A 4 minute read, written in October 2026 and read over again on 10 October 2026
The chiquita in padel: the soft ball that beats the net
A chiquita is a slow, low ball with slice, played to land at the feet of a net player so they have to volley upward instead of down. It works because it takes pace off the ball, not because it is hit well.
What a chiquita is for
A chiquita is a soft, low ball with slice, played from the back so it dies at the feet of a net player rather than sitting up for them to attack. The name means little one, and that is the point: it takes pace off the ball on purpose, because a player forced to volley up from ankle height cannot hurt you with the reply.
It is the quieter partner to the lob. The lob asks a question by going over a net player's head; the chiquita asks a different one by going under their swing entirely.
Club players tend to learn the lob first and the chiquita much later, if at all, because a low, slow ball looks like it is giving something away. It is not. A ball a net player has to scoop up from their ankles is worth more to you than a ball you have hit hard and straight at their strings.
When to play it
Play it when both opponents are set at the net position, balanced and ready, so a lob would have to clear a player who is already watching for it. A chiquita works on exactly that player, because a ball that is low and slow is harder to time well than one that is fast and predictable.
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It is also the answer to a pair that has started reading your lob early. If they are cutting off your cross-court lob before it climbs, the chiquita changes the question without changing the risk you are taking, and it buys you the same thing the lob buys: time to move forward together.
Why the engine rates it higher than it looks
The Lab's own puzzle engine, the one behind the daily Scenario and PELO, scores every option in a position by how often it has actually won from that exact spot, not by how impressive it looks. The chiquita does badly on the second measure and well on the first. It never draws applause the way a smash does, and it is still often the correct answer in the bank because of what it does to the point that follows, not because of the shot itself.
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That is worth remembering the next time a flashier option is sitting right there. A shot judged by its actual win rate from that position, rather than by how it feels to hit, is a different way of thinking about the game than most club players use, and it is the whole idea behind how the Lab scores every position in its bank.
Most players judge a shot by the swing itself, whether it felt clean, whether it looked good leaving the racket. The engine does not see the swing at all. It only sees what happened to the point afterwards, across every position like it in the bank, and that is a colder, more useful way to grade a shot than how satisfying it was to hit.
The technique: slice, not power
Open the racket face slightly and brush under the ball rather than driving through it. The swing should look unhurried, close to the same motion as a drop shot, because the two shots share a job: take the pace out of the ball completely.
Your call
You have a comfortable volley at chest height and both opponents are at the back. Do you hit it hard or hit it deep?
Depth beats power on a padel volley. Pace comes back off the glass; depth does not.
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Aim at a player's feet, never their body and never the open court behind them. A ball with no pace that lands short of a net player gives them time to step in and volley it down. A ball with no pace that arrives at their shoelaces gives them nothing at all to work with.
Where it has to land
Inside the service line, in the last metre or two before the net player is standing, and low enough that any bounce stays under knee height. A chiquita that lands on the service line itself has drifted a metre too shallow and will sit up into an easy volley.
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Cross-court is the safer target because the diagonal gives you more court to land it in, the same reasoning behind a cross-court lob. Down the line is sharper when their net player has drifted towards the middle and left their own feet exposed.
Watch where their weight is before you commit. A net player leaning forward onto their toes, expecting pace, is already in the worst position possible to deal with a ball that suddenly has none. A net player sitting back on their heels has more time to adjust, so the margin for the chiquita to land short and low matters even more against them.
Three mistakes that turn it into a gift
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- Hitting it too firmly. Any real pace and it stops being a chiquita and becomes a low drive that a net player volleys away without much trouble.
- Aiming at the body instead of the feet. A slow ball at the chest is a comfortable volley. A slow ball at the shoelaces is not.
- Playing it from too far back. Hit from deep on your own side, the ball travels further and loses the low, dying flight that makes it work. Move in a step before you play it if you can.
The next time today's Scenario puts a set net pair in front of you, try the chiquita before reaching for the lob, and see whether their feet handle it as well as their hands would have handled the alternative.