Congrats @Gentry_Stein and @Evan_Nagao !!! Within the margin of error so I would say we have two first place worlds winners here 
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I know itâs difficult and subjective, but there should be an award for whoever does the most difficult stuff.
Maybe even a sub-category where a freestyle is judged on difficulty and missing tricks isnât penalized as much.
Iâm telling you, that would advance yoyoing a lot because I canât imagine what some of these guys would do if they didnât only attempt stuff that they can nail super consistently.
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Congrats to Gentry!
I remember someone mentioning in a thread earlier how the yoyo community is as toxic as any other community out there. I disagreed, but now im more inclined to agree with him after seeing all the backlash regarding the results of this contest.
Not that I think Gentryâs freestyle was boring or anything (I dont), but this is not a contest of who has the coolest, hardest, most innovative routine; it is a contest based on judged parameters. Competition yoyoing being criticized for not fully embracing trick creativity while forcing players to adhere to a meta is not exactly a new idea. I have seen this conversation for years, and a lot of people here are far more interested in the A-RT guysâ next video than they are a winning contest routine. Gentry played the contest better than anyone and won as a result. If players donât want to optimize competition routines for the highest possible scoring, then they donât deserve to win under these rules.
@moby323 - sadly this wont happen in a contest environment. Judging needs rules. Yoyo exhibitions without awards would be the only way to pull it off. Also nobody is stopping these guys from recording videos and posted them online. I know it isnt the same because they arenât up on a stage in front of a live audience, but any contest will need rules that will inevitably restrict creativity.
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Seriously. Itâs like getting mad at a tennis player winning a point because your favorite player kept hitting the ball in the doubles lane. Like if they were playing doubles those would have been great shots but theyâre not.
Maybe your favorite player isnât as good at designing a high scoring routine, which is a skill regardless of whether or not itâs the type of yoyoing you value.
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I also agree with this wholeheartedly. People need to stop treating contest yoyoing like itâs a yo-yo video. They arenât demonstrating theyâre ability to innovate, theyâre demonstrating how consistently they can execute a high skill routine.
Thereâs a reason the And One members never made it to the NBA. The skills for flashy street ball donât necessarily translate to the professional level. Someone that makes innovative tricks that require multiple takes to nail is still impressive, but that doesnât mean they can put together a winning routine.
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At a particular Contest; on a particular day; one player bested his own Teammate by .3 of a single point.
27 theories on why the outcome should have been one way or another; can be countered by 27 more views on why the first 27 views are âmisguidedâ.
âŚIf you wanted Gentry to win; then you can easily justify why you feel he won by simply not taking risks at missing bangers.
⌠If you wanted Evan to win; you can simply justify his loss by the fact that he didnât have his best game available for at least âseveral seconds of those long three minutesâ.
⌠The Judges? The amazing guys that go out of their way to pretty much volunteer to do a thankless job to be criticized for whatever the outcomes of Contests? The Scoring system that the Judges follow; that may help or hinder either what they see or feel should or shouldnât âcountâ?
Should âweâ all question the results because we really wanted the âother guyâ to win?
In reality; the âpressureâ is on everybody but us . All of us are backseat drivers. All of us supposedly feel we see things the Judges donât see. (And in certain instances; that may be true. Our views of the videos may actually give a broader perspective than the Judges have; sitting where they sit and viewing from their particular angle).
And there are certainly no laws against playing the âif gameâ. Taking the, âThis is what he should have done game. Second guessing the Judges about what they should have or shouldnât have noticed or scored.
âŚThis is what happened. At the 2019 World Yoyo Contest in August; 2 Amazing Yoyo players; from the same Team; spent a sum total of 6 minutes on final freestyles.
And one bested the other by less than half a point.
An Excellent day for both and a Great day for Team YoYoFactory.
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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. Iâm 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. Itâs really unfortunate for him.
I agree with you though. Too many what ifs in a world of what isâs.
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And thatâs a major downside to single-elimination events. You donât 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.
Itâs 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 didnât score and -3 or even -6 points out of his tech score depending on the judge. Iâm 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 heâs the skills to keep it up but does that mean everyone has to like his FS?
Itâs 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 Gentryâs FS YouTube video there were like 8 fully negative comments and 12 comments saying stuff like âall this hate is sadâ - in effect this just draws more attention to the negative stuff, amplifying it even further.
But hey - thereâs a point in the âhateâ (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, weâll 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 doesnât 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 âhateâ if someone doesnât like something. Itâs boring. The good news is that in more thoughtful corners (not youtube), we can discuss it more so it doesnât have to be just pissing in the wind.
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Ok, for example, do we still reward âtrick innovator of the yearâ 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 donât 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 âfairâ 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 âbestâ 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 âbestâ 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 âseasonâ 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 âplayoffâ format). The fact that there are so few performances available from which to determine âthe bestâ in yoyoing almost guarantees that it gets decided by who happened to be the most mistake-free in one single performance. I donât think yoyoing will ever have the luxury of using any other method.
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Thatâs just plain mean.
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Iâm not saying whether I agree or disagree with the current format we have, Iâm just saying everyone that is competing knows what theyâre signing up for going in. If you pick riskier tricks to go for a higher score, youâre accepting that you could miss those tricks and it could cost you a win.
If itâs game 7 of the NHL finals and youâre down by 1 and have a chance to tie the game and miss, it doesnât 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 womenâs freestyle videos? I keep hearing Betty and Tessa killed it, bit I guess the yoyo video archive doesnât post the ladies?
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