YoYo Related News From Around The World
Check out full results from the 2018 MA State YoYo Contest, and video of the top three freestyles from the 1A Division. Congratulations to all the winners of one of the largest state contests in the country!
We’ve got full results for Semi Finals in all divisions! The level of play here at the 2018 World YoYo Contest is the highest we’ve ever seen, and every player truly earned their place in Finals. Check out full Semi Final results and scoring breakdowns below!
In the 1A Division, the top 19 players will advance to Finals. In 2A and 3A, the top 9 players will advance. In 4A, the top 11 players move on to Finals, and in 5A the top 10 players will advance.
The 2016 Asia Pacific Yo-yo Championships was held last week in Singapore, and with yet another huge player turnout, we got a couple of nice surprises among the results!
While we had the usual group of players among the top finishers in 1A, this year we have a brand new face topping the chart! Shion Araya, who finished second at last year’s World Yo-yo Contest, was the winner, with a solid and fast-paced routine, beating AP veterans Marcus Koh, who finished second and took home the Singapore Champion title, and Ahmad Kharisma, arguably the most consistent of the AP contestants.
Last year’s winner, Iori Yamaki, was absent, while veteran contenders Hiroyuki Suzuki and Christopher Chia finished in 6th and 15th place, respectively.
Check out Shion’s winning freestyle and full results from finals below:
The biggest surprise of the contest was in the 2A division, where veteran Liu Man Ki, from Hong Kong, beat 13-time World Champion Shinji Saito, thanks to a major deduction from the latter that was just enough to switch their final rankings. An impressive feat nonetheless!
3A had fewer big names compared to the other divisions, and Taiichiro Higashi had no trouble securing his second title in a row.
Offstring at this year’s AP was nothing short of fantastic! Local legend Lim Aik Hwee took home his fourth AP title 10 years after his first, and after no less than 4 years of competition hiatus!
He was closely followed by Tsubasa Onishi and his usual and always entertaining acrobatics, and Tomohiko Zanka, who got his career’s best result yet!
Hideo Ishida had no trouble winning the counterweight division and his first AP title. His “modern old-school” 5A is always a pleasure to watch.
Many thanks to organizers of the Asia Pacific Yo-yo Contest for the official videos, and of course for bringing us yet another fantastic event! Check out their YouTube channel for more videos from the contest!
We’ve got the video of the winners from the 2015 Hungarian National YoYo Contest! Check out the winning routines below. Thanks to our friends at YoYoRaven for the results and video!
Iori Yamaki, Zach Gormley, and Shion Araya
Zach Gormley is the winner of the toughest and greatest yo-yo contest in history!
In a final round filled with favorites, Zach Gormley brought his best and was crowned the new 1A World Champion last night in Tokyo!
2A was equally exciting, with Shiji Saito winning the battle of World Champions against Shu Takada and Takuma Yamamoto!
In 3A, Hajime Miura had no trouble whatsoever, finishing almost 20 points ahead of runner-up Alex Hattori!
We also got a new 4A champion! Naoto Onishi won offstring in an incredibly balanced division!
In 5A champion, Jake Elliott, won by the tiniest of margins: just 0.03 points ahead of Takeshi Matsuura!
Finally, AP was a delight to watch, but ultimately it’s a competition, and Shaqler won with a jaw-dropping routine! Check the full results and commentary below!
With the new seeding rules in place, only the current World Champion was granted a spot in the final round. The result was a final round completely stacked with the best of the best who were able to make it through the qualifying rounds!
In such a high-level contest, predicting a winner was no easy task, reflected on the final scores, where there was only 1.5 point between the 2nd and 7th place finishers, but the online chatter correctly predicted Zach’s win! Another strong candidate was Iori Yamaki, who also had strong popular support, but ended up in 3rd place.
Perhaps the biggest surprise here is the young Shion Araya, who, despite competing at the World Yo-yo Contest for the first time, showed an amazing level of play and maturity, managing to do well not only in the qualifying rounds, but also in the grand final, earning a much-deserved second place!
Last year’s champion Gentry Stein had a great routine, but a single discard cost him the three points that would have put him immediately in second place, and perhaps even first considering the time spent switching yo-yos, and thus he finished 6th overall.
A few other strong contenders had discards as well. World Champions Marcus Koh, and Hiroyuki Suzuki, Ahmad Kharisma, Colin Beckford, and Ryota Ogi were all penalized for the yo-yo switch and ended up in the lower half of the placings.
János Karancz had several unbelievable tricks, as usual, but was unable to go as clean as he hoped, while Anthony Rojas had a fantastic routine, but ultimately without the trick density to achieve a high Technical Execution score.
A fierce battle between World Champions took place in 2A, with Shinji Saito emerging victorious with a high-level routine we expect from the now 13-time World Champion!
Shu Takada brought some very innovative tricks to the stage, that combined with his usual top-notch choreography and music use, were enough to bring his pre-deduction score on par with Takuma Yamamoto’s, even though Shu’s Technical Execution score was almost 8 points behind Takuma’s.
What ultimately decided the final placings was Takuma’s Detach penalty. Hiraku Fujii also suffered from penalties and was unable to place this year.
If there were any doubts about Hajime Miura’s supremacy after his fourth place finish at Japan Nationals, there surely are none left after his outstanding performance in Tokyo!
Finishing almost 20 points ahead of the second place with an unbelievable score of 96.5, Hajime Miura earns his second World Title and becomes a very young legend in 3A play!
In second and third places were US players Alex Hattori and Hank Freeman, respectively, both with very clean routines, but without the extra refinement and difficulty of Hajime’s freestyle.
Be sure to watch Patrick Borgerding’s routine as well! Pat himself stated his goal is not to win, but to bring insane tricks to the stage, and he did not disappoint, hitting all his bangers on the stage in Tokyo!
World Champion Minato Furuta had a very unfortunate run. His tricks were amazing, and he would have been a serious contender had it not been for two disastrous double discards that cost him 12 points in penalties, and a lot of downtime on stage.
Naoto Onishi won the 4A World Champion title in a division where the final standings were decided by the penalties!
While Naoto’s routine itself was completely clean and deserving of the title, it was Takumi Yasumoto’s 2 penalty point that knocked down the latter to second place, and amazingly, Rei Iwakura’s astonishing 6-point penalty that cost him the World Title!
The next spots were taken by the three American players. 2013 World Champion Michael Nakamura had a solid routine, but his Performance Evaluation scores prevented him from getting a better placing. Ben Conde was certainly the crowd favorite, and while he managed to hit his unbelievable tricks, they were not in large enough number to guarantee a better Technical Execution score. An epic performance, nonetheless!
Jake Elliott did it! The new World Champion becomes the man who beat Takeshi Matsuura in 5A! What everybody thought was impossible now becomes true as Jake Elliott raises the bar for 5A play, bringing a whole lot of new tricks to the division!
And check out the final score! This is the closest score ever to determine the World Champion! If this is any indication of the future, we can expect truly legendary contests with these two beasts of counterweight play!
On the human side of things, Sora Ishikawa repeats his third place finish from last year with another entertaining freestyle, followed by Hideo Ishida and Bryan Jardin, who went slightly less cleanly than they hoped.
Shaqler! Wow! The AP division this year was truly amazing, and every performance there deserves to be watched several times, but Shaqler’s freestyle is truly epic! Their 2010 routine is already a classic, but this takes their teamplay concepts and skills even further!
The addition of Shu Takada brought even more energy and acrobatics to the team, and making them only the second team ever to win two World Titles!
Shaqler also took home the Entertainment Award, while BeatPoint’s beatbox/yo-yo combo was awarded the Artistic Award, and Taiwan’s WHO Theatre got the Creativity Award for their fantastic team offstring performance!
Day 1 of the 2015 World Yo-yo Contest comes to an end after a marathon of over 250 players going through the wildcard round for all divisions! Here are the results!
As expected, this was a tough and cruel round for the 169 players competing for a spot in tomorrow’s preliminaries. Only 33 players made it through, with some of the crowd favorites failing to advance. The American players did a great job, with six players (Andrew Bergen, Colin Beckford, Eric Tran-Ton, Clint Armstrong, Kevin Nicholas, and Lucas Gremler) among the qualified, along with two contestants from China (Pisco and Weichuan Wang) and one from Hong Kong (Benson Fok). Among those who failed to make the cut were Vashek Kroutil, Hidemasa Senba, Eric Koloski, and Ryosuke Iwasawa.
These are the qualified players in 1A:
Full results for 1A can be found here.
With only one player outside Japan competing in the wildcard round, it’s no surprise that all eleven qualified players are Japanese. We hoped 1999 World Champion Takumi Nagase would make it, but he was unable to match the speed of the current 2A generation.
3A has been improving at a fast pace, and the times when just being able to throw double-trapeze were enough to be competitive are long gone. Almost all of the competitors in the 3A wildcard round are Japanese, but Ayoun Kuo from Taiwan managed to squeeze into the next round!
There are a lot of people who want Rei Iwakura’s spot as king of offstring! No less than forty-two players competed in this division, including a handful from the world’s 4A elite! Ben Conde, Bryan Figueroa, and Naoto Okada had no trouble making it to the preliminary round, while two-time World Champion Eiji Okuyama, and Atsushi Yamada both failed to make it through in this tough division.
Counterweight is the contest’s smallest division, and while the number of contestants was small, we are super excited about the players who are competing, and even though 2004 World Champion Makoto Numagami was unable to make it through, the wildcard ranking is led by two equally legendary names: Hiroyasu “Pon” Ishihara, and 2001 World Champion Shingo Terada!
The full list for 2A-5A can be found here.
Stay tuned for more updates from the greatest contest ever!
The 2015 Japan National Yo-yo Contest comes to an end with mind-blowing freestyles, and some surprises among the winners!
Videos courtesy of yoyovideoarchive!
In 1A, Takeshi Matsuura retains the National title with yet another superb mastery of slack tricks! Yusuke Otsuka, who’s been better every year, finished second, followed by three of the best players from the new generation: king of 44FESTA Yamato Murata, and C3yoyodesign’s duo Ryuichi Nakamura, and Shion Araya.
2A also saw last year’s champion retain his title, with Takuma Yamamoto finishing with a four-point lead even after shedding two points to yo-yo stoppage. Shu Takada scored an incredible 38.5 out of 40 in evaluation scores and finished second, followed by living legend Shinji Saito.
The biggest upset of the contest was in 3A, where current World Champion Hajime Miura was unable to present his usual consistency and finished in fourth place! The winner, Tomoya Kurita, had a couple of great bangers and pretty good trick volume, giving him the edge over runner-up Mizuki Takimoto and 2010 World Champion Minato Furuta.
Rei Iwakura trampled over all the other 4A contestants with yet another superb freestyle! His evaluation score? 38.7 out of 40! Naoto Onishi was the runner up, over ten points behind Rei, followed by former World Champion Tsubasa Onishi.
5A was up for grabs this year, with neither Takeshi Matsuura or Takuma Inoue competing. Hideo Ishida, who had finished third a few times before, was the clear winner, even with some loss of control during his freestyle. Sora Ishikawa displayed his usual repertoire of bangers, but was hurt by lower trick volume and a -3 deduction for not returning the yo-yo to the hand at the end of the freestyle.
With the World Yo-yo Contest approaching fast, players worldwide are now aware of what to expect from the home field contestants, and Japanese players had the chance to experience the venue that will host the contest in August!
Check the full results below!
We’ve got full results from the 2015 East Hungarian YoYo Contest! Check out video of the winners and full scoring breakdowns below. Thanks to our friends at YoYoRaven for the results and video!
The results are in for the 2015 California State YoYo Contest…congratulations to California State Champion, Gentry Stein!
Full results for all divisions are below, and official video from the contest will be posted here in just a couple of days. Click on the spreadsheets to view them full size so that you can see the complete scoring breakdown.
Check out full results below for the 1A Freestyle division at the 2015 European YoYo Championship! Congratulations to Jakub Dekan, the new EYYC Champion!
Check out full results below for the 1A Open Freestyle division at the 2015 European YoYo Championship!
Check out full results below for the 5A Freestyle division at the 2015 European YoYo Championship!
Check out full results below for the 1A Open Freestyle division at the 2015 European YoYo Championship!
Check out full results below for the 4A Freestyle division at the 2015 European YoYo Championship!
