A very warm welcome to our latest members, Pater, Hinrich, Michael, and Niklas. Tell us a little about yourselves, your experience in the game of Petanque and what you want to gain from being a member of this community.

Let’s have your reports on the weekend. Did you WIN OR LEARN? For me, I was filming this weekend at Auch and learnt a LOT about French strategy and how they can be exposed sometimes. During the week I played twice with a local guy who is a bit of a lost case. No one really wants to play with him as he is so erratic it’s crazy. I won both meat competitions with him as it was a deliberate idea to bring out my best game. It forced me to play as close to 100% as I could in the shooting position and whilst we had 1/2 easy ish games the others were epic battles in the dark. Once I had the jack I threw it into the nightmare places that no one goes! Next to the string in case I needed to shoot the jack if he dropped 3 points…..I had to do this multiple times. And whilst it’s only a 3 game competition for meat it’s highly contested and I won lots of respect for my strategic play, accepting my partner and my utter determination NOT to lose. He was happy as he has not won anything for ages and went around telling everyone how great he was 🤣

I'm always practising on my shooting. Something I really want to improve 10 fold this year. Now, everyone says that the lead foot on the side you shoot from, in my case right, should point towards the target boule. All good, however I regularly miss the target 2cm to the right nearly everytime. I must say its consistent, so something is good. The length of the shot is also bang on, every time, just always a bit right. It's never left. So this must be telling me something. Any thoughts Kevin?

There are now more than 100 people in this community, but I know many of you are happy to read, watch and lurk in the background. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But I want the paid Pétanque Coach membership to become something completely different. I don't want to ask you to pay $19 a month simply to watch more videos. There are already hundreds of my videos available free on YouTube. If I'm asking you to pay, I need to give you something genuinely worth paying for. So I'm planning to introduce much more actual COACHING into the paid membership. I'm currently considering: 🎥 Weekly LIVE coaching sessions on Zoom A chance to actually talk pétanque with me rather than simply watch me on YouTube. Technique, tactics, psychology, practice, problems with your own game and whatever we are working on that week. 🧠 Boule Mind sessions Confidence, pressure, nerves, concentration, routines, recovering from mistakes and understanding why we can throw perfectly well one minute and seemingly forget how to play the next. 🎯 Technique Clinics Send me footage of your own shooting or pointing and I'll analyse selected videos so we can all learn from them. 🧩 Pétanque IQ Real tactical situations. Shoot? Point? Promote? Move the jack? Defend? Attack? I'll show you the situation, let you make the decision and then we'll break down the options together. 📓 Improve Your Game Structured exercises, practice ideas, challenges and potentially a Pétanque Journal system so you're not simply throwing hundreds of boules and hoping you improve. 🎙 Inside The Game I've started experimenting with something I'm particularly excited about. A while ago I wore a microphone throughout one of my own matches and recorded what I was actually thinking — the tactical decisions, what I could see, why I chose a particular shot and my reaction to what happened afterwards. I want to develop this further so we can analyse real pétanque decisions in real situations, rather than discussing tactics in theory.

Many players, especially from Thailand and Vietnam, give the boule a quick glance right before shooting. At first, I thought this might be counterproductive, but after seeing how well they play, I realized there’s more to it. It’s likely tied to concentration—perhaps a way to block out distractions and stay in their own zone. Does anyone have information on that?