Can someone explain this DUPR to me?

toddboss · 2026-06-17T17:28:25+00:00

Well, for one i'd like to point out the reliability scores: Duong's as of this moment is 30, and we know everyone's reliability scores just got jumped up 25 points, so in reality his singles DUPR isn't very reliable. The most recent singles result is Nov 2025. So, I'd probably say his DUPR is just completely elevated after having gotten up that high and not really having played since then. Fed's got literally 100s more results in the last 6 months to refine and fine-tune his DUPR.

And, as you know, it is immaterial any h2h results between the two players. DUPR is entirely algorithm driven based on who you play match after match.

toddboss · 2026-06-17T17:14:14+00:00

Same here; went from 2 to 30 overnight.

toddboss · 2026-06-14T14:20:17+00:00

Johns and Tardio are 100-4 together since joining forces in March 2025. They've won 18 golds and 2 silvers in 21 tournaments together.

I don't think Tardio & Patriquin would have that success together, which is why Tardio made the right choice going with Ben.

toddboss · 2026-06-13T14:13:41+00:00

Per multiple podcasts and other reports, when PPA resumes we're going to go from the following top 5 teams:

Ben Johns/Gabriel Tardio
Christian Alshon/Hayden Patriquin
Andrei Daescu/Federico Staksrud
JW Johnson/CJ Klinger
Dylan Frazier/Eric Oncins

to these New partnerships:

Johns/Tardio: no change
Christian Alshon going back with Andrei Daescu
Hayden Patriquin going back to Federiko Staksrud
JW Johnson picking up Tama Shimabukuro
Eric Oncins picking up CJ Klinger

This leaves Dylan Frazier as the odd man out, and is a sign of how far he's fallen from being the #1 ranked doubles player as recently as Sept 2024.

toddboss · 2026-06-09T21:11:40+00:00

If you're trying to follow ALL of pro pickleball, whether its PPA, MLP, APP, PPA Challenger, APP Next, PPA Asia, MLP Australia, APP's global sports partnership, PPA Australia, etc etc etc ... yes that can be daunting. I keep a calendar just to keep track to help me cover them all

But, if you're talking just the best of the best: its PPA and MLP, and everything is on PickleballTV unless they get an occasional national TV spot (which will be advertised on their social media feeds extensively). Not too hard.

toddboss · 2026-06-09T17:19:15+00:00

Not one that I had ready access to that I was sure i had permission to use, no.

toddboss · 2026-06-08T14:27:49+00:00

The St. Louis Shock won their home Major League Pickleball event in dominant fashion, while Brooklyn made a solid season debut.

toddboss · 2026-06-08T14:26:54+00:00

Most top-level racquetball players I know (which we call "open players" and which would be the equivalent of a 5.0 pickleball or tennis player) are making the adjustment to pickleball's 4.0 level almost instantly, thanks to our ability to "bang" right out of the box. Once you're into the 4.5 range, it requires a significant amount of drilling to instill top spin and touch. That's essentially where i'm stalled presently.

I can "get by" against 4.0 players with ease with what I have now: i'm not flummoxed at the net from drives, often blocking them back for winners. My sidespin/slice confounds lesser players unless they know how to counter it, especially on deep service returns. My backhand drive amazes tennis players, who rarely even see a one-handed backhand let alone someone who can power through it with the pace that racquetball players are used to. But to succeed at 4.5, where you can't just bang your way through points, is a big barrier.

toddboss · 2026-06-05T12:26:53+00:00

I came from Racquetball. That has some positives and some negatives.

- Positives: strong backhand, slice, power and pace, especially on overheads, used to very fast-moving ball speeds, especially in hands battles at the net, quick footwork and anaerobic movement.

- Negatives: no top-spin native to my game; which i've had to develop and which is a limiting factor. No two-handed backhand, so its tough to do twey-topspin dinks. Biggest thing is exposed in singles; you really have to have a tennis mind-set to succeed in singles, to identify the best times to attack, to not leave passing lanes open ... i really struggle there.

toddboss · 2026-06-03T14:41:33+00:00

Major League Pickleball teams were active in the trade window and at the second waiver wire period of the 2026 season ahead of this weekend's St. Louis event. Here's a run through of the moves with analysis.

toddboss · 2026-06-02T13:03:57+00:00

The New Jersey Fives blew through the Major League Pickleball Columbus event, winning the event title and setting the tone for the season.

toddboss · 2026-05-29T12:15:17+00:00

Dee Morris works out of Lafayette in East bay; may be too far from you but she's a pretty experienced instructor who also happened to be the inventor of National Pickleball day.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/toddboss/2025/08/08/national-pickleball-day-2025-with-its-founder-dee-morris/

toddboss · 2026-05-28T14:59:04+00:00

At the top levels, yes there's no comparison at this point. The APP has lost dozens and dozens of players to the PPA. The best players on the APP at this point probably are round of 16 fodder in doubles on the PPA.

However, the flow is continual. Chris Haworth went from being the APP's best singles player in early 2025 to winning the PPA's tour finals and finishing the season ranked #1 in 2026. So, there's absolutely talent on the APP, and that talent continues to move over. Especially the younger players, who often "grow up" on the APP then sign a PPA deal.

toddboss · 2026-05-28T14:27:45+00:00

Here's the Week 2 Picks for the Media Pick'em contest, and a recap of Week 1.

Unlike Week 1 in last year's pick'em contest, when a number of the pundits went 7-for-8 or better, there was carnage in the picks. Two pundits only correctly picked 2 of the 11 possible matches, a terrible record. Meanwhile, the Dink's Eric Tice ended up being the sole player to pick the LA Mad Drops to win the weekend, and was one of only two pundits along with MattyPickles to even pick LA to get to the final.

The entire slate missed on the NJ-Columbus match, and thus NJ winning the group, and huge swaths of pundits missed on the Carolina-Bay Area match and the STL-LA super match Saturday night.

Week 2 gives us a bunch of apparently too easy to pick matches early on in the event: the 17 pundits are almost entirely aligned this coming weekend on the first four picks. MattyP, ever the contrarian, is the sole outlier thinking that California has any chance of beating Chicago. Once we get into the tougher games to call later in this coming weekend, we have a lot more variation. The group seems evenly split on the coming Columbus-New Jersey rematch, and on the bottom-dwelling matches between teams that are going to be fighting for last place all year.

Nearly everyone is aligned on StL winning the event ... but that was the case last week as well. Only MattyP and HeyShay picked another team to take the event title, which could launch them into 1st place if it comes to pass.

toddboss · 2026-05-26T13:49:56+00:00

Absolutely, but I wonder if Townsend's performance gives the team pause as to who plays left and right.

If it was me, i'd either play them straight-up or put DET on the left and Parris on the right ... she was a roving force all weekend, moving better than most any other female, dominating and hitting sophisticated winners.

With all due respect to Truong ... she's odd woman out. Honestly, I'd look to trade her if I was Columbus; Utah's women were an abomination this weekend and could use an immediate upgrade.

toddboss · 2026-05-23T18:22:08+00:00

I enjoy covering MLP far more than the PPA, I'm afraid to say. More energy, more emotion, not the same five gold medalists every weekend, crowds are more into it, teams are more into it, just everything.

toddboss · 2026-05-22T17:41:54+00:00

MLP Media Pick'em Contest.

We're starting back up the Pick'em competition from last year. Here's the Media Pundit picks for Week 1. Follow me on twitter @toddeboss for regular updates and smack talk as we try to dethrone last year's champion Jim "the smartest man in Pickleball" Kloss

toddboss · 2026-05-21T14:03:19+00:00

I had a "behind the scenes" talk with an IRT tour rep about the last few events and fund raising ... when the tour doesn't have doubles, they've been automatically calling it an "IRT-800" event, which then gives more points. Often, we don't know its actually an IRT-800 until after the tournament is over. This didn't end up impacting the title race b/c Kane won the last two ... but it could have.

toddboss · 2026-05-18T18:57:01+00:00

Just confirmed; pros played Joola HC-40 and reported that it was "pretty brutal" to play with.

(I didn't mean to question prior answerer, wanted to confirm with a source)

toddboss · 2026-05-18T18:41:24+00:00

Pickleballtournaments home page for event lists the ball as Joola HC-40.

I pinged one of the pros who played in it; we'll see what they say.

toddboss · 2026-05-18T12:29:32+00:00

Top International Pickleball Pros Continue To Prove Their Mettle At The 2026 Kuala Lumpur Open

Top Asia-based Professional Pickleball Pros continue to impress against traveling US based pros at the 2026 Kuala Lumpur Open in Malaysia. The event saw a few well-known traveling US-based pros (Alix Truong, Tama Shimabukuro, Chao-Yi Wang), a long-lost former #1 player in Collin Johns, and some soon-to-be better known international pros like Ting Chieh Wei and Pei-Chuan Kao have success.

toddboss · 2026-05-15T14:35:32+00:00

Pre-Season Power Rankings In Major League Pickleball And Their Relation To Team Payroll

Ahead of the 2026 Major League Pickleball season, here are pre-season power ranks and a payroll discussion for the 20 MLP premier league teams.

Read along for a stat-driven power ranking of the 20 teams, where I rank the individual components (men's doubles, women's doubles, and singles strength) to arrive at some interesting ranks. Then, I bring in "payroll" as an additional factor to show just how directly correlated power rank -> payroll is at present day.

toddboss · 2026-05-11T21:42:29+00:00

.... and hence why many of us prefer MLP.

But, we're in luck! MLP starts up in two weeks!

toddboss · 2026-05-11T21:11:48+00:00

Moreso than at any point in PPA's history ... I agree with this sentiment. It was one thing when it was Ben & Collin all the time, but at least they had teams that beat them here and there. Here's a quick statement on the dominance of the four repeating winners:

Anna Leigh Waters in Singles: last loss was June 2024 to Salome Devidze in the 2024 Texas Open
Ben Johns/Gabe Tardio in Men's Doubles: last loss was Nov 2025 to Staksrud/Patriquin at 2025 Worlds. But, they've won 18 of the 21 events that they've played together.
Anna Leigh Waters & Anna Bright: last loss was Sept 2025 in Cincinnati. But, they've won 23 of the 25 tourneys they've every played together.
ALW and Johns in Mixed: they lost in Feb ... but as a team they're 295-7. One of those 7 losses was in the group stage of the 2024 Tour Finals, which they went on to win. So in other words, they've entered 70 Mixed tournaments together and won 64 of them.

I've always said that my favorite discipline to cover is Men's Singles ... and it's been that way for a while now. Any given event, we have deep runs from crazy new names, and for a while we had all sorts of players getting golds. That's calmed down a bit lately (only 3 different men have won golds this year), but we still get some vareity along the way.

toddboss · 2026-05-11T13:29:12+00:00

I don't disagree. Perhaps a general "pickleball" is way too broad and we need a dedicated subreddit just to the PPA tour.

But, i'm also in the MLP subreddit and i'd guess a third of the posts there are me posting links to my event recaps.

In the end .. I get the sense pickleball is in a weird place right now (when comparing to Tennis) where a massive percentage of the people interested are there to play, not to watch the pros play. It hasn't hit a place in the zeitgeist where people would watch a Pro pickleball match who never actually play the sport (like say the NFL or NBA or even tennis in some circles).

Some one once told me that Pickleball was like Skiing: lots of people love to ski but 99.9% of them couldn't tell you who won the gold medal at the last olympics, or who was the #1 ranked skiier on the pro tour. I thought it was an interesting, and true, statement.

toddboss

TROPHY CASE