How the scoring system work in 2A competitions?
Yesterday I saw a wonderful video of Naoki Okuma performs in 2023JN. His performance looked great in my eyes, he didn’t make any mistake, and the audience cheered for him a lot of time in the performance, but he didn’t win the competiton. Not even in Top 3, he ended up at the 7th place . Why?
Another question is that in competitive 2A , are looping tricks are the compulsory tricks to gain high score? I haven’t seen any performance of 2A that doesn’t use looping tricks.
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The thing with the current judging system is, every trick/variation are scored individually, so it’s not just about the quality of the trick but the quantity also matters.
To put simply if you can do 90 tricks and each scored 1, you will have the same score as someone who does 30 banger tricks that each scored 3.
Now, with 2A, doing multiple wrap variations simply takes less time than loop variations. Assuming we are comparing loop variations to wrap variations of similar difficulty, and let’s say the player loops at the same speed, you can normally do more wrap variations than loop variations. The nature of some loop variations simply require multiple loops before it counts as “one” variation, and thus only scored once.
For example the trick fountain can be broken down into three elements, hop the fence, punching bag, and vertical punch. But the problem is you can’t do fountain in three loops (hops), you normally need 5-6 loops but it will only be scored as 3 trick variations, so a few tenth of a second wasted there. However with wrap tricks you can always do a different variation of wraps for each loop, and thus it is possible to do 5 elements on the same 5 loops.
This is also sort of what happens with Hajime Miura 4A few years back, cool tricks is not always the same as contest winning tricks.
As much as I love Naoki’s tricks (it is my favorite freestyle of JN), unfortunately those are not the tricks that “push the limit” of the judging system.
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