Paul,
get your practice and foosball life started off the right way...build good habits that will give you the biggest and best impacts short and long term
1. Practice ball control more than anything else...many reasons, see Practice, Repetition is the more of genius for much more detail
2. Start every day's practice with at least 20 minutes of 5 man control practice...in the end, five man wins games more often than any other rod
3. Pick a pull or a rollover and stick with it...tick tack stuff is fun and maybe easier in some ways in the beginning but it is MUCH less effective...nice as options where you throw one in maybe 1 out of every 10 to 20 shots. It takes a very long time to teach your body the strokes needed to be really sucessful and to face enough different defenses with that shot to know how to adjust and what to do under certain circumstances. Out of the Top 100 US tournament players there is maybe 1 player who shoots something other than a Pull or a Rollover (Chris Dube shoots a pull kick and this is a leftover from many years ago when the table was different than today) but no great player has ever used a tick tac shooting style as their primary (or secondary for that matter) shot in competition. There is much more that could be said about this but for now, trust us on this stuff.
4. Learn now, the game is not primarily a game of speed, it is a game of strategy and nerve. It is natural to be wowed by the speed and see the game as a man to man sort of race offense verses defense. Now speed is good and certainly can't hurt but speed can be nuetralized through strategy and nerve.
It is easiest to see it from a defenders point of view to start with but it can infor your offensive approach too. As a defender most people jump when the shooter shoots but right now in the beginning you want to fight this natural reaction. It is your job as a defender to get into the shooters head and make them have to think and worry if possible about where and when your men will be in one place or another. If you can accomplish this, you are already winning the battle because once the other player begins to think about anything other than what he wants, their stroke, timing, and choices are impacted.
You want to see the goal in the beginning as 3 parts evenly divided. Your 2 men can be in 2 out of those 3 holes when the person begins to shoot. Even if you get scored on a lot in the beginning, practice being where YOU want to be when the shooter starts and make yourself mentally tough and not move when they go to shoot. I don't mean stand dead still the hole time. I mean move your men in and out of those 3 positions in as random and irregular a fashion as possible so that you are where you want to be when the shot begins (and ends). This is VERY VERY hard to do, even for the most experienced players. This is what I mean by "nerve". What I mean by "strategy" is the random movement of your men and your plan to get into the shooters head.
Last thing I will say about this. Study the people you play and when building your "strategy" start with understanding what shot/hole the person favors. For the pull shooter on all but the lowest levels and a rare exception here or there, the favored shot is the Long hole (you know what this means right?). With the rollover it is either the long pull side of the long push side and a small % of people may favor straight but I'm talking even then of maybe 5%. Higher than a pull shooter favoring the straight but still a small %.
Usually these people will shoot that hole 80% or higher of the time. With this in mind, as a defender you want to ensure you take this hole away and make them shoot other options which they will not be as comfortable with or as good at shooting. They will try early to make you think otherwise to stop you from taking the long away but you have to stick with the plan playing the odds. So, even though you are going to move your men randomly, and this means spending different amounts of time with your 2 goalie men in one of the 3 parts of the goal I mentioned earlier - you want to spend more time in the hole you want to take away than you spend out of it.
Offensviely the reverse of all this is true. You need to devleop your long stroke to build the rest of your shot around because if you are not a threat long, the goalie can make the goal smaller in defending it. BUT you want to develop the many other options as well and not be afraid to shoot them at any time. I summarize this idea with this saying "Favor No Hole" ...yes, yes, its suggestive too, ha, ha...but get the simple truth of this...it is very hard to do even for the best players in the world.
Start with a solid foundation and your game will progress faster and it will bring you more pleasure because of it.
okay, there is tons more but there are my two cents at the beginning.
charles
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