That is a good question to bring out the Yoyo philosophers. I would say a trick is made of elements and a combo is combined tricks and maybe elements. That said, I really don’t know anything, so, take my idea for what it is worth.
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I feel like every combo is a trick but every trick is not a combo.
Like lacerations are just tricks, they don’t combine multiple elements or tricks together, whereas most speed combos are a series of mounts and tricks/elements tied together to create a larger trick.
Taking that further, doing a series of lacerations together would be a combo.
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mind… blown
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I often wonder the same thing. I think I’m starting to have an answer forming in my brain, but it’s not entirely concrete yet.
The short answer is, you know it when you see it. But I find it very hard to “see” what I myself am doing. I rarely film myself, but when I do I sometimes think “yeah, that’s a trick… more accurately the start of one”. Combos I can do. Tricks I have trouble figuring out how to finish. I usually get stuck on an element that I can’t figure out how to transition out of, without my “trick” turning into a combo.
But I have to know, what was the slack element @MarkD suggested? Slacks are I think my overall largest weak point. I can do a few decent slack tricks, but I don’t really do any decent slack combos.
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Brother Slack:
My fave slack trick though is Branding, there’s an entire doc pop episode about it:
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Honestly I have no clue what compromises a “trick”. Im kind of with twitch here with the confusion. I take unique elements from certain tricks to create my own combos, but perhaps my different take on these elements compromises a trick? If this was the first time some of these elements were created, it would be considered a named trick. So under yoyo’s current terminology tricks depend on knowledge of yoyo trick history, which to me is proof that the definition of what a “trick” is, is actually quite tenuous. I think of skateboarding when it comes to tricks, and a kickflip to a crooked grind is a combo of two tricks. In yoyo, something like spirit bomb is actually comprised of a wrist mount among other things, and is more of a label for a combo than being a singular “trick” imo. For the past few months I have been developing my yoyo skills independently of learning new tricks and have just been combining elements I know at random to create my own style. I have been using tons of elements from tricks I know, but rarely execute the trick traditionally. Am I not doing tricks? Imo something like Rewind isn’t a trick; it is a combo of several mounts.
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Ah, these are great. These are two I actually do use. Those, ninja vanish, and whip to wrist mount(cheese whip) are pretty much the extent of the slacks I can combo with—brother slack to NV is my favorite, best slack combo I can do.
And it took me a long time to combo with brother slack. Not sure why… Awesome that @twitch77 is taking to it so quickly.
I can do a bunch of pretty basic slack tricks like jade whip, iron whip, several I don’t know the name of, basic hooks, but I’ve never really built any combos with them because they just don’t flow(or I just don’t know how).
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The way I see it: Spirit Bomb is a trick, Rewind is just a series of mounts and absolutely not a “real” trick. I couldn’t tell you exactly why I see Spirit Bomb as a trick, but not Rewind. It’s very arbitrary and maybe the only answers are everyone’s own personal opinions.
But to me I don’t think it matters. I don’t care if I’m learning a trick or a combo that has its own name.
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What I said above is every combo is a trick, not every trick is a combo.
Just because a combo includes multiple tricks and mounts doesn’t mean it isn’t a trick on its own. Otherwise almost nothing is a trick. Like kwyjibo is just trapeze, hops and some rolls by that standard.
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By that standard… 100 Eli hops in a row is a trick. That doesn’t make sense to me. That’s a long (boring) combo, not a trick.
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Personally I have always just had two designations. Tricks are something short with a defined beginning and end that one would do the same every time they did it. This would definetly include combos. The other is freestyling which would be a full routine or just vamping as you go. I try not to get to caught up in the definitions though as long as I’m enjoying it and so is anybody watching. This is one of those things that there are going to be varying opinions on and is going to be hard to pin down to a definition everyone can agree on.
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Absolutely. Like I said I don’t think it really matters all that much, but it’s interesting to hear other people’s opinions regardless. Sometimes you can find insight in the most mundane things.
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No, because you’re not including multiple elements that you are transitioning to and from in a way that hasn’t been done before. When Kwyjibo was created obviously it hadn’t been done before. But all the elements involved had. They were just assembled in a new way. That’s completely different than just repeating one specific trick over and over again. It’s not combining anything in a new way.
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I suspect the word “trick” started losing its descriptive power as unresponsive play started to become more prevalent and combos and freestyling became more possible and commonplace. It’s just not common to see small, self-contained chunks these days as it was back when you weren’t guaranteed minutes of sleep time to work through a combo.
That said, I think we can construct a definition of the word “trick” that would be meaningful and useful.
For me, this gets at the root of it. A trick only becomes a trick when someone says “Hey, this is called X and these are the exact steps to do it.” This includes combos like Skin The Gerbil and IMO things like Rewind that are just a series of mounts (because honestly, aren’t most tricks these days just a series of mounts, hops, etc?) Free styling IMO is like riffing in music. It’s obviously still music but what differentiates a song from improvisation is that the song is a formalized, repeatable piece of music. Same with tricks: they’re formalized series of elements with a defined beginning and end and a correct way of doing them.
IMO when constructing our definitions, it’s useful to use the Trick Ladder’s rule of beginning with a throw and ending with the yoyo returning to the throw hand via a bind or tug return.
I think this is the other element of a meaningful definition of “trick:” uniqueness. Take Skin The Matrix by Mr. YoYoThrower. It’s elements from Skin The Gerbil but with Matrix thrown in a couple of places. But it’s a discrete trick from Skin The Gerbil because it combines those elements in a unique way that hasn’t been done before and codifies its into a formalized set of actions.
So I’d posit the following definitions:
Trick - a formalized and named set of movements, beginning with a throw and concluding with the yoyo returning to the hand, that combines its various elements in a way that had not been done before.
Element - component part of a trick that begins or concludes with a transition to or from another element. This may include what would otherwise be defined as a trick should it have begun with a throw and ended with the yoyo returning to the throw hand.
Combo - a trick comprised of a series of elements
Freestyle/riffing - the ad hoc, un-formalized combining of different elements, often with the purpose of creating a new trick.
These probably need a bit of tweaking/cleaning up but I think this could work for when we need more definition.
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Fantastic write up @nonja121!
And I think @T4t3z0r88 nailed it with this…
And going by this definition, it means I am working on creating my own tricks…which feels cool as hell! 
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i think a reasonable explanation is this:
a group of elements= a trick
a group of tricks and elements= combo.
so let’s say you made a combination of elements that form a trick, if that trick is combined with another trick you had already made, its a combo.
meta combos for example. it consists of a combination of tricks, with the tricks consisting of certain elements. A zach gormley upside down gt mount tension slack, to the undercut for a reverse gt, to a hop to a green triangle, to the fake gt, to the fake gt suicide, etc. the zach gormley tension slack is already considered a trick, but it was combined with elements and other tricks to form a combo.
In conclusion,
It depends on the player, and which tricks he considers as an element, a trick, or a combo.
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My only problem with this is that the definition of “trick” is more or less separated from the definitions of “element” and “combo”. I feel those should not be separated. Aside from that, those descriptions are spot on. I’d go with an even more generalized description and say that a “trick” can be any element or a combo that has been given a name. The term “trick” can also be used when speaking about both elements and combos in a general, non-specific way.
I think this is a great way of summarizing everything lol.
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I agree with everything you said 100%. It is exactly why I can’t for the life of me define what a “trick” truly is. Some tricks are clearly tricks, but others seem like combos, others just elements, and then you have the classics, which may be a combination of both, and many people know them because of their seniority in the community, but is hard/impossible for a newcomer to recognize without studying some trick history.
I feel like if you don’t individualize every trick like skateboarding, you can’t properly define a trick. A kickflip to crooked grind is always just that (even if some combos are associated with some skater), but yoyoers seem to think that their variations compromise one “trick”, and I just don’t like that definition. Some yoyo tricks are defined by element combos, and others aren’t. What is the difference? Some arbitrary line that I can’t delineate apparently.
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The reason why I separated out trick and element is because some people seemed to be saying that certain things were elements and not tricks in a general sense devoid of whether they were used as part of a combo or as a stand-alone thing. So I took a page out of the trick ladder’s definition of a complete trick to differentiate between something like the Matrix would be called a trick and when it would be called an element.
I don’t see how I divorced “combo” and “trick”? I said explicitly that a combo is a trick with multiple elements. That’s to differentiate Skin The Gerbil from Around The World, which is exactly what you quoted from @Durfee
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Two questions for anyone in the know:
- Why are so many people selling off their 2sick Blockades?
- Why is the UNPRLD Abduction so bloody heavy?
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