The Bert shot in pickleball: when to take a ball on your partner's side

The first time someone hits a clean Bert against you, you have the same reaction you had to your first Erne. It looks illegal. The player is standing past the sideline on the wrong side of their own court, several feet from where they belong, and they put a ball away from there. They did not do anything wrong. They just read a pattern earlier than you did.

The Bert is the cousin shot to the Erne and shows up in the same dink rallies. You take an Erne on your own sideline. You take a Bert on your partner's sideline. The setup looks identical from across the net. The travel for the player taking the shot is much longer.

What a Bert actually is

A Bert is a volley taken at or near the sideline on your partner's side of the court. You either run around the kitchen onto their side or you cut across in the air, you contact the ball outside the non-volley zone, and you finish the shot somewhere past your partner's sideline. Your partner, meanwhile, has cleared out of the spot you are running into.

The shot is named after Bert. As in Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street. The Erne came first, named after Erne Perry, and when players started attacking from their partner's side too, the name wrote itself.

Two things have to be true for it to work. The first is that your partner has set up a dink pattern that produces a predictable cross-court reply. The second is that the two of you have communicated, before the shot, about who is going where. Otherwise the Bert just becomes a collision, and the point is yours to lose because you have abandoned your half of the court.

Why it is legal

The non-volley zone rules apply equally to both halves of the court. Your feet cannot touch the kitchen or its line during the volley, the takeoff, or the landing. Whose side you are on is irrelevant.

What does change is the geometry of how you get there. The kitchen extends from sideline to sideline. To reach the Bert position, you have to travel around the kitchen, either by running outside the baseline-side corner or by jumping over the corner closest to the sideline you are heading for. Both are legal. Both are slow compared to a normal Erne, which is why the read has to be earlier.

If you cut a corner and clip the kitchen line, it is a fault. If you land on the line, it is a fault. The 2026 rules guide walks the current language for the non-volley zone if you want the exact wording.

How it differs from the Erne in practice

The Erne is a shot you take in your own zone of responsibility. You are not displacing your partner. You are not vacating coverage. The trade is two feet of run for a put-away.

The Bert is a much bigger commitment. You are running across the court, your partner is moving out of the way, and the half of the court you came from is wide open during your trip. If you read the dink wrong and the ball goes back to your side, you are nowhere near it. The opponent has a free middle.

That is why the Bert is rarer than the Erne even at the pro level. The reward is the same. The cost of being wrong is much higher.

Setting one up

You do not call a Bert. You earn the chance to take one. The dink rally that comes before it has to do most of the work.

Two patterns produce Bert balls. The first is a partner dinking aggressively to their cross-court opponent's backhand and forcing a defensive cross-court reply. That reply, if it lands soft and high enough, drifts toward the sideline that is your partner's side, on its way back across. You are the player who can intercept it without crossing the kitchen.

The second pattern is a partner dinking down the middle and squeezing the opponent. The opponent reaches with their backhand and the ball spills laterally. Same setup, different angle. The dinking strategy guide covers the shape and placement that produces these replies.

The trigger most coaches teach is the opponent's paddle face. If the paddle is below the ball and the face is angled to send the dink cross-court at a high enough trajectory to reach the kitchen line, that is a Bert ball. If the paddle is square and they have other options, do not commit.

The communication piece

The Bert does not work without partner communication. You cannot show up unannounced on someone else's side of the court. They will be standing where you need to be, or they will swing at the same ball, or both.

Two ways to handle it. The first is a pre-rally call. Before the point starts, the player on the right side says "I'm hunting Bert this point" and the player on the left knows to clear if they see the read happening. The second is a mid-rally call, usually a one-word "switch" or "go" right as the dink crosses the net. By the time the ball arrives, the partner is already pulling back to cover the opposite middle.

If you are the partner whose side is being invaded, your job is to retreat to the middle and back diagonally. Not all the way to the baseline, but enough to cover the open court if the Bert hunter reads it wrong. The partner communication guide covers the call vocabulary and timing in more depth.

The around-the-post option

Sometimes the ball that looked like a Bert is actually better as an ATP, the around-the-post shot. If the ball is going to drift past the sideline and behind the post, you do not need to invade your partner's side at all. You let it pass the kitchen entirely and hit it back across at sideline level.

The rule of thumb. If the ball is going to land short of the kitchen line on your partner's side, that is a Bert ball. If it is going to drift past the sideline before crossing the kitchen line, that is an ATP. The ATP guide walks the mechanics of that shot.

Defending against a Bert

Once you have hit a couple Berts you start to read them coming the other way. Defense is mostly about pattern disruption.

The simplest defense is to stop dinking the same place. If your cross-court dink is producing predictable replies that drift to the same sideline, change the angle. A dink down the middle, or a hard dink to the inside foot, removes the Bert geometry.

The second defense is to watch the off-side player's feet. If the player on the side you are not hitting to shifts weight toward their partner before you have hit your dink, they are loading for a Bert. Lob over them. The space behind the kitchen line on the side they just left is wide open.

The third defense is to widen your own dink targets. Dinking only to the deep cross-court corner trains your opponents to hunt that ball. Mixing in shorter, middle dinks keeps both Berts and Ernes off the table because the geometry never sets up.

Common mistakes

The most common mistake is players hunting the Bert without earning the pattern. They commit to the run on a random dink, the ball goes elsewhere, and the open middle is exposed. Patience is most of this.

The second mistake is poor communication. Both players going for the same ball is the standard partner-court collision, and a Bert without a call almost always becomes that collision. Calling "switch" or "go" with enough lead time fixes most of it.

The third mistake is hitting the Bert too hard. From outside the sideline, a controlled volley to an open foot is unreturnable. The ball is already at an extreme angle. You do not need to add power. You need to direct.

When it is worth the cost

The shot is a finisher, not a strategy. Coaches like Tyson McGuffin and the Briones Pickleball Academy frame the Bert the same way: build a dinking game that produces predictable replies, let the Bert show up when the pattern hands it to you, never call one out of nowhere.

Watch any tournament rally that ends in a Bert and you can usually count the dinks that came before it. Five or six is typical. The pattern has been established, the partners have made the call, and the shot wins the point because everything before it told both partners exactly where the ball was going. Most of the Berts visible in rec play are the opposite, players getting aggressive, leaving their side, and getting punished by a counter to the open court.