Hmm, I guess this is probably a good place to put Elephark’s Abridged Secret Guide to Winning (salt to taste)—aimed chiefly at getting through preliminaries:
Your priorities should go something like this, in this order, and not in any other order:
- Consistency
- Efficiency
- Variety
- Difficulty
The first rule of winning freestyles is consistency. I’ll say it again. The first rule of winning freestyles is consistency. So what should you do about it? Above all else, focus on consistency. Pick tricks you can do, then practice them until you can’t mess them up. Why? Because messing up is worse than doing nothing, both math-wise and performance-wise. And when you get onstage your chances of messing things up multiply. Two times zero is zero. Five times zero is zero. Zero is good. Get your trick failure rate to zero.
The second rule, which often goes hand-in-hand with speed but is distinct from it, is efficiency—not wasting time. Time is quite important in freestyles because you really don’t have very much of it. Restarting your yoyo is dangerous. Switching yoyos can drop you a place or two. Aside from that: extra throws, adjusting string, pausing before or after your tricks, pausing between or during your tricks, showing your triangles excessively, having to think about what your next trick is, and so forth. Time-wasting behaviors creep in without you realizing it sometimes. Tape yourself freestyling, then compare it to a world-winning freestyle. Be critical and honest, and pay attention to the differences you see. The guys who win are also the ones who can cram all sorts of points in every conceivable space. Even easy little pinwheels and things hardly take any extra time but can net you points if you can make them look worth it. A few points here and there can add up real quick.
Got that? Okay, next thing you want to do is put in some variety. By this I mean you need to make sure you have lots of different kinds of tricks in your routine. If two tricks start with the same mount, either find two different ways into it or ditch one. Don’t repeat anything if you can help it, and avoid using any tricks that look like any of your other tricks. The advantages are threefold: you’ll increase your chances of having your tricks appeal to any given yoyoer (and hence judge), you’ll decrease your chances of missing potential clicks due to repeated stuff, and you’ll also cash in on extra performance points. Those are starting to get more important these days, so don’t ignore them.
After you have…ahem. AFTER you have those down, start focusing on the difficulty of your tricks. It’s a delicate balancing act. The harder and/or flashier the tricks, the more they’re worth—but also the riskier. So you have to pick a set of tricks that are high enough above the basics to get points, but not so hard that you can’t consistently do them. You can increase efficiency (more points faster) by increasing speed, and that also increases difficulty. Know your weaknesses and manage your difficulty. Don’t bite off more than you can chew, or you will choke onstage and you’ll probably be mad at yourself for months because you know you very well could’ve done better. One of the saddest sights, in my opinion, is seeing someone who should be taking top 5 choke hard and get 10th or 15th or 20th.
Generally speaking, contests are more for the hanging out than the actual competition part. A lot of the time people (myself included) will focus way too much on the actual competition part. Don’t neglect the hanging out part. You’re doing yourself a disservice if you do.