How to Hold Your Dinks in Pickleball: Control, Deception, and Smarter Speedups

Main Points

• Holding your dinks is about early preparation, not fancy paddle work
• Best used on dead balls, especially out of the middle on the left side
• Early paddle positioning forces opponents to guess, creating mistakes
• Holding allows you to disguise dinks, speedups, and lobs from the same setup
• Aggressive dinks should land on or just behind the kitchen line
• Changing location is more important than hitting harder
• Use test balls to read opponent positioning before speeding up
• Speedups work best when opponents are reaching or leaning forward
• Crosscourt holds pair well with inside-out dinks and middle speedups
• Wrist-driven, windshield-wiper speedups add topspin and control
• This skill is becoming essential for competitive pickleball heading into 2026

---

---

Summary

This video breaks down one of the most important higher-level pickleball skills: holding your dinks. While many players think this concept is about deceptive paddle motion, the real advantage comes from early preparation. By setting your paddle early and waiting for the ball, you force opponents into guessing mode. That hesitation is what creates openings, late reactions, and off-balance replies.

Holding your dinks is especially effective on dead balls, particularly those that arrive through the middle. These situations give you time to prepare and keep your paddle in a neutral position, making it difficult for opponents to read whether you’re going to dink, speed up, or change direction. When done correctly, even simple location changes can cause big problems without requiring elite-level touch or power.

The video also emphasizes pairing held dinks with intelligent aggression. Aggressive dinks should land on or just behind the kitchen line, otherwise the advantage is lost. From there, players can observe how opponents respond. A couple of softer “test balls” reveal whether an opponent is waiting back or reaching forward. If they reach, that’s the green light to hold the same motion and attack with a controlled speedup.

Crosscourt dinking adds another layer. Holding the ball allows for effective inside-out dinks that pull opponents off balance, setting up speedups through the middle when they lean or overcommit. This pattern is commonly used at the highest level, including by players like Ben Johns, but the video stresses that recreational players don’t need pro-level execution for this to work.

The key takeaway is that holding your dinks is about patience, preparation, and reading positioning. Even adding this skill in a limited way on dead balls can significantly elevate your soft game. As pickleball continues to evolve, this type of controlled deception is becoming a core skill players will need to stay competitive in 2026 and beyond.

---

---

Tags: Dink | Richard PIckleball | Strategy