How to Fix a Warped Shuffleboard Table

Wood is a notoriously finicky material when it comes to creating flat planes. Whether it be through moisture or pressure, wood has a tendency to bend and warp, and the flatter and thinner the surface, the worse this will get.

Even more annoyingly, sturdy hardwoods can ironically get the worst of this, as they can be harder to fix and much more expensive to replace than cheaper soft woods.

However, that doesn’t mean there’s no hope if your shuffleboard warps, it just requires a delicate hand. And you have a few options here.

The first option is to do it yourself. This option is the least expensive, but by far the riskiest.

DIY Warp Fixing

There are essentially two types of warp: concave warps (the warped wood forms a dip) and convex warps (the warped wood forms a hump). If your wood is extremely out of whack, it might be concave in one spot and convex in another, forming a “wave” pattern.

The idea here is to loosen or tighten the bolts on the underside of the table to allow the wood to change shape.

If you have a concave warp, the bolts are too loose, and need to be tightened. If you have a convex warp, the bolts need to be loosened. If you have a “wavy” warp, the concave side needs to be tightened, and the convex side loosened. However, this is NOT a quick fix.

You can easily destroy your table by trying to adjust too much, too fast. DO NOT attempt this if you’re not comfortable with the thought of that happening.

The bolts need to be tightened or loosened AT MOST a half turn on each pass, and at most one full turn in a 48 hour period. Once you’ve hit that limit, you need to let the table rest. It will slowly begin to move into the new position your rods have “told” it to move to and settle into that new shape.

Once settled (again, this is a process that takes DAYS, so be patient) you can adjust more as needed. Keep a level on hand and measure frequently until your table is perfectly level.

Things to Consider

When dealing with a concave warp, you want to loosen the INNER nut on your bolt, and then tighten the outer nut. When dealing with a convex warp, you want to do the opposite (loosen outer, tighten inner). The nuts should remain equidistant from each other at all times, you’re just shifting their positions one way or another as a unit.

If you’re having trouble turning your nuts, use some WD-40 or a similar lubricant on them. Do not try to force the nut, as you could unintentionally tighten or loosen the nut too much once it breaks free of whatever is keeping it from moving (be it rust, tension, etc.).

Again, if you try to adjust too much, too fast, you will irreparably crack your table. Avoid doing this at all costs. If the surface is damaged, then it doesn’t matter if you play with winning shuffleboard strategies or have techniques on shuffleboard shooting because the table is no longer fit for use.

If you’re not comfortable with that, you have a few other options.

Buy a New Table Top

How can you play shuffleboard if the table is warped? sometimes a warp is extremely drastic, and nigh unfixable; it would take too long to get it to work, and you could potentially go all the way around the other way, and make it too loose rather than too tight or vice versa.

If you don’t relish the idea of waiting a month or more of constant tuning to fix your table, or you accidentally break it (surprisingly easy to do even if you’re being careful; hardwood under tension is very fragile), you can always just buy a new table top, or new table in general.

This, of course, shouldn’t be your first thought, as buying a new high quality shuffleboard table can be quite expensive, but if you’re left with no other option, it’s better than simply being left with an unusable warped or cracked shuffleboard table.

Call a Professional

If you’re looking for a cost effective version of the above option, this is definitely one to consider. While it won’t be cheap (and it may be hard to find an independent professional in this case), calling someone who knows what they’re doing to take your table and fix the warp is a very good option if you’re worried about destroying your table.

This should honestly be your first choice if your table is still under warranty. While it might take a bit longer, the chance of destroying your table is basically completely obviated here, and that’s a risk you especially don’t want to take if there’s a clause that voids your warranty for “tampering” with it in this way.

Damage Prevention

No matter which of the above methods you choose you’re paying in some way, unfortunately, whether it be in time, money, or a little of both. The best thing you can possibly do is ensure your table never warps in the first place.

Maintaining a shuffleboard table can be done in a few ways. The first is ensuring the bolts are the proper tightness out of the box; make sure the table is level when you get it, and adjust if need be. This will prevent any small warps from turning into big ones.

Ensuring your shuffleboard table stays free of moisture is also an excellent idea. Wood expands when exposed to moisture, and contracts when it dries out. This especially can lead to “wavy” warps as one side expands while the other contracts due to the changing moisture levels.

Neither completely gets rid of the chance of your table warping, but they help immensely, and ensure it’s going to be a rare occurrence.

Shuffleboard Strategies to Win Every Time

As with any game that’s easy to learn, strategy plays a large part in shuffleboard games. After all, everyone has the same set of fairly limited actions they can take, so it’s going to come down to the bigger picture, and the little things you can do to get better at the game and take home a win  more often.

Here are some techniques you can use to evolve your shuffleboard strategy and give you an edge over your opponents.

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Board Control

One of the biggest things you can do to get better at the game is to evolve your understanding of the board.

This involves not only knowing the basic layout of the board, the scoring zones, and so on (which is a given), but keeping a close eye on the current layout of the board; the location of each puck (yours and your opponent’s) and how best to make use of them.

Despite what you may believe, your opponent’s pucks are something you can make use of as well. While they can certainly be a hindrance to you when blocking your own shots, you can often kill two birds with one puck, as it were, by using your opponent’s own puck to block their next shot and protect your own pucks from being knocked out of the play area.

Likewise, you need to always remain cognizant of where your own pucks are going to land, to be sure that your opponent can’t do the same to you.

This means you need to always think ahead when making your move. You not only need to angle to get the most points with a shot, but to make sure you can actually KEEP those points after your opponent goes.

You can only really get “greedy” with a shot when you have the hammer; otherwise you may as well write off any unprotected pucks you leave on a shot, as they’re almost certain to be moved out of the way.

This forward thinking is the biggest skill you need to learn to play shuffleboard at a high level, and it’s by far the hardest.

One other thing you need to consider about board control is if there are issues with the shuffleboard table. Playing on a warped table isn’t fun, but it can be mitigated by following the guide to maintaining shuffleboard table. We have experience on what makes a great shuffle board table. In fact, we’ve made an excellent shuffleboard table review that you can read.

Throw Accuracy

Practice shooting your pucks as much as possible, and with both hands if you’re playing on a table. This gives you more options and ability to make plays that might otherwise be awkward (shooting a puck up the left rail is difficult with your right hand, for instance).

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Being able to put your pucks wherever you want it is another highly critical basic skill to learn, and opens up a plethora of new techniques. Much like pool or air hockey, bank shots are a key feature of shuffleboard; you need to be able to get around your opponent’s pucks wherever they might be blocking you, after all.

Knowing where your puck can go and being able to squeeze it through even the tightest spaces will make you look like a shuffleboard wizard, and help you rack up those points to boot.

Guess the Weight

An interesting little wrinkle in the gameplay of shuffleboard is the pucks can be different weights, customized by you and your opponent within certain limits.

Obviously, these pucks are still visually the same, so it takes a fair bit of guesswork and intuition to figure out how much your opponent’s puck weighs…but it CAN be done.

Look at the way the puck slides across the surface when your opponent serves it. Does it seem to have a lot of momentum, or need an extra bit of effort from your opponent to push? Or is it the opposite; does it glide with the slightest shove, and maybe lose a bit of momentum at the end?

Look at how it interacts with another puck it impacts. Does it bulldoze straight through it or bounce off? Somewhere in between?

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None of these observations is going to give you the perfect info on how heavy your opponent’s pucks are, but it will give you an idea. And that idea can factor into your strategy in a big way.

Particularly, you need to know if your opponent’s puck is far heavier or lighter than yours. This can be the difference between shoving their puck out of the way and rebounding from it, or even sending your opponent’s puck careening TOO far away from your own, increasing their point gain!

This simple skill takes trial and error but it will give you a surprising amount of insight into what your options are.

Head Games

When playing shuffleboard games at the bar or in a tournament observe your opponent as much as the board. We’ve emphasized how important that observing the board state is, and looking at how your opponent plays is equally as important, if not more so.

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If they’re an aggressive risk taker, you’ll need to try and counter their ability to make use of the board even more than usual. Likewise, if they’re a methodical player who’s leaving a minefield out there for you to navigate, you’ll need to figure out how to crack their defense to get things of your own done.

The key to any strategy is knowing your enemy. Everybody has their own preferred strategies for playing, and this will include you. But knowing what your opponent wants puts you in a much better position to DENY them what they want.

In the worst case, this will just force them to take on another strategy. This is already a win for you, as it pushes the opponent out of their comfort zone. But at the worst, they might not notice what you’re doing, or be so deep into their strategy that a single well placed shot can ruin their whole game plan; this is a way to win a game with a single serve, or at least make your opponent lose (which is just as important if you’re off the hammer).

Observe, learn, and retaliate; these simple steps are the basic keys to mastering any game where you and an opponent take turns playing, and is part of the reason why being the last to make a move is often the most important.

Shuffleboard Shooting Techniques

When it comes to shuffleboard, the most basic of the basics is shooting your puck. Without this skill, nothing else really matters; you could be playing on a perfect board, with an unbeatable strategy, but none of it matters if you can’t act on and make the most of those things.

So, this time we’re going to go over all the different types of shots and how to improve your shooting technique.

The Basics

When first learning to shoot your puck, there’s a few things to keep in mind.

The first is to never touch the table while you’re fiddling around with your puck. The smudges left by the oils on your fingertips can easily foul shots by slowing (or even stopping) your puck in its tracks.

Instead, ensure all of your fingertips, save the thumb, rest lightly on the top of the puck, with the thumb placed a little on the back of it. This ensures a firm grip and maximum control.

With one smooth motion of your arm, move the puck forward ad simply…let go. The puck will glide across the table and come to a rest wherever the force you put on it allows.

It’s important that you don’t jerk your arm forward when doing this, as this gives you less control over what you’re doing when you let go. A simple, smooth motion is enough, rather than a flick.

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In the tips to win any shuffleboard game, people miss this the most. like throwing horseshoes; the main reason a lot of people fail at games of accuracy like horseshoes and cornhole (or fishing or lassoing for that matter) is because they try to throw too vigorously and end up jerking their own shot off to one side or another (or over or under shooting the target) through the imperceptible ways your arm will jitter when doing that.

Relax; shuffleboard isn’t a game of strength or speed, but of accuracy and placement. You need to remove mental distractions. Also, don’t forget to check if there is adequate table powder on the table before throwing your puck

Types of Shuffleboard Shots

In addition to the basic cast above, over the passage of time, there are a number of more specialized shuffleboard shots that had been developed. You’ll want to learn these shots as they’ll let you accomplish different things over the course of a game.

Free Shot

This is another word for the basic shuffleboard shot, but I feel it’s worth mentioning both as a neat bit of terminology and as being sort of the “master shot”. Most types of shot are either going to be a subset of the free shot, or of the Side Wheel shot (which we’ll talk about below), it all depends on whether you’re shooting without a guide, or with a guide.

The free shot gives you the most versatility in where you place your shot, since you can angle it whichever way you please.

However, it also give you the most room for error of the two basic shot types, with the ability to whiff quite hard if you don’t aim perfectly. If you instead want a safer, but more predictable shot, go with the…

Side Wheel Shot

This sounds fancier than it really is. Essentially all this means is you’re using one of the side rails to guide your shot, by putting most of your fingers on the outside of the rail, and guiding the shot with just your thumb and forefinger.

This results in very consistent shots a consistent distance out from the rail that are very easy to make fly straight.

Of course, this makes your shots predictable. They’re going to be a few inches from the outside of the board every single time.

You can combat this a little bit by switching sides, which is where being able to shoot well with both hands is going to come in handy.

The side wheel is excellent for safe, low stakes shots, or ones where you don’t want to rock the boat (for example because you’re already ahead and don’t want to worry about losing that lead by flubbing a shot).

The rest of these shots are more situations than specific moves.

Sacrifice Shot

Sometimes the most important thing to do in a game is to knock off your opponent’s puck…whether yours stays on the board or not.

The sacrifice, or knock off shot, is a shot aimed at the singular purpose of whacking your opponent’s shot out of bounds. If yours stays within the play area, that’s nice, but not really the goal.

This is primarily a desperation play; sacrificing your own chance at points to deny your opponent’s. However, it can single handedly turn a game around if it makes it so your puck is now the furthest forward. This is a great shot for when your opponent has the hammer and you’re behind, as it raises the stakes for their last shot quite a bit.

English Shot

Also known as a spin shot, this is exactly what it sounds like: a shot with English on it. To put English on your shot, simply twist your thumb and forefinger (forgo using your other fingers in this case) as you release the puck, in whichever direction you choose.

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This will cause the puck to stop and reverse a little bit as it hits a certain point down the table (more dramatically increases the more force you put into both the twist and the cast), ultimately giving you a bit of a controlled curve to it.

This is much safer and more reliable than a bank shot for putting your pucks behind an opponent’s and both protecting your own puck while putting it ahead, to ensure you can score. For this shot to be more effective you need to make sure that the table has adequate powder. 

Bump Shots

This is a shot that bumps either your own or your opponent’s puck to put yourself into a better position, simple as. This is different from a sacrifice shot, as you want to arrest your own puck’s momentum here; much more precision is required.

Also known as a “stick shot” when used on your opponent’s puck.

Guard Shot

Simple enough: this is just shooting a puck to block off access to another one of your pucks to make it harder to bump. This requires you to reign in your power quite a bit, but is otherwise simple.

We can’t finish talking about shooting techniques if we won’t talk about the correct maintenance of shuffleboard tables. Although searching and buying top rated shuffleboard table for the money will help mitigate the problem. Ultimately, you can’t play properly if you neglect equipment maintenance because getting a warped shuffleboard table will be a lot of stress to fix. So regularly clean your table or hire someone to do it for you.

How to Play Shuffleboard – Rules and Regulations

Shuffleboard is a bit like a pool, in that it’s a platform for several different, but similar games you can play.

However, all games of shuffleboard have a few things in common, so let’s go over some quick terminology first for the different elements of the table and pieces you’ll need to play before going over a few of the most common games.

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Shuffleboard Terminology

Puck: These are the little discs you manipulate for the various shuffleboard games, also known as weights. These are filled with different weights, within a certain limit (355 grams is typically the upper weight limit), and you can choose your preference.

Hammer: the final hit of a round; the match point. A coin flip is used to determine who gets to shoot first, and who gets to shoot last.

Wax: also known as powder, sand, or a million other terms, this is what keeps the pucks gliding smoothly over the surface of the field or table.

Foul Line: the center line which a puck needs to pass to be considered valid; pucks that don’t cross the foul line are removed from play.

Score Zone: divided into three numbered areas, you get points equal to the number for each puck in that numbered area at the end of the round unless contradictory rules are in play.

Hanger: a puck that is hanging over the farthest edge of the table, or off the edge of the field; this is usually awarded four points.

Standard (Tournament) Shuffleboard Rules

These are a fairly common and surprisingly simple to follow set of rules, beyond the more fiddly aspects of tournament play that apply mostly to the setup of the game.

The objective is simple enough: score more points than your opponent.

At the start of the game, you flip a coin to determine who gets the hammer. Winner may choose to get the hammer (which is usually the case) or to choose their color. The other choice goes to the loser.

At this point were follow rules setup for bar games. However, all tournament games are “switch hammer” and played in a best of three format. The one who gets the hammer in the first game loses it in the second game. If a third game is needed, there will be another coin flip.

The “short foul” rule is in play, meaning you need to clear the center line for the puck to count as in play. Points are scored as normal based on the numbers listed in the score zone. However, points are ONLY awarded for pucks that are further in than your opponent’s deepest puck; ex. If your opponent has a puck on 2, none of your pucks in the 1 zone will count for scoring.

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Each player has 4 pucks, and points are tallied after all 4 have been shot. Pucks do not count for scoring if they leave the board, don’t pass the foul line, or are hanging over one of the side rails, but “hangers” (defined above) are the standard 4 points.

Only one player scores in a round; this is the player with the furthest puck without leaving the board. The one with the most points at the end of two games is the winner!

And that’s it, pretty much. There are a few other fiddly bits involving the setup of the table and technical difficulties, time outs, and so on, but this is it in terms of the gameplay.

This game is also known as “Knock Off” Shuffleboard.

Horse Collar

The basic rules are the same here as Knock Off; it can be played in teams or one on one, and you shoot from opposite sides of the board as your opponent.

The main difference here is in scoring. Rather than trying to get 15 points, the target number here is 51. Also, both teams can score in Horse Collar; the team with the highest number of points (over 51) is the winner.

However, only the player with the hammer can actually win, so you both need to surpass your opponent’s score and score the last shot to win, meaning going first could either be an advantage or a hindrance depending on how high scoring the match is.

The rules for hangers are a bit different as well, contributing to the high scoring nature of the game. Hangers in the middle of the board are worth a whopping 13 points, while one in the corner is worth an even more impressive 26 points.

Finally, points may only be scored if one puck is in the three point zone, so things are a little more precise; you could even scratch an entire game if things aren’t going your way by bumping all of the pucks out of the three point zone.

Tap and Draw

Our last game is more of a variant of the other two, but an interesting one.

It can be played using the scoring rules of either Knock Off or Horse Collar, whichever the players please. The primary difference here is in how you interact with the pucks. In this case, hitting your opponent’s pucks off the board is bad.

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If you knock your opponent’s puck off the board, your OWN puck is removed from play, and theirs is put back where it was. Likewise, any of your pucks that were moved into a better position as a result will be returned to their original spot.

This makes Tap and Draw much more of a game of jockeying for position, with a much more sensitive touch required.

These are not the only games of shuffleboard, but they are likely to be the most common games you’ll come across.

As a last point, getting high-quality shuffleboard tables is an implicit rule of the game. You might have strategies to improve your game, but they are useless if the tabletop surface isn’t balanced. Because lower quality tables are more prone to wood warping, you might also be stuck on constantly fixing your shuffleboard table. So, when you’re searching for a shuffleboard products, you better get the best one.