About 3 months ago, I remember someone on the internet saying that "foosball is basically who can snake the best". I've been practicing the snake before that and I can't feel myself improving on it anymore (not that I'm at god-like level or anything), so I decided to give it a break.
The snake and the pull are almost evenly represented among top players (and title winners) over the last 5 years. Note that this is the _pull_, not the pull-kick.
I don't see a lot of "professional" discussion on push kicks and pull kicks though. Are they really inferior to the snake? I'm not going to head to tournaments or anything, so maybe just the push/pulls will be enough?
The best showing for a push-kick over the last 10 years is Frank Balecha's 3rd place finish in Open Doubles at Vegas in 2004. This result highlighted the problem with the push-kick: On Saturday, he was on fire and made it to the match being played for the winner of the winner's bracket. On Sunday, his timing was off and he struggled to score.
It's a beautiful shot when it's on, but any shot that moves between 2 men is more sensitive to timing issues than a shot with less "action", and it's tough to shoot it consistently day in and day out, which is what you have to do to be a regular threat to win.
Assuming the man closest to your 3 attack men is 1, the center is 2 and the man furthest to you is 3. Push kick would be 1-2 and pull kick would be 3-2 consequently. Do you think there's a "best" way to pass your ball before shooting it, that will have the highest chance of scoring? I was thinking 1-2-1-3-1-2, because it does 2 fake push shots in the beginning, then a fake pull. After the first two fake push shots it is unlikely that the opponent will be prepared for a real push shot so I end with a 3-1-2.
A tournament-level push-kick does not move the ball around between men like you're suggesting (what you're suggesting is commonly called a tic-tac shot). A tournament push-kick sets the ball up next to the 1 man, often about on the edge of the penalty box (depending on the style of the shooter). Then it's either kicked over to the 2-man or shot behind the defenders directly from the 1-man (often with a bit of sideways motion first to get them to jump out of the way).
Same for a pull-kick.
Good players to watch push-kick are Ken Allwell, Gregg "Jeep" Perrie, Frank Balecha, Clint Coyne, and Harley Park.
Good pull-kickers are Chris Dube and Thor Donovan.
There aren't any top-level pro-masters who regularly shoot the tic-tac, but Laslo Teke does it in pickup games pretty well and John Zoller can do it pretty well too (he's the closest to a regular tic-tac shooter).
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