I’m practicing a pretty easy slack trick called “Gondola”. I religiously check for neutral string tension before practicing it, but by the time I’m in the Houdini Mount, I’m already creating tension somehow. “Fine,” I think, “I’ll actually make it a twist or two too loose to compensate… I should then be neutral in the Houdini”.
No luck. I have only 3 or 4 twists in the slack, but it’s enough that I’m not reliably hitting my nth index finger. I tried the trick with a brand-new string and it was ridiculously easy to hit with a nice open loop. But after a few minutes of play, testing for neutral on my string must not be giving accurate results and I can’t seem to reproduce that nice open loop.
The few times I’ve tried Revolutions, I also get twists.
I must be missing something fundamental… So, the questions that come up for me are:
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What’s the most accurate way to test for neutral? I throw a sleeper (or not, if my yoyo is already dead), pinch as close as I can to the yoyo, and let the string hang loose between the pinch and my throw hand, fairly close together. It doesn’t twist, it’s just a nice “U” shape. Anything better? It’s not rocket surgery; I don’t know how you could test better than that.
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Does the speed of the throw affect the loop? I’ve seen people throwing beautiful slow slacks around, and I like this approach. But the slower I am, the more opportunity there seems to be to get a twist.
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All tricks will eventually create tension. How the heck do people throw these into the middle of long combos? I can’t imagine getting to the middle of a trick and feeling confident that I’ll get a nice loop of string when I try to throw a slack, and yet people seem to do it often enough.
Am I just ridiculously unskilled? Do other people have similar problems?
I should mention that the results aren’t much different from string to string. Fat Kitty, Bulk Poly, Slick 6, Toxic… I manage to mess it up on whatever string type I try.