THE OZZIE, IDIOT-PROOF SCORE HACK. 

NuckleNuck^™ guarantees that your days of feeling like the only idiot on the Pickleball court will be over if you understand the FREE infographic. You will discover there are so many more idiots out there than you thought.

SUBSCRIBERS ONLY: FREE GIANT SCORE HACK INFOGRAPHIC

NuckleNuck subscribers are very smart people and you’re also good readers. So while I try to make the reading fun and mildly entertaining I am also going to assume you can make it through the hard parts of this article. But after the brainy, hard parts comes the reward of the infographic, which, I promise, will change your life.

If you’re a “skimmer” and you skip right to the infographic it will not be as rewarding. Don’t eat the desert before you eat your asparagus. Besides I know where you live and I will track you down—not really! Just kidding, gosh, don’t get all serious on me here, and don’t be looking for the unsubscribe button!

Wait? On the other hand, if you go to the unsubscribe button at the bottom of the article you will have to scroll past the infographic and it will suck you back into the article. So change in plan—go ahead and unsubscribe!

Okay, all seriousness aside, you made it this far, let’s get into it:

HOW YOU WILL BENEFIT FROM THIS POST: Put this into practice and you will never again call out the wrong score and make a complete fool out of yourself. On a much darker side, this score hack will help you keep your opponents accountable by knowing their score too, when they haven’t a clue. Good days are just around the corner. (Disclaimer: there will be other parts of the game that will give you ample opportunity to make a fool out of yourself.) But fear not, NuckleNuck is here to help.

 [ Meet my friends Steve and Ozzie. They are going to help us later ] 

It took me 5 years to learn what I am about to share with you.

(Or maybe a better way to say that is that it took me 5 years to get to the point of wanting to learn what I am about to share with you.)

You’re ready to serve. You don’t know the score.

Should you ask your doubles partner for the third time or should you just blurt out what you hope is the score. Score keeping is a real problem, and it’s not a short-term-memory, old-people problem (although that is a possibility).

I feel stupid when I can’t remember the score but on the other hand, if I privately ask my partner I feel the shame of not knowing the score. (Of course, shame is the biggest force behind any bad decision.) So I choose to not humble myself, instead, I take a stab at it and call the score out—the wrong score! Now, I get publicly corrected by my partner (in the middle of my backswing) and mumbled complaints from my opponents. Distracted, my serve goes long. Now the score is 2-7-1, I think.

Don’t lie to me—look straight at your iPhone and tell me the truth. You’ve been in this scenario, haven’t you?

The added element that exasperates this problem is that I play mostly with Baby Boomers and many of us share the same dreaded score disease.

I’m 70, and I have earned the right to feel old, but the “stupid part” is a bit hard for me to swallow. Okay, so you don’t appreciate me using the word “stupid”, so let’s just call it Artificial Intelligence and give it a positive 2025 spin.

When it comes down to it, I have never really tried to understand why I can’t keep score. I thought that one day I would magically become a good score keeper and not have to ever defend myself again with the age-card. That has not worked well for me.

So after 5 years of playing, I decided to deal with it. It’s time to put this thing to bed—once and for all. My NuckleNuck mission, should I have no choice whether or not to accept it, was to dive deep and figure out what is at the root of this score problem.

How could something so simple be so complex. For Pete’s sake, it’s a 15 minute game, and the first team to 11, wins. (by 2 points, of course)

Last Friday, in the small town of Wadsworth, Ohio, I played 6 games of Pickleball at the YMCA and I had to ask the score at least a 8 times. When it comes down to it, this is really my problem and I am inviting you into it. I brought a couple of my imaginary friends into NuckleNuck to help me explain the absolute treasure I have discovered as I dug deep.

But first, let’s get a little background on these 2 fellas:  

Fictitious bios in mind, you would think the obvious solution here is to get Steve to merely work on his total recall. And of course Ozzie is the perfect person to teach him, right?

Or just put Ozzie in charge of all the score keeping and let Steve off the hook. But that ain’t right either, is it now? You can foresee the potential end of this Pickleball friendship. Steve really needs Ozzie.

Ozzie’s number superiority keeps him from enjoying the game. He’s fixed on correcting everyone he plays with. His black & white-ness overtakes him when he plays and it becomes his personal duty to beat the gray out of everyone he plays with. While it may be satisfying to him personally, it’s just not fun. Ozzie needs to have a little fun or why show up. He really needs Steve but will never admit it.

More on this later. Back to the score problem.

Seriously? Not a memory problem or a math problem?
Hard to believe, right? Let me explain.
Steve and Ozzie both learned in first grade how to add from 0 to 11. It’s not a math issue. They met in Kindergarten and both of them made it to 2nd grade. Both are now in their mid 50s, so it’s not likely an old-man issue.

Something else must be the problem

My fun speculation: I think Pickleball’s complex score-keeping was invented by Joel Pritchard, Bill Bell, and Barney McCallum the same day they arbitrarily renamed the “Non-Volley-Zone” the “Kitchen”.

I can just picture Mrs. Pritchard yelling at her kids after a tiring pre-teen sleep-over, telling them all to “get out of the kitchen” and find something to do outside! In 1965, kids were supposed to be “seen and not heard”. I kind of miss the 60s sometimes.

It was all fun and games for their bored kids but their dads needed to add some adult complication to their new sport—they added a 3-number-score-keeping system. Adding complexity to simple things makes perfect sense when you consider that Joel was also a Congressman. See how this all fits together? Just sayin’.

Think about it, Football, Baseball, Tennis, Basketball, even Ping Pong all have 2-number scoring in common. They don’t require you to remember 3 numbers when you’re playing. They didn’t complicate their games.

It was just too simple to use a Ping Pong paddle to hit a plastic Whiffle ball over a Badminton net. That kinda game would never have taken over the world.

The Super Bowl outcome last Sunday was 2 numbers. Can you imagine, at the commercial break and Tom Brady announcing, “The score at the end of the 3rd quarter is Eagles 34-6-3? No, no, no, “Eagles 34, Chiefs 6 at the end of the third” rolls-off the tongue so much easier. Not one of the 120 million people watching the game last week needed a third number to figure it out.

So the culprit is that 3rd number, right? 

Well actually, no. 

The problem is more that there are 3 parts of the score and not just 2. Adding the 3rd number triples the problem for our brain.

Testing has been shown that our brains handle only 1 thing at a time*. It shifts very quickly from one thing to another but it only handles 1 thing. Our brains are basically binary. More serial and less parallel.

• It’s the reason that a good pick-pocket can make a decent living. He distracts you first and then steals your Rolex.

• It’s the reason for the rise in smartphone related auto accidents and why (texting-while-driving) TWD is the new DUI.

• It is the way a magician operates. Distract, misdirect and then astound the paying audience.

• It’s why the baseball bunt was used for the first time in 1864. To advance the game-winning runner from 2nd to 3rd.

• If you deal with AD/HD, this binary processing of the brain gives you the super power of sequential task focus** or if unchecked, can lead to chaotic distraction and uncompleted tasks behavior.

THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM: Our Brain

It’s 2025, and we now know that the brain gets into a bottleneck*** situation when trying to process multiple tasks. Multi-tasking is after all a myth. The brain allows for parallel threads of information to choose from but deals with them serially, one at a time. It also experiences what they call Brain Blinks and it will slow down because it selects a dominant track at the expense of the less dominant.

Just how complex is keeping score?

We are ready to serve and our brain toggles between 3 simultaneous tasks, (the 2-Team Scores and the Server Number) and needs to sort which task is more important.

Often times the Server Number wins out because there is a 50% chance to get it correct but the Server Number is also the last number in sequence you call out. You have to task your brain to now remember that number, and to say it last, not first.

Thanks to Joel, the score sequence goes like this: hard number, hard number, easy number. But our brain works like this: easy number, (upload that number into short-term memory), hard number, hard number, download easy number.

Things get worse. The 2-Number, Team Scores are much more complicated. You have to give your own score first and then you have to conjure up your opponent’s score.

The lowest probability of getting it correct is 1 in 20, or 5% (in an 11 point game) and if you play to 15 the probability drops to 3.5%. (96.5% chance of getting it wrong.)

Your opponent’s score would be easy if you could only hear it. 
If you are a fellow Baby Boomer, you know the difficulty of even hearing the score that was barked out 44 feet from you in a crowded YMCA Pickleball-modified basketball court. Add a Junior High basketball game into the mix and it’s impossible to hear anything on the other side of the net.

Finally, on top of all of the brain-toggling and distraction, you need to add a large helping of stress. The Pickleball rule to call out your 3-number-score before the serve pushes you to also serve-up the wrong score, in efforts to keep the game moving.

SO HOW CAN WE MAKE IT SIMPLE?
—THIS IS WHERE OZZIE COMES IN?

OZZIE’S IDIOT-PROOF SCORE HACK:

HIS SECRET SAUCE: Ozzie starts at the beginning of every game by choosing not to be the First Server of the game. His friend Steve loves to be the first server so it works out perfectly. The Golden Retriever in Steve is delighted to always serve!

Now Ozzie knows that if he is playing on the LEFT SIDE of the court, the score will ALWAYS be EVEN and if he is playing on the RIGHT SIDE of the court the score will ALWAYS be ODD. It does not matter if Ozzie is serving or not. It doesn’t really matter who is serving.

Ozzie plays on the left side, score is EVEN, and on the right side, the score is ODD.

It’s like magic. It always works!
NO EXCEPTIONS!

TRUE CONFESSION:

Truth be told, Ozzie is still not 100% correct all of the time. If he is playing on the LEFT SIDE and he has no idea what the score is, the hack will only get him in the ball park. However, It will always be even but his score could be a 2, 4, 6, 8 or 10. But it will 100% never be a 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 or 11.

The Hack gives Ozzie more time to concentrate on his game and does not need to focus his energy on the score.

Go to the infographic (below) to discover how the Score Hack also works for Steve.

FINALLY, IT’S INFOGRAPHIC TIME!

AS PROMISED, THE INFOGRAPHIC WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE.
If you are like me, you want to see what’s under the hood of OZZIE’S SCORE HACK.
So, I have designed the entire process in a Picture Format called an Infographic. If you are a visual learner this will be enlightening for you. If you are not a visual learner it will still be entertaining for you to check it out.

SNEAK PEEK AT THE IDIOT-PROOF SCORE HACK INFOGRAPHIC

KNOW SOMEONE THAT NEEDS HELP KNOWING THE SCORE? SHARE THE HACK.

THE INFOGRAPHIC IS FREE for you to download online at NuckleNuck.com and use at your Pickleball Club or wherever you would like to post it. All materials are copyright protected so the contents may not be altered but you are encouraged to download, print or share.

You may not sell the infographic without express permission from NuckleNuck™

NUCKLENUCK IDIOT-PROOF SCORE HACK - HIGH RES PDF: 9.2M file
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NUCKLENUCK IDIOT-PROOF SCORE HACK - LOW RES PDF: 755K file
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NUCKLENUCK IDIOT-PROOF SCORE HACK - LG. THUMBNAIL: 4.2M PNG file
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NUCKLENUCK IDIOT-PROOF SCORE HACK - MED. THUMBNAIL: 1.9M PNG file
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NUCKLENUCK IDIOT-PROOF SCORE HACK - SMALL. THUMBNAIL: 629K PNG file
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NUCKLENUCK IDIOT-PROOF SCORE HACK - TINY THUMBNAIL: 203K PNG file
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NOTE FOR BEGINNERS: CJ Johnson & Tony Roig from BetterPickleball.com created an actual game-play situation to show how to know the score and court positions. They do a great job of narrating the steps on their YouTube channel. They are a great resource for learning how to play Pickleball. Check out this video:
LIVE GAME Example - Pickleball Scoring Made Easy

Please let me know if you enjoy this long-form format with added Infographics. Thanks so much for each of you willing to subscribe. We now have 47 subscribers NuckleNuck. We appreciate each and everyone of you. We welcome your feedback.

Dan