally.

One last thing that Stu has mentioned to me many times in past – sometimes the best deception is the most obvious shot. If you’ve established the fear in your opponent of your deception, they will start to suspect the more obvious shots, and watch closely to what you are preparing when you are making a return. Delay your shot when it is appropriate, and then hit the safest shot.

You have to remember – you are always trying to maximize the energy your opponent uses, but this doesn’t mean deceiving them every time and it doesn’t mean necessarily hitting the ball to the place on the court that is the furthest away from them. Think of it this way: If your opponent has hit a really tight shot to the back corner and is now cheating very far back and to the side to cover your return, it may seem obvious that you could force them to cover the most court by dropping the ball in the front backhand corner, but this will not be the case if you hit tin, or hit the shot loose.

At every shot you make, there is a best choice that you can make that combines the following principles (and probably plenty more that I’ve missed): Maximize the amount of energy your opponent spends covering your shot, minimize the amount of energy your opponent can force you to spend covering their return (so hit tight shots that cut off their available angles), and minimize the number of errors you hit and winners your opponent hits (again, hit high-percentage shots that keep your opponent under pressure).

That’s the end of my lunch break, so that’s the end of this entry. In any case, I’m excited to pursue this further on the court and continue to add towards this aspect of my game. For good examples of deception in action, go on YouTube and search for videos of Jonathan Power – my friend Dan pointed out to me how compact his swing is, and if you watch, his approach to the ball is often very calculated. Try and guess what shot he is going to hit before he actually makes it and see how close you are. If you were wrong, how were you tricked? If you were right, what factors contributed towards you guessing that was the next shot? Once you’ve done this, come back here and tell me all about it, because I’m way too lazy to do that myself.