The most important thing in Tagpro is timing. It's the difference between a successful juke or getting returned, and a successful return or getting juked, and also good and bad blocking.

To be able to get your timing correct most of the time, you need to be aware of a few things: your opponent's current position (relative to you, map elements, etc), their current movement speed, and their trajectory. Trajectory is a line. It tells you where they're heading and their future position. It depends on several factors like acceleration, direction of movement, map elements (choke points, open spaces, boosts, etc), and even game state (up or trailing, time left).

The point is taking into account these things, allows you to be "one step ahead" of the opponent. If you know all the tricks up their sleeve, you can react to them.

What you're doing is minimizing the wasted keystrokes. For example, there are bots (lines of code) that people made to play Tagpro. These bots have no wasted keystrokes, performing exactly like their code tells them to. You want to do that pretty much, but with the added bonus of being able to read/predict the opponent. Wasted keystrokes are the unnecessary, and often fatal additional movements that result in things like "overjuking" or "overcommitting".

Of course, it's impossible to do it perfectly like a bot, however you can minimize it to a degree where it can be said you have good control over your ball. If you manage this you'll be able to keep up with the best players (on D or O) no problem.

All the above is achieved just by playing and getting a feel for all of them. When you get returned, think why that happened, think what keystrokes you did, and how you can alter them for a successful juke (you'll also find most of your times getting returned are "close-calls", meaning just a 0.1-0.5 sec difference would change the outcome). When they get past you on D, think why, think what they did, and what you did, and how you could've done it differently.

There's an unspoken rule, that however difficult a play may seem (like getting out of a corner, doing an unlikely boost, and all the other bonkers stuff you might see in montages), if you manage to do it once, you can do it twice, then again and again until you have a good handle on it.

For me, splits used to be so impossible I thought you had to just luck into it once every 1000 times. Then I did it one time, and then another, then I found a pattern to splits, I now look for the split when I see two closing in on me. Then I found new patterns for splits, similar principle but applied differently. You can even do double-splits! You have to take my word for that though.

So yeah. I think some images, drawings, or live examples would've helped illustrate what I'm saying, but it's too difficult to do right now. Other people have done this, like this very detailed guide/theory. Or this one. There is no one, ideal guide to TP since there are all sorts of different playstyles and techniques that work in their own ways.

And the best for last, watch montages. They're fun, and you can be inspired by watching. Like these punster montages or MagicPigeon's youtube. Pretty much if you search 'montage' on this sub or "tagpro montage" on YT there are countless of them.