I wrote this long rant to give you my opinion on all this yoyo contest stuff so you can see where I am coming from when I debate it. It also comes in handy when I publish some proposals I am working on.

I will describe how I think about yoyoing, how I create tricks, why I don’t compete, why I don’t like the current judging system and what to do with all of this. I will also touch on the EYYC controversy a bit in there.

This is not to say that the current judging system is somehow totally wrong or pure evil. It’s more complicated than that. This is only my opinion. Take it as it is. It’s not an attempt to bash specific people. It’s more like an observation of the current state.

How I think about yoyoing

It all boils down to the way how I play yoyo, and what I think is the good way to play. I have a very specific opinion about this. Actually — I even think it is the right way to play yoyo. Yoyo is a toy and we play with that toy because we enjoy it. Each person is unique so each person enjoys different style of play. If you are true to yourself, which is a good thing in my opinion, your style of yoyoing will be a reflection of what you enjoy doing and it will be unique to you. I say that you put your soul in it. In that sense, yoyoing is a form of communication. Your style is not only bunch of random tricks you do, it tells something about you and your personality. It’s the specific tricks, their combinations, and the way you do them. It says something about what you like and how you think.

Many people recognize this but I am not sure if they get the overall idea. Gentry said many times “you may do a someone’s trick but you will never do it the way he does it.” Same is true the other way around. Even if you copy someone’s trick, you will do it in your unique way and it becomes part of that communication. You can say that your trickset is your language.

This is something I value a lot because it is way more interesting than just the tricks. We try to innovate yoyoing, we create new tricks and stuff, but all this will mean nothing in the future. If you create a new innovative trick today, it will not be as interesting tomorrow. Especially if it is only interestig because it is new. Also — not everyone is gifted to make totally new yoyo tricks, or the fastest tricks or the purest flow or whatever. It also become increasingly harder to be innovative with tricks as we keep exploring the possibility space. Originality will become so hard to achieve, that it will be almost non-existent in some unknown future.

But this language of yours, your style, your soul in your combos — that will never go away. It is something persistent and totally unique to you. Not everyone can be world champion or world trick innovator — but you can be unique and special just by being yourself and true to yourself. This way of thinking about yoyoing, and just generally thinking about the world, is something I value a lot and I find it to be a good way to live and do things. If you want to see specific examples, look at any A-RT stuff from Jensen Kimmit, Charles Haycock and Tyler Vieannau. It’s the strongest example of what I am talking about.

Just look at how much this one combo says about Charles. This combo is easy, funny and stupid. There is nothing technically interesting about it. But the way Charles does it is very unique to him. It fits his personality. It just makes sense and makes me smile because I “understand” in a way.

People are very interested in other people. Relationships and social interactions are very important and interesting to us. With this type of thinking, your yoyoing style becomes part of it. It’s just another way how to connect with people. If I like your tricks — I like you, because you communicate something with them. This is why I value a personal style way more than the originality and innovation, even though you might think otherwise about me.

I have always been very interested in innovating yoyoing, coming up with new tricks and this kind of stuff. But watching a player who is true to himself and yoyoing in his own style is way more insteresting to me than just original and innovative tricks. I rather watch player who is not skilled at all but plays his own style other than someone trying hard to be original by doing tricks that I can see don’t fit him well. But there is still a space for not liking someone’s style. You can’t get along with everybody so you might as well not like everybody’s style — his form of communication. And that is perfectly ok. I still appreciate it even if I don’t like that style.

How I create tricks

Finding your style and making tricks is an interesting topic on itself. If you think the way I described, you typically don’t create tricks intentionally. It’s more like a search process. You play around with the yoyo, but you don’t really try to force any idea. Lot of people get cought up in this process — they find and interesting element or a combo and they just decide it is good and they will practice hard, even if the trick doesn’t really fit them, it’s hard and unnatural. I did that many times as well and I don’t think that is a good way to go. It never works. You must be prepared to throw away ideas, try many things until you find what really fits to you. Many times I found some super cool trick but I threw it away because it just didn’t fit me. Those tricks are usually very hard to practice and they never feel natural. I have tricks that I couldn’t hit consistently after years of practice. That’s the kind of stuff you want to throw away.

If I come to a mount, I don’t just try to make a coolest trick out of it. I play around with different ways to move out and then I just pick the move that feels the most natural to me. Very often it is not the best move I could do from this position. I could do some super cool double slack or something but I often choose a simple bounce and move on because it just feels better to me. And that’s the right mindset to develop your own style. This is also why I try to not say that I create tricks. I find tricks. The process is way more an observation and exploration in playing around with many possibilites of this toy. I wouldn’t really call it creation. I don’t feel like I created my tricks. I found them.

I can tell if people play this way or not. If you play this way, it feels very natural to do your tricks, you can see the person is doing these tricks with ease — even if he misses them, they somehow feel right. On the other hand, if you craft your tricks, building them and “creating” them too hard, forcing them to be something specific, or doing tricks of other people that don’t fit to you, it doesn’t feel right. I can see that tricks don’t fit, they are hard and unnatural to the person and it’s visible. You are communicating that way, too but the communication is negative.

Too often I see people stuck at doing and creating tricks that obviously don’t fit them. Just because they don’t want to give up that cool slack or nice banger they found. Or they will try hard to imitate other players, play in a way that is not theirs. The worst kind of this are those forced tricks where you just decide that you will create double slack now, or you just take a mount and just try hard to create new trick from it. One especially sneaky way is when you have two combos and you want to connect them. That’s silly just by itself, but it happens pretty often when you make a freestyle. I found this to be almost always a very bad mistake (apart from trivial cases). Trying to find out a meaningful way to connect two tricks that is doable and fits your style is almost impossible task. In my case it never worked and I have fall into this trap way too many times. It always felt forced, it was hard to execute and practice and I messed it up on contest.

This might seem like you will always end up with the easiest tricks because they will be easier to stick with. But that’s not what I am trying to say. You can find tricks that fit you that will be very hard actually. The key here is that you don’t need to hit them every time. If the trick fits you, it doesn’t matter. You miss it and move on. Next time you hit it. If the trick fits, you will enjoy doing it no matter how you hit it. You will enjoy practicing it. The whole process will be fun and engaging. With these tricks you will be so excited to hit it that you will try it hundred times in a row and don’t care. Tricks that don’t fit you will often feel terrible and frustrating even trying just a few times. Many of my earlier tricks that got me some attention around 2012/2013 didn’t actually fit me well. That’s why I mostly don’t do them anymore, or I changed them quite a lot since then. Back at that time I tried hard to be innovative, so I came up with what I considered good but I did’t care if it actually fit me or made sense at all.

This also doesn’t mean you should stop trying new things, stepping out of your comfort zone and challenging yourself. That’s a good thing but you need to develop a sense for when to stop chasing a dead end and move on. It’s also good to be careful about other players feedback. Don’t let other people tell you what to do too much. They will tell you what fit them, not you. Listen to them, take feedback, have open mind but decide for yourself. You are not making tricks for them, you are making them for yourself.

I wanted to describe this to you so you understand where I am coming from. Back to the topic.

Why I don’t like the system

The reason why I don’t like the current system is that it destroys this way of playing yoyo, quite heavily. It forces people to play a very specific style. It forces you to hit your tricks to the music, to have diverse tricks, present them in a specific way. You can’t just do a tricks that fit you — you also need to do other stuff you might not enjoy, otherwise you don’t get points. You need to bend, twist and decompose your tricks so they fit the freestyle. Often to the point that they are very unnatural and hard to execute. What is natural and easy for you as a standalone combo now becomes incredibly difficult as you try to hit it with a bit different pace to match the music, or you try to recombine it so it fits the freestyle, move around with it to have space use, look at the audience to have showmanship ormake it faster to get more points in less time.

This creates a weird situation where people who enjoy this very specific style of play have it very easy, while people whose style is different have it way more difficult because they are forced bend their style to match the system. This is the reason why I don’t compete in 1A anymore and I suspect many other people as well. Last few years doing that I was very unhappy and it became extremely difficult to make freestyles for me, because it would either match the system but be completely boring and uninteresting to me, or it would be interesting to me, but not scoring well. What I find ironic is that the second is actually more interesting for players in general. Most people I know actually enjoy more when I do my thing. They want to see original freestyles that stand out. So I was facing the dillema of doing good freestyles for the contest rules or good freestyles for people and me.

This was very frustrating time to me, I couldn’t really handle last few contests I competed in 1A. I practiced some freestyles so much but they turned out badly because they didn’t really fit me and that was really demotivating. I think everyone in the yoyo community is familiar with the “practice paradox”, I think everyone experienced it. You practice hard for some contest, bunch of weeks everyday, and then the contest day comes up and you totally fail, you get a discard or whatever, make a bunch of mistakes and so on. And yet, there are times where you just don’t care, don’t prepare at all, you make a lazy freestyle evening before contest and throw it with almost no mistake the next day.

I always thought this is a “Murphy’s law” and it is somehow related to the stress and expectation and stuff. But right now I think it is very correlated with what I said above. If you make a freestyle day before, you don’t really have time to craft it in the way of the judging system too much. You just take combos you do at that time, throw them in and that’s all. But if you practice that freestyle for a long time, you have all sorts decisions and transformations you do. You reorganize the combos, make them fit well with the system and design the freestyle very carefully to score. In that sense, that lazy freestyle will be much more likely composed of tricks that actually fit your style, so it will be easier to execute than carefully constructed freestyle, where you bent and destroyed all your combos to match them to the system.

Practicing for contests is very time consuming and if you want to commit to it, it is very practical to use tricks that you do when you play casually, so you are practicing those tricks at the same time. This means that if you change your tricks a lot, you will practice those changed versions that don’t really fit you and you basically fool yourself to play in a way that is not yours.

Because fitting your tricks to the system is so hard if they don’t already fit, what people usually do is that they dumb it down and do way easier tricks that are easier to fit to the system and sometimes even worse — they destroy their personal style to fit in to the contest requirements. This to me is very sad and I don’t like to see it. It’s sad to see even my favourite players that I really like to incorporate generic pointless elements and combos to their freestyle, destroying their uniqueness by that. If you are really true to yourself, this personal style, your langauage, it’s the most valuable and most unique thing you have in yoyo — it’s your soul, yoyo soul. No one has the same soul as you. And I don’t like to see players trading their souls for numbers on a spreadsheet.

I am guilty of that too. I made freestyles full of stupid tricks that I don’t like, I even started doing frontstyles again and I had to come up with a horizontal which is kinda crappy. All this just to get at least a bit closer to the system requirements. But in reality this is such a pain to do, because I am throwing away my personal style. I feel like I am betraying myself, doing what I don’t actually like to do. All this added up to an overwhelming bad feeling from most contests I went to. I realized I don’t enjoy competing, it’s crazy stressful, I am forcing myself to do style I don’t feel comfortable with, I hate practicing it and get frustrated very quickly. After two years of struggling like this, I couldn’t handle it anymore so I stopped competing in 1A altogether, and I am much happier since then.

The sad thing for me is that I very much love competing itself. I like going on stage, performing, showing off tricks and making a freestyle. It’s the system and all its requirements that make it so frustrating for me.

Problem with the new system

The problem is that since the new system was introduced, this situation got much worse, significantly. Because there are now much more specific requirements, the style that meets all of these requirements is so narrow that almost everybody needs to bend their style to achieve something. We used to have system with just 1 evaluation for all performance, which allowed for a lot of variation between freestyles. Some freestyles seriously lacked things we considered good, so it was decided to split it into bunch of very specific categories. Now everyone tries to fill out all of those, but the way to fill them all doesn’t allow for much variation. We basically ended ap trading variation between freestyles for variation within one freestyle.

And arguably the reasoning was good — I don’t want to bash someone here. I acknowledge that making these decisions is not easy and it’s hard to predict their effect. We used to have freestyles that were super boring — someone just standing on one place at the back of the stage whole time, doing convoluted tricks that were barely visible. But we had much more variation between those. Some freestyles would be musical, some not. Some would be technical, some would be full of speed combos.

Right now the evaluation requirements force you to incorporate everything into one freestyle, which ends up being very generic — there are not that many options how to do this so we ended up with bunch of freestyles that are basically the same. I noticed that I can’t even pay attention to many of those. Freestyles very often look like filling a checklist — a tax form with a fields: frontstyle, horizontal, speed combo, boom boom laceration combo to the music, hops combo around hands, behind the back horizontal. Then there is this ridiculous trend I observed — people (especially in Japan) seem to think that they need to touch every part of the stage to get high space use score, so the routine is a checklist of all positions on stage — start at the center, go to the left, go the right, get on your knee. Without this even making any sense. I remember watching someone just running like crazy from one part of the stage to the other one like he forgot that he needs to go to the other side. All this just to stand there doing the same thing, but on a different spot. That was pretty funny.

But what is the point of going around the stage just for the sake of going around? All of those ridiculous things are the rules taken out of context and put into their extremes. Remember watching Jensen Kimmit’s freestyle from worlds 2010. He goes around the stage all the time, but it is different. His movement makes sense. He moves with the flow, with the yoyo, it feels natural, meaningful. Same is true for Gentry’s 2014 winning routine and Zach’s 2015 one. But in many freestyles today it is the case that this movement is completely pointless and it’s there just to fulfill the rules. Which were ironically inferred from the good freestyles I’d say. System creators probably observed that good players move on the stage and it makes sense and it’s good, so they put the requirement for moving on stage in the rules. But it’s not the moving on stage part that is important. It’s the meaningful movement on stage. Running around just to fill the checklist looks awkward.

Look at the meaningful movement, especially second and third combo.

When I mentioned 2015 Zach, I want to speak a bit about that. At that time, the problems I described were not as much amplified as they are today. I remember watching Zach practice before finals with Petr Kavka and we were joking about him doing Hook 2.5 because it felt ridiculous. Zach was one of the most innovative players at that time and just a very good example player that really played his style and put his soul into it. It just felt so weird that he would do such a generic trick as Hook 2.5. To me it was one of the very first examples of this trend of bending your personal style for the purpose of the competition. I would even say destroying your style but destroying is very strong word, and I don’t actually know if that is the case here. It felt right in place in the end. Maybe he likes that trick and it is natural to him. It wasn’t such a big deal but there were still few little things in that freestyle that looked like they are there just for the sake of the system, but otherwise they are meaningless and don’t fit his style as much. Nevertheless I think that he managed to do this “style vs system juggle” incredibly well and its still one of my favourite freestyles. I bet it must have been pretty hard to make that freestyle in a way that fits to him (you can see that) and still scores in the current system. To this day it is one of the best examples, but It’s more of an exception.

Look at the 2.5 hook that started it all. And again — meaningful movement. This is just an amazing freestyle.

What’s more important is that with this freestyle he started that hook trend. It immediately got picked up and now you can barely see a freestyle without one of those crazy hooks. And that is just one aspect of this trend of doing generic non-sensical tricks just to fit in the rules and get points. Those hooks are sure points, that’s why people do them. But other than that they look pretty crappy and they are not very interesting. You need to spin and twist your body in such a unnatural way to hit these. It often looks ridiculous.

Anyway, all those mentioned elements that creeped into all freestyles lately are just boring fillers. As I said before, a checklist, a tax form. Freestyles got incredibly boring to me lately. In practice, when I watch freestyle I just turn my brain off when people do this and wait till they actually do something interesting. Sadly it’s nowadays very often that something actually interesting is like 10% of the freestyle and the rest is all those predictable fillers — in the form of generic tricks but also movements on stage, hitting music cues, gunshots, drops etc. And because the system doesn’t leave too much space for personality and uniqueness, most of the freestyles are almost identical, differing in those 10% of actual interesting stuff.

If you actually try to do something special and unique, the freestyle doesn’t score and you loose. And if you try to make it fit more to the system, you either go the generic “dumb it down” route I don’t like, or you go the “fit and twist my tricks to the system” route that ends up being unsustainable because it is incredibly difficult to do.

EYYC 2019 Controversy

I feel like I should mention the EYYC 2019 results here. I think the controversy about Tony vs Kacper is a very interesting case. Lot of people (including me) thought Tony will win. And I don’t want to doubt the actual results here. I understand the results, they are probably on point. The thing is — I like Tony’s style how it is. I like this kind of tech bombing where I can just look at the stage, he does all those crazy tricks and I stare at them amazed. I don’t really need them to fit the music, I don’t need to see him running around. I also don’t need to see him doing frontstyle or behind the back horizontal and I don’t need him to look and wave the crowd and doing silly funny movements. I feel like especially that would be awkward. This is just not his style. His style is what he does now. It fits him and that’s why it is good. And I really appreciate he keeps doing it even though he loose because of it. He only needs a higher performance score to win. But if I think about it — do I really want to see that? If Tony really worked on his performance, sacrificing his own style, would that be better? Trying to pull off behind the back horizontal or trying to hit his crazy tricks to the music? But those tricks were not made to fit the music. They were made to fit him and his style. He would need to do them in a way that is unnatural and hard for him, dumb them down or just not do them and all and replace them with a frontstyle speedcombo or eli hop filler. Honestly, as much as I wish him the best at contests, I don’t want to see this happen.

Just look at the tech, man. Crazy.

On the other hand, let’s talk about Kacper, who won the EYYC. He shines in completely different aspects of the freestyle. He is a different person and you can see that what he does fit him very well. He doesn’t do crazy hard tech like Tony, he does easier tricks but very well to the music. He does funny moves, he seriously look at the crowd and jump around the stage and all that cool stuff. And I like that. I don’t think it is any less valid style of play. I enjoyed both of those freestyles quite a lot. You might argue that it was full of very generic tricks, but there were different qualities in. I don’t need Kacper to do more Tech and bangers. I don’t need him to use complicated mounts or cool slacks to do his thing. I want him to be a funny macho. I want him to do his thing.

That serious look man. What a powerful character. So much energy in this.

Someone wrote an argument in a sense like “Tony could do Kacper’s stuff easily but Kacper couldn’t do Tony’s stuff”. That’s a very wrong statement. It may be true about individual tricks, but it’s completely wrong when it comes to the freestyle. Anyone who ever made a performance oriented freestyle to the music knows how hard that is. Hitting the trick is one thing but pacing it to the music is a whole another level of difficulty. It’s the reason why all players who do a lot performance-oriented freestyles generally do easier tricks, because hitting stuff to the music makes even the easiest tricks much harder. Same is true for other performance aspects like space use. That’s just to point out that Kacper’s freestyle sure wasn’t easy.

Taken that into account, they both couldn’t do each others freestyle just becuase it doesn’t fit them. I doubt Tony could do Kacper’s freestyle ever because that is completely different style of play. And same for Kacper. They would need to twist their natural playstyle so much that they would probably fail.

The problem is that even Kacper’s freestyle, even if it fits the system better, suffers from the effect I described above. Just think about those two freestyles and how would you make them better. If you want them to fit the judging system better, it would mean to bring them closer together — Tony would need more crowd-looks, hitting music cues with easier combos, do a hop body combo and speed frontstyle before a drop. Kacper would need to start doing more tech to get more tech points, some nitty gritty complicated mounts and hard slacks. While this maybe sound ok in theory, it would force them do the unnatural thing for them and it would probably end up bad and awkward.

Forgetting about the system, more logical thing to do would be to let them shine at their specific styles. Let Tony be more tech, let him do what he is good at, let him go in a speed he like, forget the music use and space use, let him do less fillers and more of the stuff we know from his Instagram. And same for Kacper — forget tech points and difficulty and let him focus on the performance, hit more stuff to the music and do more serious looks to the crowd and body movements and just show.

The thing is that both of those freestyles could fit the players better and be more entertaining not by bringing them closer together, but making them even more different. And that’s a good thing. I don’t really want them do be same. I am glad we have a variety of people who are each good at their own thing. I want so see bunch of different freestyles, even though some might be monotonous. It’s better than watching bunch of same freestyles over and over. Instead of forcing players to do some least common denominator style, we should embrace their qualities and let them shine at what they are good at and what they enjoy doing. Once that happens, I will be competing in 1A again.

Who should win?

I see all these opinions about how yoyo contests should be and what qualities should the winner have, but I’d like to see the contests embracing the player’s qualities instead of dictating them. We now have people who shine if their style happens to match the system and then we have people who struggle because their style doesn’t. Just to give one last example. Look at Alexander Bachvarov. He is one of my favourite players of all time. I absolutely love his style, it’s so interesting to watch. It’s pure smooth tech and you can really see that there is his soul in it. It’s absolutely unique. When this guy competes, he doesn’t move on the stage at all. He just plays with his amazing style for a while and goes away. He hardly does any mistakes because he just does exactly what fits to him. But he never has any chance to succeed in the current system. Should he? I don’t know. But all I know is that I would never change anyhing about his style. I just love it, It’s perfect, unique and pure and I don’t want it to be spoiled with a behind the back hop horizontal or random reverse hook 2.5.

Look at that flow. And those tricks. I love it so much.

These opinions and system dictatorship is something that bothers me very much. There is this school of thought that freestyles should be entertaining and fun for non yoyo players. Which on itself is a good idea and I agree partly. But to be honest, I don’t want all freestyles to be like that. I want variation. I want to see Evan’s circus on stage but I also want to see quiet and calm tech from Alexander. I want freestyles that are dumb and funny, but I also want to see freestyles that are interesting for advenced yoyo players. Freestyles from Gentry, Evan or Kacper are fun to watch but they rarely inspire me as when it comes to yoyoing. Freestyles from tech people like Tony, Alexander or Takeshi are often not as fun to watch like a show, but way more interesting technically. They show new possibilities, they inspire me to try new tricks and keep me challenged as a yoyo player. I don’t want to debate whether Kacper should win over Tony or if Evan is better than Takeshi. I want to see both and I don’t want to compare apples to oranges.

This school of thought is a problematic because it focuses too much on non-yoyo players. I know it’s important but let’s face it. Who even cares about yoyo contests? Most people who care are yoyo players. Let’s not play a game of pretending something for outside crowd that is mostly not there. We make contests for ourselves, so let’s make them interesting and fun for ourselves. If yoyo players think Tony is the best yoyo player, why shouldn’t he win? Because non-yoyoers who doesn’t care don’t understand it? Why should non-yoyoers even decide something like that? And what picture does this draw? Do you think that we will attract outsiders by doing something that we don’t like only to attract outsiders? Do you want to be part of the community that focuses more on its looks than on its members in the first place?

I exagerrated here, I know, don’t take these points too seriously. It’s just something I want you to think about. Really. Yoyo contests are our thing, and we should make them interesting for us in the first place. We will not attract people by pretending. We will attract them by our passion. If people see our community excited and happy about what we do, they will naturally be interested, even if they don’t understand completely. And this lack of understanding is often a driving force. We want people to be curious like “I don’t understand why these yoyo players are so excited about this but I want to understand more.” On a side note, outsiders can often appreciate way more than you would think.

But I don’t want to undermine importance of performance too much. I think being outsider-friendly and making fun freestyles is very valuable. The only problem I have is that it just shouldn’t limit our community. We shouldn’t dumb it down and make it less interesting for us, only to make it interesting for the outside world. We should not limit good players in being good players.

Yoyoing is not a sport

The other school of thought that bothers me even more is the “let’s make yoyoing a sport” one. I know there are a lot of people who have this opinion and I understand a bit, but I thing it’s fundamentally flawed. As with the outsider-friendly dogma, this one also seem to push the idea of how yoyoing should be, instead of embracing what it is. It’s even the mission of IYYF — make yoyoing a sport. I don’t really feel like pushing this is the right thing to do. It just feels like a childish wish to me. We want the yoyoing to be on TV alongside ice hockey so we try to push it into this direction. But yoyoing is very different from many other sports. And most importantly, these sports were never “pushed” in this direction. They just became that naturally.

The problem is that sports are by their nature much more measurable thing. You run 100 meters and we measure how quickly. You play ice hockey and we measure how many goals you hit. That’s a very big difference with yoyoing because of scope. If we want to make yoyoing a sport, it’s like saying you want to make kicking a ball a sport — it sounds stupid. There are sports that involve kicking a ball, but those are sports on themselves and they just involve kicking a ball. From our point of view, sports could only be some specific things we do — long sleeper contest, trick ladder or fast challenge would be good candidates.

From this point of view, it even sounds stupid to say “World yoyo champion”, because yoyoing itself is not a sport. It’s a general activity. Our world champion is champion in a very specific thing that involves yoyoing in it. It’s actually so specific that I would hesitate to call it “yoyo champion”. It’s like finding a “World Music Champion” by letting everyone play specific song on piano as fast as possible. Why fast? Why on piano? Why this specific song? How does this contest prove anything? Does it even make sense to say “Music Champion?”

The problem with our way of making contests is that they can hardly become true sports if we continue to do them the way we do. I know there is this everlasting comparision with figure skating but I don’t think that is a good one, and that is not a good example of typical sport anyway. We are not figue skating, we are yoyo. If we want to make it a real sport, we can’t just call it yoyo. Some very specific and clearly defined competitions can be sports — like the fast challenge or ladder. Freestylish yoyoing can be sport maybe but to be a true sport, it must be judged much more rigorously. Eliminating subjectivity and measuring very specific things about the freeestyle. Which automatically creates the problem I described in this whole rant. It will very likely push us in the direction of unified style because it’s almost impossible to really compare such different styles like Tony’s and Kacper’s. And now you see where is the new system coming from and where it is going and why — it’s just pushing us this direction. And it is in contradiction with the “outsider-friendly” dogma. If you want to make yoyoing a sport, you probably need remove a lot of those fun performance elements, because they are not measurable well.

Notice that the thing I described I value the most — this personality and uniqueness of each player — has nothing to do with this sport stuff. Even in other sports it’s usually meaningless to talk about style or personality. Runners have only one style, they just run. There are strategies in sports like ice hockey, but it would be silly to call them a personal style or a form of communication. And that is pretty bad if we want to make yoyo a sport. At least if you ask me, because I consider it to be one of the most important and interesting aspects of yoyoing.

I think that the yoyoing we do, the thing we usually call yoyoing, this personal playing yoyo, is more like an art. And art is a form of communication. There is nothing wrong with making contests and sports out of it — there are contests and sports made out of other types of art. But those sports are standalone things, there is no sport we call painting or sport we call music. In the end everyone listens to music he likes, look for pictures and painting he likes and watch yoyo players he likes.

How to get out of this?

This is mostly what I wanted to say. I consider this to be a big problem and I suspect it is part of the reason for massive decline in yoyo community in recent years which is happening in Europe and especially in Czech Republic. I don’t think this is be the only cause but I think it doesn’t help it either. I mentioned this in the first video in my judging series. I talked about the worst case scenario where people don’t like how system works, so they stop competing, don’t go to contests and stop playing altogether. I don’t think it’s as far from truth as I have put it in there. I didn’t want to sound so negative but I think our system might be a big factor in this whole decline. It is certainly the reason I don’t compete and also the reason why some of my friends don’t compete. And as I said, contests are a big motivator, so if you don’t go there, you’re less likely to continue playing.

I’ve spent pretty long time ranting here, so the natural question is how to get out of this?

As I said, I think we shouldn’t dictate how to play yoyo. We shouldn’t force one specific style. We should embrace the variety of styles and let people play yoyo how they want and let them master their specific style.

If we want to do this on competition level, one way to do it is to split yoyo contests into more focused divisions. This is especially important if we really want to make some sport out of it. Yoyo show is more a circus than a sport. Sport is composed of some measurable activites — I think a good example here would be athletics. It’s branched into big bunch of little measurable activites. It’s meaningless to say World Running Champion, because running is such a broad activity. That’s why there are bunch of specific running disciplines, and you can be champion in one of those.

Another interesting way to do this at competition level is to have a system with conflicting requirements. System where focusing on one scoring category inevitably lowers score in another category. You could get points for being slow but also for being fast for example. Our system has a little bit of that element but not much. This would be very challenging to design I suppose, because we would need to find out equivalence on different domains to compare players. Very much like we have to figure out already — Comparing players who do totally different things. But if we do this rigorously, it could work. Maybe. I am not sure. A slight variation of that is something that works in AP category — giving multiple awards for different things.

Anyway, this is something we need to solve in my opinion. Otherwise yoyoing will die altogether. At least competitive yoyoing, which is a big motivator for yoyoing in general. This is the reason I started the judging series on youtube where I try to find the solution in less opinionated way. I don’t really know the answer but I want to figure it out with all of you. It’s our community, let’s stop chasing some imaginary goals, let’s embrace what we like to do and make the system we enjoy competing in.

PS:

Youtube series about judging:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK1e9Qz2Doo&