Introduction

Welcome to the guide on how to improve at foosball. Maybe you’ve always wanted to be better than the average random person at this great game. Or you want to impress some people. Or you’re eager to join foosball tournaments.

Whatever your goal, this guide is for you.

It starts with the fundamentals: rules, setup, and conventions around playing. Then it explains how to position or move in both attack and defence—mostly focusing on defence.

It includes the most common shots or techniques for every situation. But the fun thing about foosball is that you can play any way you like and invent your own strategies or shots!

How to use this guide

You can use it any way you like. But I think there is a certain order and strategy which yields the best results.

For most sports / games, I would recommend learning defence first and offence second. With table soccer, however, how you defend really depends on your knowledge of how the opponent likes to attack.

On top of that, foosball is a wild game. Especially if not everyone knows what they’re doing, people can just start shooting the ball randomly, and as fast as they can. Defence doesn’t have much use in these circumstances. Whether you win or not depends more on how well you can control the ball and how great your attacking skills are.

I have, therefore, put all articles in the order that I think is the best.

But always remember

Practice is the magic word. If you have a foosball table at home, or anywhere else where you can play alone, I strongly recommend putting in some hours to perfect your technique. Even then, the game is unpredictable and you will never get a 100% success rate, but that shouldn’t keep you from trying the best you can. Even a few hours of extra, specific training can make a huge difference.

Who are you?

Just someone who has played a lot of foosball in both high school and college. And most of the time, I won 😊 Although I must admit this was partly because I usually played with the same partner, a good friend of mine, who was also quite skilled.

So let that be lesson number one: sneakily try to get the best partner for every game.