About Penalty Shootout
Penalty Shootout plays out a football shootout against the computer. You take a penalty by choosing where to aim, then go in goal and guess which way to dive, alternating until the shootout is decided.
How to play
- Each side takes 5 penalties, alternating, with you shooting first.
- To shoot, pick one of six target areas: top or low, and left, centre or right.
- The CPU keeper dives left, stays in the centre or dives right at random. If it guesses a different side from your shot, you score. If it guesses the right side, the shot is saved, except that a shot into a top corner still has a 35 percent chance of beating the keeper.
- When you are in goal, you choose to dive left, stay in the centre or dive right. The CPU aims at a random one of the six areas and misses the target altogether about 12 percent of the time. You make the save if you picked its side.
- The shootout ends early once one side cannot catch up, checked after each complete round of one kick each.
- If the scores are level after 5 kicks each, it goes to sudden death: one kick each until one side scores and the other does not.
Controls
- Mouse or touch: tap one of the six target boxes on the goal to shoot.
- Mouse or touch: tap Dive left, Stay centre or Dive right when you are in goal.
- There is no keyboard control in this game.
Tips and strategy
- Aim for the top corners. Low and central shots score two times in three, but a top-corner shot has an extra chance even when the keeper guesses correctly, which raises its success rate to roughly 78 percent.
- Top centre is no better than a low shot in this version, so if you are going high, go for a corner.
- In goal, every dive is equally good. The CPU picks its target completely at random, so there is no pattern to read; just pick one and hope.
- The keeper is random too, so there is no need to vary your shots to stay unpredictable. Keep choosing a top corner.
- Over a full five kicks you should expect to score more often than the CPU, since its shots are saved one time in three and it occasionally misses the goal.
Background
Penalty shootouts were introduced to football by the International Football Association Board in 1970 as a fairer way to settle drawn knockout matches than drawing lots or replays. The standard format, five kicks each from the penalty mark 11 metres from goal followed by sudden death, is the one used here. The first FIFA World Cup match decided by a shootout was the 1982 semi-final between West Germany and France, and shootouts have since decided several World Cup and European Championship finals.
Questions
- What happens if it is level after five kicks each?
- Sudden death. Each side takes one more penalty at a time until one scores and the other does not after the same number of kicks.
- Does the CPU keeper read my shots?
- No. The keeper picks a side at random every time, so where you shot before makes no difference.
- What is saved as my best score?
- Your number of goals in a shootout you won. Losses are not recorded. It is stored in your browser's local storage on this device.