Use your opponent's expectations against them

Juking, but like, mentally

Dylan Freechild says he's always looking to use the defense's momentum against them:

I think the traditional 'giving [the person with the disc] four or five seconds to look downfield and then letting the defense kinda drift upfield'...that cadence and pace of play is pretty predictable for the defense. [He then talks about some cuts that the cutter would probably make—and that the defender knows to expect.] You can almost feel it's second nature...

...I think the unconventional-ness of [what Dylan does] is what gives me [an advantage]. I'm basically always looking to abuse the defense's momentum against them. I'm just trying to make them overplay one way or another.

But to me, there's a partial disconnect between the first and second halves of that quote. Yes, using the defender's momentum against them is absolutely an important part of good cutting and good frisbee. But when he's first talking about the "cadence and pace of play" being "predictable" for the defense—it's not only the defender's physical momentum that he's using against them. It's their mental momentum—their expectations—that he's using against them.

Any strategy is immediately 25% better (made up number) if the defense isn't expecting it. A 25% boost won't necessarily turn every bad strategy into a good strategy. But it'll make a few strategies viable purely because the defense is slower to respond when the offense's motion doesn't fit the mentally engrained patterns they rely on when playing D.

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Cues and processing time

When your actions on offense fit into the defense's existing mental models, it's easy for them to respond. The defense's mental processing when the offense does something predictable—like making a cut from the back of a vertical stack—is something like this:

I see them starting the under cut —> I play my "under cut" defense, OR,

I see them starting a deep cut —> I play my "deep cut" defense

But when the offense subverts expectations, an extra step gets added to that mental processing:

I see Dylan catch an under —> Wait, he was supposed to look downfield, WTF is he doing heading across the field?? —> Oops, I gotta go follow him.

For some theoretical background, I'm going to again bring up one of the book chapters I find myself quoting the most, Chapter 1 of The Sports Gene by David Epstein. He stresses that "reaction time" in sports is a function of your ability to notice and interpret sport-specific cues.

Epstein shares the story of how Albert Pujols, one of the greatest hitters in baseball history, struck out facing softball star Jennie Finch—as did a number of other top MLB players. (Softball pitches are significantly slower than baseball pitches, but because they're thrown from closer, the amount of time a hitter has to react is roughly similar, so it's unclear whether one or the other "should" be harder to hit.)

Pujols is world-level at a skill that requires unbelievable reaction time—but his inhuman skills aren't a "raw reaction time" advantage that exists across domains:

When scientists at Washington University in St. Louis tested him, Pujols, the greatest hitter of an era, was in the sixty-sixth percentile for simple reaction time compared with a random sample of college students.

"Unexpected cues" is enough to turn one of the greatest hitters ever into a guy who's scared to stay in the batter's box:

[Finch] fired the first pitch just high. Pujols lurched backward, startled at what he saw. Finch giggled. She unleashed another fastball, this time high and inside. Pujols spun defensively, turning his head away. Behind him, his professional peers guffawed.

Making it harder for the defense to key in on your cues unlocks the same advantage. When your patterns match the patterns your defender is used to, they can mentally process everything at "full speed". But the more unexpected your movement patterns are, the longer it will take your defender to mentally processthem.

You can also think of it as an example system one vs system two thinking—force your defenders to actually think as much as possible, and minimize the time they're able to spend relying on unconscious processes.

Be the "Jennie Finch" compared to the "MLB pitchers" your opponent is used to playing against.

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Randomness is Game Theory Optimal

Nate Silver's recent book On the Edge also discusses the benefits of randomizing decision making in games in order to deny your opponent certainty.

The Nash Equilibrium solution for poker...involves lots of randomizing. Randomizing between calls and raises, between calls and folds, or sometimes between all three. It's not just that you should play differenthands in different ways; you should play the same hand in different ways. Sometimes, if your opponent raises, you should 3-bet¹ with the Ace & Queen of diamonds² and sometimes you should just call. That's what the theory says, anyway...Randomizing your strategy is not just an essential part of poker—it'sessential in game theory in general.

...Atlanta Braves Hall of Fame pitcher Greg Maddux—one of the most cerebral pitchers of all time—reportedly [...used] quasi-random inputs such as the stadium clock to decide what pitch to throw.

In games like poker where it's important to be unpredictable, the value of a particular strategic option is made up of a combination of what I call "intrinsic value" and "deception value", and there's generally a trade-off between the two....

...That not only means bluffing; it also sometimes means playing meekly ("slowplaying") with a good hand...Deception is so important in poker that in any reasonably close decision, the GTO strategy [Game Theory Optimal] is usually a mixed strategy.

I suppose these are really two different concepts. First, there's tricking your opponents—using their expectations against them. Then, there's what Nate Silver is saying—use randomness to make it hard for your opponents to predict you. In other words, make it hard for them to even start having an expectation in the first place. But it feels relevant enough that I'm shoving it in this article anyway!

One simple way to be more random: if your team runs a vertical stack, when you're at the back of the stack, make 1/3 of your cuts to the open side under, 1/3 of your cuts deep, and 1/3 of your cuts to the breakside under. In my experience it's extremely rare to find a frisbee player who really cares about what Silver calls "deception value"—this is an area where there's still a lot of room for growth in ultimate culture.

I also like his idea that even when you have a dominant/winning strategy, you should sometimes not fully exploit it. As long as your opponents have some doubtabout what you'll do, they'll hesitate to fully commit to countering that strategy.

My best attempt at applying this to ultimate: even though give-and-going is a really good strategy, if you give-and-go every time you throw, you'll lose some of your advantage because you never catch the defense off-guard. Instead, stand around like a statue after some of your throws, just often enough that your defender sometimes lets their guard down, making the times you do give-and-go even more effective.

I haven't quite gotten to the "use the stadium clock to generate random inputs that guide my decision making" level of frisbee, but I do try to make a point to just do random crap sometimes.

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Some examples

Abusing a defender's momentum and abusing their expectations will often—but not always—happen at the same time. Let's look at a few ways Dylan and other experienced players use their defender's expectations against them.

• Don't turn to face upfield after catching an 'under'. As Dylan points out in the clip above: his defender is expecting him to catch the pass, stop, and turn to look downfield for the next pass. Dylan subverts that expectation by immediately throwing a give-and-go sideways towards the breakside without ever turning around.
  This example is part expectation and part momentum—because of their expectation, the defender starts slowing down their momentum to play mark defense.

• Related: You should avoid only looking dump at stall [X]: One of the many ways we fail in teaching new players frisbee is the "look dump at stall five" (or six, or four, or whatever it may be in your case) meme that I've heard so many times. If you always look dump at the same stall count, the defense will figure that out quickly enough. The dump cutter's defender can rest for five seconds and then play super hard defense when the stall count gets higher. The mark defender can shift, knowing you're no longer looking downfield. You should dump the disc when your defender isn't expecting you to, not when everyone within 100 yards of the field knows you're "looking dump".

• Immediately pass the disc back to the person who just passed it to you. Another classic Dylan move, featured in his Callahan video. Just caught a dumpor swing pass? Well, no one's expecting you to pass it back to the person who just passed it to you. (I try to use this pass, but it often doesn't work because not even my teammate who just passed it to me is expecting it.)
  Like in the linked example, this can often be a combination of momentum & expectation, especially if the defender is trying to "seal" the breakside. But it can work even if you caught the pass standing still and the defender's momentum isn't taking them towards the breakside, simply because they're not expecting it.
  
  But I don't mean to suggest this specific upline cut/"Dylan Freechild" move is the only way to get benefit out of passing the disc back immediately. A good defense is re-adjusting their positioning every time the disc moves, so if you can get the disc back to your teammate while the defense is still getting in position to defense against passes coming from your location, unexpectedly good passing lanes will often open up.

• Let your defender think you're clearing back to the stack, then turn back into the open space. The "fake clear" cut is another great example of subverting expectations—when a defender thinks you're just jogging back into the stack, they'll often let their guard down. That's the perfect moment to attack back into the open space. As in the linked article, this cut can work even if you & your defender aren't moving very fast — it's toying with mental expectations that generates separation, not the ferocity of the direction change.

• Feigning boredom: More generally—if you look like an inactive cutter, you can often convince defenders to think of you as an inactive cutter. That, of course, is the perfect time to become active.

• Look off the defense and use no-look passes. Looking off the defense is intentionally cultivating the defender's expectation for the purpose of subverting it. A good defender is reading the thrower's eyes to figure out where the next pass might go—a good thrower uses that against them and then throws a pass to a place the defense wasn't expecting.

• Cutting. In my opinion, getting open via change-of-direction is as much a mental battle as it is a battle of speed and footwork. A common suggestion is that you want to "attack your defender's hips" and change to direction B as soon as they commit their hips in direction A. But it's part mental game too: you want to start attacking direction B at the moment your defender is most convincedthat you're committed to direction A. A good cut is when you make your defender think, "oh, shit, I gotta commit now or I'm getting burned"...and then that's the exact moment you say "haha, just kidding" and head back in the other direction.
  
  The footwork is important, no doubt, and when you change direction you're obviously using the defense's momentum against them as well. But the mental subversion adds that little extra processing time to your defender's reaction that gets you an extra step open (An extra step that you might need if you're not John Randolph).
  To put it another way: If they know you're trying to fake them out with a series of jukes, you might succeed in getting open—but they'll be able to recover relatively quickly. But if you fake them out after they've decided you're not trying to fake them out, you'll get even more open.

• Playing the disc from within the endzone: See You don't *have* to walk the disc to the front of the endzone. A good strategy in general, but possibly part of the reason this works so well is defenders don't expect the offense to start without walking to the front of the endzone first.

• Pretending to call for the disc: Another classic example.

• My article on stall zero hammers makes a somewhat similar argument about the "metagame" strategy of ultimate—teams don't expect the riskier throw early in the stall count, so they often don't respect it, and that's exactly what makes it a better decision than you might expect. If teams know you won't attempt and over-the-top throw until late in the stall count, that's an expectation they can use to make your job harder. There's some Game Theory Optimal amount you should throw stall zero hammers, and I'd say it's definitely higher than 0% of the time.

• Cutting deep as a handler: There's often an assumption that players that start the point as handlers will stay in the backfield, or at least always look to circle back to the backfield (e.g. after making an upline cut). Defenders abuse this tendency and play hard defense near the disc, knowing they don't really need to worry about getting beat deep. Handler deep cuts remain underrated.

• Hiding your intentions on defense: I've mostly focused on offense today but the same strategic thinking applies on the other side of the ball.
  
  Have you and a buddy ever set up to bracket at the back of the stack, and the cutters you're guarding immediately start talking to each other: "hey, they're bracketing, you cut [this way] and I'll cut [that way]". Once they know what to expect, they know how to counter it. A better way to bracket is to pretend you're playing man-to-man defense, only shifting towards your position in the bracket at the last possible moment after the cutters have committed. Countering the offense's expectation can be the difference between a bracket working brilliantly or the offense countering it immediately. (Defenses in American football are a great example of this strategy of disguising your defense.)

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Final thoughts

Playing random is Game Theory Optimal. We can all choose to add a little more randomness to our game, simply to keep the opposition from knowing what's coming. Great players learn to take it a step further: figuring out what the opposition is expecting and using those expectations against them, forcing them to really think instead of just instinctively relying on their mental catalog of ultimate-related patterns and cues.

I don't pretend to be the first person to apply these ideas to frisbee, but hopefully I've managed to build a little on what's been said before. For example, see: Hive Ultimate on Predictability

1. i.e. re-raise, essentially—in other words, play aggressively

2. This is a good starting hand, I'm pretty sure...