Part 10
Keep Learning: Beyond the First 100
After the basics, the best way to keep growing is to learn with other people. These communities post a new trick on a schedule, cheer each other on, and help when you’re stuck.
Weekly trick clubs
- Trick-a-Week (YoYoExpert Forums): a tutorial posted every Friday for the year. It isn’t a race: the goal is to try a new trick each week, pick up new elements, and revisit old weeks any time. Posting videos is optional but encouraged.[59][58] It has run yearly, with a new thread for 2026.[57][56] An earlier 2020 version was aimed at players around the Kwyjibo level.[60]
- Average Throwers Club (ATC), from G Squared (G2) YoYos: a free club for building your trick collection, with tricks of varying difficulty each week. It runs in G2’s Discord, where members give live video help and earn points toward a season championship and credits toward merch. There are club meets on Zoom every other Thursday, and a separate basics club for newer players.[61][63] Season 1 ended with a casual championship streamed live on YouTube.[62]
Style threads
Share your progress
Post wins in “I Finally Landed It!”, see what others are practicing in “What trick are you working on?”, and share your own creations in the Post a Trick thread.[70][71][72]
Go deeper
- Learn from the pros: YoYoTricks.com has trick collections from players like Gentry Stein, Ann Connolly, and Evan Nagao, plus combo series, long-string tricks, and a competition-training series.[76][77][78][79]
- Track your progress: Skill Addicts gives you points as you land tricks.[32] Rewind’s database sorts tricks by level and style.[35]
- Compete: many contests run beginner-friendly sport ladders.[23] Find events on our Resources page, and see VSYC-26, our Virginia State contest.
- Throw together: come to a DMV Throwers meetup or visit a sister club.
How experienced players learn
- Pick the right trick: shorter tricks with fewer elements, and tutorials with a first-person view, are easier to learn from.[74]
- Think in checkpoints: remember a trick as a path from mount to mount. It also helps you link tricks into combos.[73]
- Review: warm up by running through a list of the tricks you know, and practice slowly until they’re automatic.[73]
- From learning to owning: record yourself, break the trick down until you understand why it works, and practice until you can hit it on command.[75]
Part 11
Make Your Own Tricks
Past the first 100, you’ll notice most tricks are other tricks mixed together. That’s your cue to start making your own.
Think in elements
An element is one move, like a hop, a whip, or a hook. Elements are what get the yo-yo and string into and out of mounts, so the more elements you know, the more mounts you can invent, instead of cycling through the same few.[104] A useful starting list, from a 2021 forum post:[103]
1A building blocks[103]
| Type | Examples |
|---|
| Mounts | Trapeze, Brother, 1.5, Double or Nothing, Houdini, Kamikaze, Wrist, Gorilla, Kink, Chopsticks, Brain Twister, Mach 5 |
| Elements | Bind, regen, stall, kickflip, pinwheel, wrap, underpass, roll, hop, pop, pull-through, boing, suicide, whip, slack, laceration, hook, grind, finger spin, rejection, flop |
| Picture tricks | Green Triangle, Flag, Star, Tower, Ladder, Rock the Baby, Walk the Dog, DNA |
There’s no shortcut, though. As one player put it: learn a lot of tricks, and you’ll see how they build on each other and how the same ideas come up again and again.[105]
Learn rejections in order
A rejection pushes the string into the wall of the yo-yo so the spin kicks it back out of the gap. A 2024 forum sequence starts with tricks where you only reject the string, then adds catching the yo-yo, and finishes with Magic Drop.[106]
Build a trick, step by step
Zammy’s 2013 guide breaks trick making into six steps:[107]
- Influence: borrow an idea you like from a player, from music, or from another skill toy, and make your own version.
- Experiment: throw and try something different each time. Failing is the point.
- Step by step: build the trick from point A to B to C, asking “where do I go from here?” at each step.
- Write it down: optional, but it keeps you from forgetting good ideas.
- Analyze: check the beginning (a strong mount), the middle (your main idea), and the end (a clean dismount or bind).
- Finalize: ask “am I happy with it?” and “is it done?” If not, go back and experiment more.
Find your style
Because so many players learn from the same great tutorials, a lot of trick sets look alike today. Players in a 2023 thread point out that timing and transitions matter as much as the tricks, and one quotes André Boulay: “Make the simple amazing.”[108] Share what you make in the Post a Trick thread.[72]
Part 12
How Tricks Evolved
Every trick on this page rides on the hardware and ideas of an era. Here’s how play grew from the classic sleeper to unresponsive, body, and horizontal tricks.
- 1920s Pedro Flores’s looped string lets a yo-yo sleep at the end of the string, opening up far more tricks. Donald Duncan spreads them with demonstrations, contests, and school tours.
- c. 1950 A Duncan employee proposes the starburst, which becomes the standard response system for decades.
- Classic contests Players compete by completing set lists of tricks, called compulsories.
- 1984 The Yomega Brain’s clutch returns the yo-yo on its own, helping beginners build a strong throw and sleeper.
- 1989 The Fireball’s transaxle spins about three times longer than a fixed axle.
- 1980s–1990s Longer spins from new axles, response systems, and materials make whole new categories of tricks possible.
- 1998–2003 Velvet Rolls (3A), freehand (5A), and offstring binds (4A) arrive. Early-2000s 1A tricks move from responsive looping combos toward technical string tricks that need wider gaps.
- 2002–03 The first C-size bearing yo-yos and yo-yos built to be unresponsive out of the box appear, as forum historians recall them.
- c. 2007 Big contests replace compulsories with preliminary freestyles.
- 2000s–2010s YouTube spreads tutorials and new tricks worldwide, including horizontal play and finger spins.
- 2020s Short-form video makes tricks like the DNA go viral.
Sources: 1920s, Gentry Stein[38]; c. 1950, the YoYo Wiki[25]; contests[39]; 1984[40]; 1989[41]; 1980s–1990s[38]; 1998–2003[46][48]; 2002–03[47]; c. 2007[39]; 2000s onward[38].
Early responsive play
For most of the yo-yo’s history, tricks started from a sleeper and ended with a tug: Walk the Dog, Rock the Baby, Around the World, loops. Contests were about completing set tricks better than the next player.[38][39] Many forum players call roughly 1998–2002 “old school,” 2003–2007 “mid school,” and 2008 on “modern,” though everyone draws the lines a little differently.[47]
The unresponsive turn
As yo-yos became less responsive, players needed a way to bring them back on command. The bind was the breakthrough; it lets a yo-yo stay unresponsive through slack and long combos, and it underpins modern 1A.[38][26] New trick families followed:
- Lacerations: Brent Stole is a green-triangle laceration by Alex Berenguel. Its name comes from Brent, who used a similar laceration on the way to winning the 2002 U.S. Nationals.[42]
- Slack and whips: the Plastic Whip is the classic introduction to slack-style 1A.[43]
- Borrowed moves: Paul Escolar’s Suicide, releasing and recatching the trapeze loop, comes from a diabolo trick of the same name.[44]
- Rolls and flops: Doctor Popular is known for the Gyroscopic Flop.[45]
Body, head, and neck
Looping lessons include wraps around the arm, leg, and elbow, plus chain wraps.[55] Tourniquet style (2010) wears the slipknot around the upper arm with an extra-long string for body-based wraps.[46] Modern 1A tricks like Ghost Neck loop the string around the neck.[54]
Safety: Neck Tricks
Never pull on a string that’s around your neck. If you get a knot, take the string off your finger first, then untangle it.[54] Save these tricks for once your basics are solid, and practice with room around you.
Horizontal play
In horizontal play, the yo-yo spins on its side. Steve Brown recalls trying a horizontal Brain Twister in his first freehand routine in 1999.[48] The internet spread horizontal play worldwide,[38] and Doctor Popular’s PopCast recorded an oral history of modern horizontal yo-yoing with Josh Yee.[49] To start:
- Shorten your string. It’s faster, and it keeps a swinging yo-yo farther from your face.[52]
- Learn the horizontal throw on a responsive yo-yo first.[52]
- Learn each trick vertically before trying it horizontal, and vertical behind-the-back before horizontal behind-the-back.[53]
The social era
Gentry Stein posted an early finger-spin trick in July 2020; an August 1 video passed 7 million views, and a viewer compared the twisting string to DNA, which gave the trick its name. It has since been seen across social media more than a billion times, and it works as an easy modern responsive trick.[38] Doctor Popular’s PopCast also interviewed Páll Guðmundsson, creator of the DNA bind, also called the Tornado Bind.[50] For more, watch Doctor Popular’s Yo-Yo History playlist, with episodes on binds, gyroscopic flops, and horizontal tricks.[51][49] For the full story of the toy, see The Story of the Yo-Yo.
