Oh btw, there was (I am completely serious) a group of people talking about how good the AC1 was and how it is in their top 3 and how they want to get their hands on an AC2 so badly, it was about seven people talking about it. I’m not joking, this ackchuyally happened.
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If Evan made that triple hook that he can normally hit he would have won. He then went on to land one in horizontal play, which was insane. He lost this over one trick he can normally land, but instead missed it twice in a row. It’s really unfortunate for him.
I agree with you though. Too many what ifs in a world of what is’s.
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And that’s a major downside to single-elimination events. You don’t get to demonstrate how good you are in an overall sense, but only how good you are in that one single stretch of 3 minutes.
It’s not much different than, say, the NFL, where a team can go undefeated during the regular season and the playoffs and not be at their best during the Superbowl and lose to a team that was barely over .500 but absolutely brought it on the day that counted most.
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This is true. I think salty people need to realize that Gentry and Evan scored almost exactly the same, and Gentry actually went cleaner than evan according to the Tech Score, and thats why he won.
You can literally pinpoint the moment Evan lost the contest when he missed 3 out of 4 high-level hooks starting at 2:16. Those are 6 whole points he didn’t score and -3 or even -6 points out of his tech score depending on the judge. I’m sure that if he would have landed those, he would have won ): .
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In a live stream later in the night, Ben (yyfben) was teasing Evan and asked him to do the combo that lost him the contest, and he hit it flawlessly. Evan looked so defeated lol
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Gentry killed it. Congrats to him, he knows how to win and he’s the skills to keep it up but does that mean everyone has to like his FS?
It’s like Mickey in his prime - a winning formula gets dialed in and people get tired of it and start grumbling about it.
I understand that no one wants to hear any criticism , but by my count as of now-ish, on Gentry’s FS YouTube video there were like 8 fully negative comments and 12 comments saying stuff like “all this hate is sad” - in effect this just draws more attention to the negative stuff, amplifying it even further.
But hey - there’s a point in the “hate” (I think, maybe) about a scoring system that favors dialed-in performances and quantity. Gentry, like Mickey before him, knows how, and can, consistently deliver what the scoring system demands better than everyone else.
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Maybe so, but that is an indictment of the scoring system, not Gentry as a yoyoer or a champion. He was smart and not only played to his strengths, but put together a routine that took advantage of the current scoring rules and it paid off. People can argue all day that with a different scoring system Gentry might not have won, but until we get a different scoring system and see Gentry compete with it, we’ll never know.
It will be interesting to see if all the speculation and debate over scoring, both in 1a and 4a, drives a change in the rules, or if it will all just be pissing in the wind.
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Right, but I thought I was pretty clear in my indictment of the scoring system, not Gentry (or Mickey for that matter).
That said, complaints about this stuff have existed for a long time but it doesn’t seem that it changes much.
My bigger point is that I think it is a shame that criticism is not well-practiced or received online because it gets reduced to “hate” if someone doesn’t like something. It’s boring. The good news is that in more thoughtful corners (not youtube), we can discuss it more so it doesn’t have to be just pissing in the wind.
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Ok, for example, do we still reward “trick innovator of the year” anymore, or is that no more?
Because it would be nice to give creative yoyoing some strong shine, somewhere.
Competition is good for creativity, for sure. But if the creative yoyoers don’t have a competitive platform, then this stuff is just on instagram or in occasional youtube videos or whatever.
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I just think part of the skill lies in designing a routine that rides the line of being difficult enough to score well without being so difficult you risk missing tricks. So you do get to show how good you are overall when it comes to designing and executing a freestyle. If you have tricks you are at risk of missing and you miss them it means the other person did better than you did.
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Yeah, I do agree with that. But is it “fair” that a player should lose the title because that 1 time out of 10 that they miss an important trick or combo happens in the one single performance that decides it all? At least in Baseball there as many as seven opportunities for skill to overcome flukes or bad luck and show who truly is “best” during the World Series.
There are a number of sports that have changed their championship-deciding formats away from one that is more statistically valid to one that is more appealing to viewers and hence more lucrative (especially with television broadcast rights involved). Deciding which team is truly “best” for a particular season has become much more debatable simply because the format to deciding a champion has been statistically compromised.
Unfortunately, yoyoing only has, on average, three significant competitions for establishing rankings (regional, national, and world contests). That hardly constitutes a “season” in which players could accumulate points and win a world title by simply earning the most (the way the penant used to be decided in Baseball, or the champion was decided in NASCAR, before both went to a “playoff” format). The fact that there are so few performances available from which to determine “the best” in yoyoing almost guarantees that it gets decided by who happened to be the most mistake-free in one single performance. I don’t think yoyoing will ever have the luxury of using any other method.
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That’s just plain mean.
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I’m not saying whether I agree or disagree with the current format we have, I’m just saying everyone that is competing knows what they’re signing up for going in. If you pick riskier tricks to go for a higher score, you’re accepting that you could miss those tricks and it could cost you a win.
If it’s game 7 of the NHL finals and you’re down by 1 and have a chance to tie the game and miss, it doesn’t matter if you had the highest shooting percentage in the league the last 5 regular seasons, you still missed.
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Where are the women’s freestyle videos? I keep hearing Betty and Tessa killed it, bit I guess the yoyo video archive doesn’t post the ladies?
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Yes, it is true that the format applies equally to all the players and they all know what they are signing up for. I’m not saying it is unfair, only that it isn’t as statistically valid a way of determining “best” as other formats, that’s all. And that fans ought to “comment” with this understanding in mind as they lash out at each other over who is “actually” the best.
In the World Series, the better team has seven chances to prove it by winning a simple majority of those games. The fact that two teams went to seven games and then it came down to a final at-bat tells you very clearly how evenly matched the two teams were, and that one is only barely more “the best” than the other. The same can’t be said of, say, a Superbowl title that is won by a single point, or a NASCAR championship that is lost because the dominant car blows a tire running over debris on the last lap at Homestead.
In the context of this year’s Worlds, we have the two top players only separated by 0.3 points, and one could argue that this tiny separation demonstrates how evenly matched the were, if it weren’t for the fact that a single contest does not provide enough samples to arrive at that conclusion (statistically speaking).
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Absolutely. There are people in every individual sport that have missed championships over something small. Golfers lose 72 hole majors over a short putt and Olympic swimmers have missed gold by a hundredth of a second. It’s about who shows up on game day.
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But it does give one the best facial reactions from a Patriots fan by just saying 18 and 1 to them. 
That’s the reality, yes. But my point is that these contests are not statistically valid means of determining who is “best”. A determination that is very much on the minds and in the hearts of fans, as evidenced by how much they argue over who is best. I just think fans would do well to understand how statistically invalid most contest formats are and not lean on them to prove, one way or the other, who is best at their given sport.
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They’re a combination of who is the best and who puts in the most time and effort to make their routine flawless. The more practiced a trick is the less likely you are to miss it.
I think competitions judge completely fine. I would replace the showmanship eval with a rarity one but that’s the only change I would make
Who was the MC? Dudebro was SO hyped. Wish I was that excited about anything.
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