So, when do you juke? Is it even effective?
Eh, it depends. It’s not a primary cutting tool–running hard will always force the defense to do SOMETHING; a good defender might not respond at all to a juke. But, it CAN be effective if you’ve properly read your defender and the situation.
Some guidelines for when to juke:
- Your defender should generally be pretty close to you. If they’re too far, even if they bite on the juke it might not be enough to put them out of position/off balance enough to exploit.
- It helps if you know your defender is very aggressive–I’ve found, for instance, that defenders will often try to compensate for my being faster than them (I’m not faster than everybody, but it’s usually enough to make them struggle) by really pouncing on my first step–they accelerate harder than I do when I start my cuts, allowing them to keep up with me when I’m up to speed. A very simple way to punish this is with a good one- or two-step juke–they’ll be accelerating so quickly that you’ll have them completely selling out in one direction and you can easily take the other (this usually applies to a juke in the direction your defender is giving you).
- Multiple jukes very very rarely work. Or at least, it’s not really my style. You might be able to get away with this as a handler (and indeed, sometimes it’s necessary at a high stall in order to get that critical half-step of separation), but as a downfield cutter anything that takes more than a second or two before you get open or start clearing that isn’t a long cut is just clogging. Even if you do get open, oftentimes multiple quick fakes can be hard to read and you’ll suffer from “oh, you had ‘em” syndrome–the throw comes but you were actually juking the other way. Whoops.
- Sometimes you can use jukes just to get your opponent off-balance. Again, you have to read your defender well to pull this off–after a couple times, they will adjust. But the so-called chop step does have limited application here–again, if the defender is close a good juke can be enough to get your defender on his heels or start him turning his hips to create an opening for you to go the other way. Generally speaking I’m not a big fan of the chop-step as a cut initiator–but if I’m already in motion and the disc is moving (e.g., I’m making an in cut as the disc is swung) without the defense noticing, making a short juke towards what was previously threatening space and then quickly attacking the space that is actually viable will often be enough, assuming you’re as fast as the person guarding you.
As a general rule, jukes don’t get you wide open as much as they get you a little bit of separation. This is why the juke tends to be more common in the handler’s arsenal, where short separation is all that’s necessary. I find the jukes can be very effective if you’ve set up your defender to expect you to pick a direction and run, but you absolutely HAVE to establish yourself as a running cutter before you can expect jukes to do you any good (or just have a bad defender covering you, which is not impossible! In such instances you can exploit whatever moves said defender is not prepared for). But again, they’re a secondary tool. Get yourself in shape and learn to attack space first.
I’ve noticed a decent bit of traffic here lately–by all means, if you have thoughts on anything I’ve written about, please share in the comments. If I’m unclear I’d like to clarify, and I haven’t seen everything there is to see for certain.
Related posts:
- Cutting Thought: Use your Opponent’s Acceleration
- Cutting Thought: A Mind for Adjustments
- Cutting Thought: Know When to Cut, and When to Run
- Cutting Thought: Create Space
- Cutting Thought: On Being the Primary Cut, and Not Cutting
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the weird thing is, the hardest thing for me is to learn how to read jukes so i can find out when to time my throws, esp bc i tend to throw into open space a lot and let the receiver come on to it
btw mackey, i dont recall any posts about defensive strategy, particularly man defense. do you mind talking about it sometime?
that’s what i’m getting at when i talk about the limited effectiveness of multiple jukes.
know thy receiver. if you can anticipate your read of space being the same as the cutter’s read of space and know which way he’ll go out of a juke, then yeah. occasionally as a handler you can force the issue with so-called handler-intiated cuts–floating a disc deep for a cutter to run on to regardless of whether they’re moving that way or not–but generally you’re better off looking off a juker and hitting your dump, keeping the disc moving.
defense will come eventually. for now, look at the cutting bits and think about how you’d defend different cutting strategies. if cutting is about creating and attacking space, defense is about filling and protecting space (from one perspective, at least).