Swish: basketball flick tips for a perfect ten

How a Swish level works

Every level is ten shots, each from a new spot on the court. The pill at the top of the screen shows the target: five baskets out of ten on the first levels, rising to eight out of ten later on. Reach the target and you go through. Nine or ten baskets earn three stars, so a level you passed with six can still be worth replaying.

The ball flies on real physics. It can rattle round the rim and drop, kiss the backboard and go in, or pop back out. A basket that touches neither rim nor board is a swish, and it shows as a gold dot on the shot tracker. As you climb, the spots move further out and wider around the arc, and the game becomes less forgiving about how close a shot has to be.

Aim with direction, set distance with length

The control is a single flick up from the ball toward the hoop. Where the swipe points is where the ball goes, and a longer swipe throws further. On a computer you click, drag upward and let go; on a phone you flick up with one finger, with the phone held upright.

Because direction and distance come from two different parts of the same gesture, it helps to think about them separately. First get the line right: the swipe should point at the middle of the rim, not roughly toward it. Then adjust only the length. Speed is not the thing to play with. A slow, straight swipe is easier to repeat than a fast flick, and repeatable is what you want when you have ten shots to land.

Read every miss

Swish rewards players who watch where the ball ends up. A miss tells you exactly what to change next time, as long as you look at it instead of reaching for the next ball straight away.

If the ball drops short of the rim, your swipe was too short: make the next one a little longer and keep the same direction. If it flies past the hoop or bounces high off the back of the rim, the swipe was too long. If it misses to one side, the length may have been fine and only the direction was off. Change one thing at a time. Changing both the line and the length after every miss is the fastest way to lose the feel you had a shot ago.

The spot moves on every shot, so the right length changes too. A good habit is to make your first attempt from a new spot a careful, straight one, then correct from what you see.

Bank shots and rim rattles count

Not every basket has to be clean. The backboard is part of the game, and a ball that hits the square a little long often drops through. When you are unsure whether a shot needs more or less, erring slightly long gives the board a chance to save you, while a short shot has nothing to catch it.

Rim rattles also count. A ball that spins round the rim can still fall in, so do not write off a shot until it settles. What you lose with a bank shot or a rattle is only the gold swish dot, not the basket, and the basket is what moves you up a level.

Keep the streak burning

Make three in a row and the ball catches fire. It is the reward for consistency, and it is another reason to keep your swipes calm and repeatable rather than trying something different on every throw. Once you find a length that works from a spot, trust it for the following shot from a nearby spot and adjust only a little.

When the hoop starts to slide

From level five, every other level puts the hoop on the move: it slides from side to side, and you have to throw to where it will be when the ball arrives, not to where it is when you let go.

The simplest timing is to release when the hoop is heading toward the point you are aiming at, so it arrives as the ball does. The other reliable moment is near the end of a slide, when the hoop slows to turn around and spends a little longer in one place. Pick one of these two and use it every time. Mixing them makes the misses hard to read, and reading misses is what this game is built on.

Moving levels also come with the higher targets, so this is where three stars get hard. If you are short of the target, take the safer, slightly long shot that the backboard can rescue.

If you want another quick sports fix

Swish is the pure shooting side of basketball games: no dribbling, no defenders, just a ball, a rim and ten shots. If you like that format, Top Corner gives football the same treatment. It has five kicks a level against a keeper who reads you better each time, and from level six free kicks over a jumping wall. You swipe to shoot, and bending the swipe bends the ball, so the habit of reading your own swipe carries over directly.

Top CornerPenalties and free kicks — swipe, curl, scorePlay now

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Play it here

• Swish — Basketball flick — ten shots, one hoop
• Top Corner — Penalties and free kicks — swipe, curl, score