Think about what your opponent is thinking
They have brains too
I recently read Travis Norsen's Play With Your Brain, and highlighted the following line because it was so simple but spoke to so much about strategic thinking:
The other team also probably understands the points we discussed back in Chapter 3.
I think this is actually one of the most important lessons for a player trying to learn to play with their brain. Perhaps I didn't fully realize I held that opinion until I read that quote and realized that every lesson in the book could be presented in the light of this logic.
We should never just say "[X] is a good plan". Any plan that will actually work has to be of the form "[X] is a good plan, because even if the defense tries [A or B], we'll still be able to do [Y and Z]". And the defense's plans (that "[A or B]") are going to be actually good countermeasures against our original plan. We'll discuss some specific examples below.
I don't mean to imply this is an idea that no one has thought about before. I'm sure there's some quote from The Art of War I could pull to show you that this knowledge has been around for 2500+ years. But I've never actually read The Art of War, so I'm not going to do that. But I do think that thinking about what your opponent is thinking is an important mental module, both for your game (as a player) and for your game planning (as a coach).
The same idea is popular in chess. It's easy to make a plan on the chessboard...I'll go here, and then here, and then I'll go here. It's much harder to make a plan that actually survives your opponent's response:
...many people, not just kids but even masters or grandmasters, sometimes forget about their opponent...as soon as you realize that thinking about your opponent's ideas, and not just your own, will double your chess ability — then you're on a good path! [edited slightly]
I'm sure I could find examples of how this is important of every other game in existence, as well. So the next question is: what are some strategies that will work for us, even when we know our opponent is trying their hardest to stop us? Here are a few ideas:
Speed
I don't mean running speed (being more athletic than your opponents is certainly a robust way to succeed even when they're trying to stop you. And I encourage you to pursue that advantage. But I'll focus on the mental game in this article). I mean processing speed. Decision-making speed.
I've previously linked a video of LeBron James's "High IQ" plays when discussing the mental side of sports. Here's another video I enjoyed of some of his best passes. Feel free to watch as much or as little of it as you'd like:
Watching that video in the context of thinking about this article, I realized that a huge number of the passes in that video consisted of LeBron just purely being able to process and make a decision faster than the defense could react. (For example, watch the pass starting at 1:05).
And these passes are not always particularly accurate. (Though certainly some other clips in the video highlight his pinpoint accuracy.) LeBron understands that if he acts while the defense is out of position, he doesn't need perfect accuracy. "Accurate enough, but quick" is often better than "very, very accurate, but slow".
And that, perhaps, highlights another factor in understanding that your opponent also has a brain. You shouldn't just choose the style that you're the best at, or that you're the most comfortable with. The best style is one that's the most effective after accounting for how well the defense can guard against it. A style that make you uncomfortable may actually be your best choice once you understand that it makes the defense even more uncomfortable.
Returning to Play With Your Brain, Chapter 6 is simply titled "Faster!". (And fittingly for what I was just discussing, he leads off the chapter with a quote that includes the phrase "...the easiest way is often the hardest...."). The theme of "Faster!" is exactly what I've pointed out above: speed makes it harder for the defense to stay in the best positions. Here's how he puts it:
You see, the defense is trying to prevent your team from scoring. At any given moment, the guy with the ball is the most immediate threat, and so the defense arranges itself to guard against that threat...After these defensive rearrangements (which take only a second or two), the thing (namely the guy with the ball) that was the most immediate threat is now the least threatening thing!
As both a coach and a player, I always find it extremely frustrating when a player on my team receives the ball in what could be a threatening position, and then just holds it for one ... two ... three ... four seconds – ... Finally, after this excruciating delay, he tries to dribble forward to create a scoring opportunity. But by then it is simply too late. The defenders have already shifted into good positions to eliminate this threat.
But if the team with the ball passes it around more quickly than the defense can react – if nobody holds onto it for those pointless and excruciating two ... three ... four seconds – then the defenders have a tough time of it. They are constantly trying to get into good positions, but never quite managing to get there before they have to react again in a different direction. The result is that gaps open up, players get forgotten about in the chaos and left unmarked, and the team with the ball can find much easier, much higher- percentage chances to score goals.
The logic can't be applied directly to frisbee—since in frisbee the person with the disc can't score. But the overall lesson translates nicely: opportunities arise when the offense decides faster than the defense reacts.
Deny your opponent the information they need
A second technique that's robust even when the defense is trying their hardest is making it as hard as possible for them to know what to do. Here's how I think about it:
The defense wants to stop you. In order to do that, they are going to try to figure out what your plans are. The way they figure it out is by looking (and listening, and perhaps sometimes feeling) for clues. If you have the disc, they might look at your eyes to see where you're intending to throw. If you're a cutter, your eyes might tell the defender which space you're about to cut into.
Keeping the defense from obtaining this information has been a consistent theme of my blog since I started writing about frisbee a little over a year ago. For example:
Make it hard for the defense to know who you want to throw to by not staring nonstop at your intended target. (On defense, you can do a reverse "looking off the defense", by pretending that you haven't noticed where the thrower wants to throw it.)
Feign boredom so the defender doesn't know you're about to cut
Get into positions where the person guarding you is deprived of opportunities to see the whole field.
Pretend to call for the disc to draw the defense towards a dis-advantageous position.
These and other techniques can keep the opponent from knowing what you know. I think the one I use the most often is looking off the defense as a thrower. I pretend to be interested in the break side so the mark gives me a bit more space to get off a throw to the open side.
Or, when I'm ready to throw a dump, I don't turn and then wait for the dump handler to get open. I pivot directly into a dump throw, and only pull out of the throw if necessary. Because the dump defender thinks I'm still looking downfield, my receiver is often open without needing to work. But if I make it obvious I want to throw a dump, the defender in the dump space will see that and play harder defense in response. (Dump situations could also be an example of game planning, which I discuss in the next section below. If you teach your players to look downfield until stall 5, and then look for the dump, the defense will pick up on that and make it hard for them.)
As with the section on Speed, there's a trade-off using these techniques. We make it slightly harder on ourselves (it would be easier to just stare down my intended target the whole time) in order to make it a lot harder on our opponents (if I did stare down my intended target the whole time, the defense would react by committing more attention to those areas).
Game planning
Lots of frisbee teams, even sometimes at the highest levels, still strategize in ways that don't account for what the opponent will do. Here are a few common examples:
Immediately after a turnover, we'll often see players from the team that is now on offense encouraging their teammates to slow down and take their time setting up. But of course, when the offense takes their time, they're also giving the defense time to get set up. Defenses are the most confused with things are in flux, and the transition from being on offense to being on defense is the biggest flux that a defense has to deal with.
Again, we can't just ask "what makes our offense comfortable?". We have to ask "what makes our offense most effective, after accounting for our relative strengths and weaknesses in relation to the defense?" Surely there are a few teams that do actually benefit from patience after a turnover. But far too many teams take their time, seemingly ignorant of the fact that they're squandering an opportunity and giving the defense the time they desperately need to set up.
(I also believe there's far too much importance placed on having a handler pick up the disc after a turnover. Again, we have to consider the trade-offs: would you rather have a better throwing facing a well-prepared defense, or a slightly worse thrower against an unprepared defense? Not enough teams choose the second option.)
A second huge example is the vertical stack. The level-one logic in favor of the vertical stack is that by putting the players close together, we create clean, open spaces on the open side and break side. You can see here or here for examples of this type of thinking. These comments were intended for beginners, so it's understandable that they didn't go into higher levels of strategic detail, but anyone who takes frisbee seriously should understand that the defense knows you want to create space and will make that hard for you to do.
The r/ultimate subreddit generally seems a bit annoyed with Hive Ultimate, but Felix is absolutely right that the best way to counter a vertical stack (or side stack) is to have defenders sag into the open spaces. Unthreatening players should not be defended tightly (a subject I've written about before). Frisbee defensive strategy is still in its dark ages, but are we seeing some teams effectively employ strategies like this. A couple examples that come to mind are UMass in the 2023 college national championship game (watch here), or Belgium in the 2023 WFDF U24 world championships. This example was pointed out by Felix himself, watch the video here:
A vertical stack needs to be ready for a poach-y defense.
One last note on game planning: there's always the possibility to get lost in a spiral of recursive thinking: "I know that they know that I know that...". It's not uncommon to see sports strategy referred to as a 'cat-and-mouse game' or a 'chess match'. We don't need to go too deep, but as I said in the intro, we should at least have one backup plan ready when the opponent responds to our strategy in the most obvious way. We should know what we'll do in a vertical stack when the defense plays poach-y. We should know how to respond as defenders when the offense plays with speed.
Final thoughts
One important implication of understanding that our opponents will try to stop us is that we should practice techniques that will work in the face of defensive adversity. As Travis Norsen points out in Play With Your Brain, the skills you need are a combination of mental (comfort scanning the field quickly, etc) and physical (comfort with the footwork of pivoting incredibly quickly after a catch, etc).
(Side note: this article is generally written from the perspective of the offense, but of course the same lessons apply on the defensive side of the ball, as well.)
I wrote that "A style that make you uncomfortable may actually be your best choice once you understand that it makes the defense even more uncomfortable." However, if you decide that your most effective option is a style that (currently) makes you uncomfortable, you can change that by practicing and getting better at your chosen style.
Practice not being solely focused on the person you intend to throw to. Work on making your throwing motion as fast as possible. Practice catching and then immediately throwing as quickly as possible. Practice looking upfield—breakside—dump as quickly as possible. As mentioned in a recent Ultiworld article, top club team San Francisco Fury "practice[s] with 4-second stall scrimmages".