When and Why Fakes Work
Before jumping in I want to give a lot of credit to these two articles - hopefully I haven’t just directly copied these but a lot of my approach was inspired by or solidified by reading these when they were published. You should definitely read them if you haven’t.
Great Throwers Don't Pivot https://skydmagazine.com/2015/12/great-throwers-dont-pivot/
Great Cutters Don't Fake https://ultiworld.com/2018/02/21/notes-contrarian-coach-great-cutters-dont-fake/
Also would like to thank Walden Nelson for helping me source some clips, and Ulti.tv for giving me (and other patrons) access to their drive of clips from their tournaments - so much easier than going through full game footage!
When I was starting to play Ultimate I was taught to always fake as a thrower. I was told to fake a lot, and that a good fake should look like the full throw that I was faking. If I wanted to throw an inside forehand I should pivot across to my backhand and fake a realistic looking backhand with full body and arm motions.
The downsides to this approach are numerous but to name the major ones: you risk putting yourself off balance as well as the mark, it makes timing your throws to hit cutters significantly more difficult and it’s straight up confusing for your cutters as to what you’re actually intending to throw*.
I’m definitely (for the last 10 years at least) in the camp of no fakes is the ideal, but it’s too extreme a position to say that faking is always bad as I’ve seen argued. My stance would probably be summarised something like:
Show as much of a fake as you need to create the room that you need
But in order to do that you need to understand when a defender moves, and what will get them to move. And that’s what I want to talk about.
A more nuanced terminology
Faking is not a binary concept: you aren’t either faking a full throwing motion or not faking at all. Because so many players associate the word faking with the exaggerated full body motions I’ve found it helpful to break up the definition when I’m working with teams.
A complete movement as a fake i.e. stepping out and making a backhand motion, or taking three hard steps deep as a cutter is what I call a ‘Full Fake’. Your fake is the full motion of what you are trying to sell to the defender.
More subtle movements I group into ‘microfakes’.
When Does a Defender Need to Move
The foundational part of understanding how much of a fake you need to show is to have a clear understanding of when the defender has to start responding to a throwing motion in order to block that throw.
Here’s a helpful clip to demonstrate how early a defender will generally need to move in order to cut a throw off. Manchot’s Sam Prot’s hand touches the disc at the point that the thrower would release their backhand - if it wasn’t a fake.
Just in case it isn’t clear from the slow motion, this is the point that the defender starts to move across to react to the backhand. It’s very early in the throwing motion - and it’s that knowledge that good fakes are built on.
This is why the way I was taught early in my career was illogical. Markers don’t move at the end of your throwing motion - they move at the start. A fake that looks like the start of your throwing motion is (probably - we’re getting there) going to get the marker moving the wrong way.
This is a very powerful piece of information - you can move the marker out of the way in a split second without losing your own balance or throwing you team’s timing out. Here’s Dublin Gravity’s Cliona Doyle showing this to perfection. With the defender coming in off the reset Cliona could not have delayed this throw any longer than she did - a bigger fake is a turnover.
Here’s a couple of contrasting examples of markers reacting to hammer fakes.
Here, Olga Kochenova does react pretty much at the end of Fiona Mernagh’s full throwing motion - and you can see how comically late it is**.
Whereas in this one Shout’s Arianna Pagliarani shows the very start of a hammer motion - her marks jumps giving her ample time to find an unchallenged forehand.
Hopefully you watched those hammers and thought: those marks really shouldn’t have bit at all on those fakes. That’s an excellent segue.
Threats Makes Good Fakes
Now you know that a mark has to start moving at the start of your throwing motion. So you drop your shoulder as if you’re starting a backhand pivot, before immediately stepping out for the forehand. The mark should be unable to recover because they had to move to cover the backhand, right?
Well - it depends on whether the mark bought that you were going to throw a backhand.
As a quick tangent - when I am trying to break groups out of the habits of throwing in full fakes I always show these two clips to demonstrate how ridiculous it is to think that you need to show the full motion of an action in order for a defender to treat it as real.
Back to Ultimate - these are some common threats that marks will generally have to respect.
Faking a known strength
In this example, Nick Lance opens up the around forehand with a partial backhand fake. Nick Lance has a great backhand and it’s a viable scoring option with an open cut: lots of threat so the mark has to bite.
Level of defensive aggression
Here is Lulu Boyd putting her mark on the ground with a full backhand fake. As you can see from the camera angle, there’s nobody in space for this backhand. Why does this mark bite so hard? Well - this is from the same game as Fiona Mernagh’s hammer fake from earlier and it’s indicative of Russia’s aggressive marking strategy in this game. They wanted to challenge everything, even at the expense of sometimes getting it wrong.
The Situation is a Threat
Defenders will tend to react harder when the disc is in motion and they are recovering. In this example the Italian defender bites hard on Ben Jonker’s backhand fake as it’s threatening to continue the motion down the breakside.
Of course another classic situation this occurs is faking a huck after getting free under or upline - it’s quite likely that a recovering defender will make a bigger effort to stop the momentum.
Freezing the Mark
One thing you will notice from good mark breakers is that they often don’t ‘move’ the mark but they ‘freeze’ them.
Freezing is a slight misnomer - you’re not actually stopping the mark from moving entirely. However, as opposed to making the mark move by actually leaning over or stepping out (or kicking or laying out) into the opposite direction you are actually going to throw in, you are just putting them enough off-balance to give you time to get the throw you want.
In this example, GRUT’s Filip Molnar throws in a backhand shimmy which doesn’t really get the mark to bite but freezes them so they can’t get around to challenge the forehand.
This is a good example of why you don’t have time to put in a bigger fake - Tom Blasman catches the disc an inch or two in bounds on his cut (and then throws a score, which I cut out). A bigger fake from Molnar might have created a more comfortable throwing window but he wouldn’t have had a target to throw to by that time.
In this next one, Enzo Forget of Manchot freezes his mark with a couple of forehand shimmys before uncorking the backhand huck - ensuring the mark won’t be able to challenge the throw.
Finally one of the early masters of the shimmy - Mark Sherwood freezes his mark with his shimmy just enough that he can get out this forehand. You can almost see the mark fighting NOT to get stuck. But it’s really, really, really hard to not bite on fakes***!
How to Train
a) Develop throwing threats
One of the biggest reasons fakes don’t work for people is defenders don’t respect their throws. If you have a terrible forehand, I’m not going to jump across to try and stop that throw.
Don’t be bad is not actually my advice. Focus on learning one good break throw and you’ll be much better at breaking the mark than being average at everything. If you develop a good backhand break then either you’ll be able to throw it directly, or the mark will have to bite if they think you will - making the forehands more open.
Players often try to learn more fakes in order to break the mark but your fakes should flow naturally from your threats. They can’t be disconnected.
b) Learn to read the defender
Using a micro fake and quickly throwing the other side takes confidence that that will actually work, and you also need to be able to read when the defender hasn’t bit enough on the fake.
That takes practice. Can’t learn this by reading or watching.
In order to really know where the limits are - what gaps you can get through safely and which ones will get you blocked - you’ll need to make a lot of mistakes.
My favourite way to work on this in groups is to use a three person/luke skywalker drill with restrictions on pivoting - with an experienced group this is restricted to only being allowed to move your non-pivot foot once. As a right-hander therefore I can only move my right foot once - as soon as I take one step I’m stuck in that new position. This really focuses you on creating space for a throw with pivoting - and you’ll be forced to try and squeeze the disc through some gaps you’re not sure of. You’ll learn the hard way what is an isn’t possible.
(there are, of course, some constrained games around breaking the mark in my book if you want to move these principles into a more game like structure)
TL;DR
OK there was a lot there so here’s the main takeaways:
Fakes have a range from no faking at all to a full fake. There’s no right or wrong way to fake - you just want to Show as much of a fake as you need to create the room that you need
Markers have to start moving to cover throws a lot earlier than most people think - use this to your advantage
Markers will only move if they feel like your throw is a threat
*I don’t want to throw shade at the way I was taught - I believe the culture of faking was very much influenced by how physical marking was in those days. You did have to do more shaking off of your defender. I think this just got exaggerated while tricking down through lower levels.
**Boo to paywalls in Ultimate. This matchup is the best matchup I’ve ever watched. There is a case to be made that at this time these were the two best all round athletes in Europe, and eerily similar strengths and weaknesses in their playing styles which made for an exciting and tense battle.
***Another NBA example - Demar Derozen is infamous for how everyone falls for his pump fakes even though everyone knows he’s going to do it. Watch him explain