Penalty Shootout — free penalty kick game in your browser

Drag anywhere to move the crosshair around the goal, let go, and the ball goes where you put it — nearly. Every strike carries a little spread, so the closer you aim to the post the more likely you are to miss it altogether. That is the whole decision, taken twelve yards out, over and over.

The keeper commits to its dive before the ball is struck, and you can see it go. It never waits to see where the ball is heading, because a keeper that did would be unbeatable and a save it made would not feel earned. What it does do is remember: the more often you favour one side, the more often it will be waiting there. Five kicks are guaranteed. From the sixth on, one save or one miss ends the run. Free, instant, and built for a thumb.

How to play

• Press and drag anywhere to move the crosshair. Let go to strike.
• The ball lands near the crosshair, not exactly on it. Aiming at the post is how you hit the post.
• The keeper dives as you strike, never after. Watch which way it went last time.
• Repeat a corner and the keeper will start going there. Mix them up.
• Five kicks are yours whatever happens. From the sixth, a save or a miss ends the run.
• The keeper gets a longer reach and a better memory the more you score.

Where to put it, with the numbers

The goal is 60 units wide and 20 tall in this game's own units, and a strike lands within about 2.2 units sideways and 1.6 vertically of where you put the crosshair. The keeper's reach starts at 11 units either side of where it dives and grows towards 20 as your score climbs. Those figures decide everything, and they were measured over 4,000 kicks per spot.

Aim at the post and you throw the shot away: one unit inside the frame misses a quarter of the time, and level with the post it is three quarters. Come in to three units inside the post and the miss rate falls to 3% while the keeper still has to guess almost exactly right to reach it. That spot converts 82%, the best figure anywhere in the goal. Straight down the middle at waist height converts 68%. The difference between the best shot and the lazy one is fourteen goals in a hundred.

Height is worth buying, but it is the smaller half of the idea. The keeper's reach shrinks by up to 45% at crossbar height, so at the same horizontal spot a high shot converts three to eight points better than a low one — 83% against 75% out towards the middle-left, 82% against 79% in the corner. It is a genuine edge and it costs you a little risk of going over. It is not a free goal, which is what it was in the first version of this game and why that version was thrown away.

The last figure is the one about you. The keeper starts guessing your favourite third after three kicks, and how often it does that rises from one time in five to nearly three in four as you score. Measured over 3,000 runs, a player who puts every kick in the same corner ends on a median of 5 goals; one who alternates ends on 6. It is not a huge gap, and it is the only part of this game you control completely. If you like the timing-based version of this problem, Darts asks for two taps instead of a drag, and Air Hockey puts a keeper in front of you that never stops moving.

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