The Best Sport to Ice Someone Out

Anyone who has spent enough time playing doubles in racquet sports eventually learns an unspoken rule: if you want to win, you stop hitting to the better player.

It isn’t glamorous. It isn’t something people admit out loud. But it works. Over the past twenty years, I’ve played just about every version of doubles you can imagine — tennis, padel, pickleball, platform tennis — across pro-ams, leagues, tournaments, and plenty of matches where the talent divide within each team was obvious before warm-up ended.

When the level gap between partners is wide enough, the match becomes a slow, steady exercise in directing the ball to the weaker opponent and seeing how long they can hold up. It is not personal. It is simply the most reliable path to winning in a competitive setting. The stronger player waits for their chance to participate, and that chance can come quickly or not at all.

Some courts offer the stronger player clear ways to stay in the match. Others leave them waiting. After two decades across the racquet sports I play most often, here’s how they line up in terms of how difficult it is to ice someone out.

#4: Pickleball — the hardest sport to keep the better player out

Icing happens in pickleball, but it is hard to sustain. The court is small enough that a strong player can insert themselves into almost any rally. Mixed doubles is the clearest example. The stronger player often moves well beyond “their” side of the court because the dimensions allow it. Tennis mixed doubles looks balanced in comparison. In pickleball, the stronger player can take far more space without putting themselves completely out of position.

When a team does try to ice someone out, the pattern is predictable. Most of the traffic goes to the weaker player in the form of dinks or speed-ups. The problem is that the stronger player is still close enough to poach whenever a ball sits up. Even if they are not trying to take over every point, they naturally see more balls simply because of where they stand and how quickly they can shift into the middle.

In tennis, taking a ball in front of your partner and not finishing the point leaves you stranded on the wrong side of the court. In pickleball, you can often still recover back to your side.

The weaker partner’s job is mostly survival. If the weaker partner can simply keep the ball in play, the stronger player usually gets chances to step in. The sport rarely isolates the better player for more than a few shots.

This is why icing in pickleball has limits. You can send most balls to the weaker player, but trying to play to 20% of the court for an entire game is quite difficult. The margins get thin, and the better player keeps on creeping over.

Pickleball allows icing, but it almost never removes the stronger player from the match.

#3: Tennis — where power keeps the stronger player in the match

Tennis sits on the opposite end of the spectrum of small-court racquet sports. The court is big enough that you would think icing someone out would be straightforward, but tennis has one feature that changes everything: power. No other racquet sport gives the stronger player so many ways to influence a point the moment the ball touches their strings.

The serve alone tilts the match. Even among top players, breaking serve is rare, and that is because a well-struck serve is simply hard to handle. At the club level, the gap is even wider. A strong player can hold serve almost on command, and the other team has little ability to avoid that. This is totally different from padel or pickleball, where you have underhand serves, or like platform where there is a wall behind the service box that prevents aces. Tennis has none of those constraints.

The return has a similar effect. The stronger player sees half of them, and if they choose to attack, they can step in, hit big, and follow the ball to the net. There are no walls slowing the ball down, and a firm volley is often enough to finish the point.

The weaker partner, on the other hand, does not have many safe shots. Tennis points are short, and anything left in the middle can be taken advantage of immediately. But this same volatility is what helps the stronger player break through when they need to. If they get a racquet on the ball, they can take control of the rally.

This is why matches with uneven teams in tennis often produce relatively balanced scorelines. The strong player will hold serve almost every time, and they will take enough return games to keep the match close. Icing will, of course, influence the match, but the sport gives the stronger player too many ways to reassert themselves back in.

#2: Platform Tennis — the patient ice out

Platform tennis is where icing becomes more effective. The court is small enough for a stronger player to cover space, but the walls neutralize offense and make finishing points extremely difficult.

Unlike padel, you lose the point if you hit the overhead out of the court or if it bounces back to your side. This completely changes how and when overheads are hit, and makes “offensive” play more tactical than powerful.

In terms of hitting winners, the cutter exists, but it depends on a truly bad lob and most beginner and intermediate players lack the skills to hit it. Hitting your opponent is another way to end a point, but it is hard to execute, and a miss comes off the back screen with pace and hands the other team an easy chance to take control.

Because clean finishes are so tough, points can last a long time. There was a rally at Short Hills last season that ran over ten minutes. When the game is significantly slowed down, a weaker partner is more likely to survive by simply keeping the ball in the court. They might not help the stronger player win the point outright, but they can buy time for the rally to reset.

This is what separates platform from tennis and pickleball. In those sports, the stronger player can change a point quickly with a serve, a return, or an aggressive move at the net. In platform, no one (minus the top pros) can force offense on command.

Icing works, but it does not shut the stronger player out completely. Padel is the sport where that last piece changes.

#1: Padel — the sport that exposes partner imbalance the most

Padel stands alone. It is the toughest sport for a stronger player paired with someone clearly weaker, and the most effective for icing someone out. The irony becomes clear only after you’ve played platform. Platform rallies stay neutral because no one can finish a point outright. Padel feels similar at first, but the difference is that padel gives you just enough offense to punish weak balls.

It’s the perfect storm for icing: the walls prolong rallies, but the sport doesn’t eliminate winners. If the weaker partner hits a poor lob, an out-of-the-court finish is available. And that small window changes everything.

Once a disciplined team sends every ball to the weaker player, the stronger player on that side almost never gets the few shots they need to set up their own winner. They’re not losing because they can’t end points. They’re losing because the even-strength team eventually gets a perfect ball from the weaker partner and ends the point themselves.

This is what makes padel more unforgiving than tennis, pickleball, or even platform. In tennis and pickleball, the stronger player can still take over the point the moment they touch the ball. In platform, no one can take over and hit winners. But padel sits in the middle, with long rallies that expose the weaker player and just enough offense to punish every short lob or soft drive.

When two evenly matched players face a strong–weak pairing, the stronger player ends up watching long rallies they can’t enter and decisive points they never get to shape. The structure of the sport pushes them to the margins.

If your goal is to beat a stronger individual player, padel makes it possible. The sport gives you the patience of platform with the finishing potential of tennis, and that combination makes icing someone out far easier than in anything else on this list.

Closing thoughts

I swear I didn’t write this because I had a bad loss in padel recently, where I thought I was the better player (important disclaimer in case my partner reads this). Also, this goes without saying, but this only really applies when the match matters. If you do this in a practice match, you’re just making the match less fun for everyone out there!