Archives for May 17, 2014

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