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5A May – Jonathan Robinson / 2008 World YoYo Contest

May 1, 2017 By Steve Brown

Believe it or not, there was a time when 5A reigned supreme, and was the fastest growing (and most exciting) division besides 1A.

A steep learning curve and lack of promotion all but killed the division, sadly relegating it in recent years to being lumped in with 2A as a “we’ll give the medal to the one guy who registered” division at many contests. But for a few years there, it was truly amazing.

So, to celebrate 5A May, I’m going to spend the month giving shout-outs to my personal favorite 5A routines of all time. There’s no countdown, and I’m not going to rank them, because I love them all for completely different reasons. I’m just going to spend the month digging through YouTube and posting them in the order that I feel like watching them.

And we’re going to start off with one of the most iconic 5A performances of all time, Jon Rob at 2008 Worlds. The stance, the song, the swagger…he was there to hit his tricks and he didn’t give a damn what you thought, he knew they were good. Tyler Severance set the pace in 2007 with his win, but 2008 was when Jon Rob set the tone.

 

Filed Under: Featured, Players, Video Tagged With: 2008 world yoyo contest, 2008 worlds, 5A, 5a may, jon rob, jonathan robinson, yoyo tricks, yoyo video

5A May Interview – Jonathan Robinson

May 19, 2014 By Matt McDade

Jonathan Robinson JonRob

One of the most well known names in all of 5A, Jonathan Robinson (AKA JonRob) is an extremely skilled 5A player and the kind of yoyoer that really has an aura around him that lets you know that he knows what he’s doing. A member of the YoyoFactory Contest Team, JonRob has competed in numerous contests and had numerous signature yoyos as well. Aside from winning Trick Innovator of the Year in 2007, JonRob also helped popularize some of the most well-known terminology in yoyoing. I had the chance to chat with JonRob and learn more about him, and immediately was excited to learn more about this 5A legend!

JonRob, you’re definitely a very well known name in both 5A and yoyoing in general. How did you first pick up a yoyo?

Thanks, I actually was exposed to “new school” yoyoing (at the time) in Spanish class in high school… Around 1998.

Yeah, that was definitely around the “boom” of the late ’90s. What were some of the trends/popular tricks in yoyoing you remember from back then?

Well… I wasn’t really in the scene back then. I learned as many tricks as I could from the old school Yomega DVD with Jen Baybrook in it. I played with stock Raiders that I would buy from the mall. I then fell in love with a trans-green RBII that I threw for the next five or so years. I did the same few tricks over and over again. Moving to Delaware changed my life.

What happened in Delaware?

After living in Delaware for some years I found out about Mitchell’s Toys Trains & Hobbies. Then, I went to my first contest and the first real yoyoer I ever met was André Boulay. Since I already had some basic fundamentals, André was able to teach me like five tricks in 30 minutes. After that I was hooked and started going to yoyo club twice a week. At the time, AJ Kirk was in charge of club so after learning most of the easy ladder tricks I began to learn 5A tricks from AJ. Around the same time Tyler Severance and his brother Danny began showing up as well. Next thing you know Tyler and decided that we wanted to take over 5A… and we did.

That’s really awesome, so you were basically learning tricks in a one-on-one way back then? Around what year was that going on? I remember seeing you throw some great 5A in Save Deth Volume 2 which Danny and Tyler both also had parts in.

Like 2005/06 I think. Yeah, it was of a group of us. After Tyler and I learned all the tricks we could from AJ we began to try and find our own and show up to club the next week with bigger and better stuff. We pushed each other from the beginning. It was a great time in yoyoing for me. I was hungry and I wanted to be great so I would yoyo 4, 5, 6 hours a day every single day.

That dedication definitely paid off! Some may not know, but your first sponsor was Anti-Yo. How did you get hooked up with them?

It was at 2007 World Yoyo Contest when I first met Kiya and he offered to fly me out to Chico for Nationals that same year. After arriving in Cali he asked if wanted to be on the team. It was hard to say no to the guy who just flew you out to the west coast for the first time and you were sleeping at his house. It was a good look for a while.

You were also sponsored by SPYY for a while. How did that come about?

A lot like Anti-Yo… you get to know people, talk to them and build relationships. SPYY was a real good ride. Steve gave me the yoyo of my dreams! I made a little bit of money and he made a little bit of money. At the end of the day it wasn’t a 100% comfortable fit for me at that time so I decided to do my own thing for a while.

Now you’re with YoYoFactory, right?

Yeah… YYF was probably where I should have been from the start. The yoyos they make fit me, when I’m with the team it feels like family and they are the most professional yoyo company in the business… hands down.

Being involved in a lot of different aspects of yoyoing, what would you say your favorite is between contests, videos, tricks, etc.?

I’ve always felt like a competitive yoyo player first. I played sports my whole life and I like the competitive aspect of yoyoing, even if I’m not that good at it anymore. The tricks are next only because you need those to compete, then the videos cause they help build hype and get your name out there. I could care less about trick innovation and videos. I just want to win one big contest before I stop competing.

All in all, what would you say your favorite moment out of your whole yoyo career would be?

WOW! That’s a good question…
I’d probably have to say my 2008 World YoYo Contest performance. It was hella dirty, but the song, swag and outfit were on point! 2010 BAC was another one of my favorite moments. The original 5AMay movement was at that contest. I had a good freestyle, a great song and I had on some fresh ass Jays that day!

Winning Trick Innovator of the Year award could have been one of those moments, but it has been surrounded by bullsh*t since the year Jake and I won it. I still feel some type of way about sharing that award and everything that has happened with it since then. It’s a joke now.

Yeah, I can’t say I disagree with you there. What would be your advice for any aspiring 5A player out there?

As far as advice, the best thing would probably be to learn all of the basic/fundamental tricks that are out there, then learn some tricks that a few of your favorite players do, then just stop watching 5A players or yoyo players for inspiration and just be creative. Having a solid foundation if tricks is key, though.

Do you think getting good at 5A requires a different approach than 1A?

I don’t even have an approach to 1A, it’s just something I do in between 5a tricks when I’m not thinking. I suck at 1A.

One more question: What can we expect to see from you in the future?

I wouldn’t expect much… lol. It gets harder and harder to stay motivated every year. If I could have just one perfect freestyle I would hang it up. Until then, I’ll probably just keep trying to find new tricks to score more points with. My number one goal right now is to keep my wife happy and my kids on point!

Right! I definitely feel you there. You have a great attitude towards yoyoing, thanks for doing this!

Yup, no problem. Thanks for doing what you do!

Filed Under: Interview Tagged With: 5a may, featured, Interview, jon rob, jonathan robinson

#trickcircle Roundup 5/17/14

May 17, 2014 By Drew Tetz

Greetings, gentle readers, and welcome to another installment of #trickcircle! We’re scouring Instagram for 15-second bursts of yoyoing and posting our favorites here. Check out the videos, follow the players, get inspired, and go out and throw. (Don’t forget to tag your own clips with #trickcircle and join the fun!)

To many people, JonRob is the @5AGOAT; he is widely remembered for bringing tech 5A to the masses through his battles with Jake Bullock, but wants to remind people that he’s been “going big since day one.” This wrap & tangler combo definitely backs up that statement, and the continuous motion is a great contrast to his more laidback counterweight tech. JonRob & Tyler Severance were some of the very first people to integrate wraps & tanglers into competition 5A, so if you’ve ever wanted to learn some of those, you could definitely start by picking apart this sequence.

Riccardo Fraolini (@blablanchard) has been featured on #trickcircle before, but how could we not run this insane suicide sequence? No wonder CLYW wanted to pick him up. Riccardo could easily be called the king of the instaclip: seems like every week he’s got another one of these jawdropping tricks. Riccardo’s banger elements are definitely what grabs your attention, but there is also a huge amount of care in crafting the way that these moves flow so seamlessly into each other, and he deserves credit for finding the optimal links between simple moves. And that final suicide! What?!

Serezhk Basygin (@serezhkabasygin, via @aeroyorussia) may not be a household name yet, but with tricks like this it seems like it must only be a matter of time. As is coming to be the standard for Russian 1A, this combo is almost entirely dense, technical maneuvers, including a number of clever slack GT setups, but what really caught my attention is the steady sense of pacing. Pauses are often seen as flaws for breaking up the flow, forcing players to become faster & faster, but this trick is a great example of how slowing down can really boost a trick’s impact. He uses pauses to draw attention to the mounts & elements and let them sink in before mutating them again, and the breakdown to GT halfway through the trick is a beautiful example of tension & release.

In the spirit of 5A May, Junpei Shimizu (@junpei_5a) shows three counterweight entrances to a popular variation on the reverse bind. This is a great use of the Instagram format, using the relatively small amount of time to showcase a few different moves that fit together well, and bonus points to him for hitting them all in the same take. These elements might look simple taken on their own, but they are all well-constructed combo finishers and well-worth adding to your repertoire.

Did you learn that bind in the last trick? Here’s Maxim Gruzintsev (@decaika) using a similar bind in the middle of a 1A trick to catch the yo-yo and switch into a horizontal combo. Players have been chasing plane-changing regens for a while now, but with the increased sophistication of horizontal play and the recent trend of using stalls & catches mid-combo the field is starting to get really interesting. This is definitely one of the more seamless entrances yet, and the implications for a contest situation are enormous: why waste time between tricks catching & throwing into a horizontal combo when you can just switch in the middle? He has a stop-n-go entrance that ain’t bad neither... oh, and he got attacked by a cat on camera. You gotta see that. Cat attack!

Bonus tricks:

Kenji Nakatsuka’s beautiful double rejection

Even Malcolm Chiu’s “silly tricks” are brilliant: an engineer’s windup to GT suicide (?!)

Mark Mangarin’s Boy Scout Laceration

Tomiya Maryoji’s very clever pinky catch whip

Joe Black’s “Maider x Yamaki bind”, horizontal madness

Tsukasa Takatsu’s “Octopus Two”, a great tribute to Justin Weber

Filed Under: #trickcircle, Trick Theory Tagged With: #trickcircle, 5a may, jonathan robinson, jonrob, junpei shimizu, maxim gruzintsev, Riccardo Fraolini, serezhk basygin

5A May – Jonathan Robinson – 5A Baller

May 7, 2014 By Steve Brown

Keeping things rolling with 5A May, we’ve got a new video from JonRob! There’s some absolutely stunning counterweight play in here, and plenty of tricks to keep aspiring players busy for a loooong time.

YoYo used is the Superstar by YoYoFactory.

Filed Under: Players, Video Tagged With: 5a may, featured, jonathan robinson, jonrob, SuperStar, video, yoyofactory

#trickcircle Roundup – 4/14/14

April 14, 2014 By Steve Brown

TrickCircleTitleCard

Here’s a quick little burst of goodness you might have missed on Instagram! Remember to post your videos with the hashtag #trickcircle so we can find them!

Kenji Nakatsuka just broke my brain with this amazing combo he shot of Ryota Torigoe.

JonRob reminding everyone why he’s the GOAT. Check out that moment where the counterweight lays over his forearm and he slides it down to his wrist…that is ^&*$%&^ golden.

Big, flowy slack moves and string rejections never get old. Thanks to Igor Galiev for bringing us this one from Victor Gravitsky.

…and as usual, Riccardo Fraolini wins everything. Damn, dude.

Filed Under: #trickcircle, Video Tagged With: #trickcircle, featured, igor galiev, instagram, jonathan robinson, kenji nakatsuka, Riccardo Fraolini, victor gravitsky, video

2013 Indiana State YoYo Contest Results

June 2, 2013 By Rafael Matsunaga

The 2013 Indiana State YoYo Contest was held in Indianapolis yesterday, and we have the results!

The 1A and 5A divisions at Indy States are held in an incredibly exciting single-elimination battle format. In 1A, veteran genius Ky Zizan beat Brian Long in the final match, while in 5A, the always smooth Jonathan Robinson beat Connor Ebbinghouse.

Videos coming soon to the YoYo News YouTube Channel!

Check the other results below:


2013 Indiana State YoYo Contest
2013 Indiana State YoYo Contest

1A (Battle format)

First Place – Ky Zizan

Second Place – Brian Long

Third Place – Nehemiah Peterson

Fourth Place – Colin Beckford

5A (Battle format)

First Place – Jonathan Robinson

Second Place – Connor Ebbinghouse

Third Place – Ian Johnson
4th Place – Chase Baxter

3A

  1. Colin Beckford
  2. Mike Durdak
  3. John Wolfe
  4. Chase Baxter

4A

  1. Ian Johnson
  2. Alex Lee
  3. John Wolfe
  4. Jumario Simmons
  5. Mike Durdak
  6. Garrett Keeney

Filed Under: Contests Tagged With: 2013, Colin Beckford, ian johnson, indianapolis, indy states, jonathan robinson, jonrob, ky zizan, results

Danny Severance & Jonathan Robinson tomorrow night on YoYoRadio

May 23, 2013 By Joe Mitchell

The elusive Danny Severance joins the YoYoRadio guys in studio tomorrow night as they talk to the one and only Jonathan Robinson about 5A Angel, his new 5A video.

 

Filed Under: YoYoRadio Tagged With: Danny Severance, jonathan robinson, jonrob, YoYoRadio

JonRob – 5A Angel (NSFW)

May 20, 2013 By Steve Brown

Jonathan Robinson (a.k.a. JonRob) drops his first video in years and it was worth the wait. His counterweight play is undeniably the smoothest out there. Many players have tried to bite his style and no one has ever come close…JonRob really is the Greatest Of All Time.

Music is NSFW, so either watch it on mute or get yourself some headphones.

Filed Under: Video Tagged With: 5A, featured, GOAT, greatest of all time, jonathan robinson, jonrob, nsfw

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