This paper describes an autonomous learning method used with real robots in order to acquire ball passing skills in the RoboCup standard platform league. These skills involve precisely moving and stopping a ball to a certain objective area and are essential to realizing sophisticated cooperative strategy. Moreover, we propose a hybrid method using “thinning-out” and “surrogate functions” in order to reduce actual trials regarded as unnecessary or unpromising. We verify the performance of our method using the minimization problems of several test functions, and then we address the learning problem of ball passing skills on real robots, which is also the first application of thinning-out on real environments.