The challenge within a challenge poll🤔

General Yo-Yo
1

It pretty much goes without saying that a primary challenge of yo-yoing is learning tricks.

And each and every one of us, seem to find ‘limitations’ with each yo-yo we throw.

And endless list no doubt: doesn’t spin long enough for a certain combo, too big, too wide, too heavy, gap too narrow, no hand grinds, thumb grinds, finger grind lip, wrong shape, no float, too much float, doesn’t gyro well, infinity………:scream_cat:

This topic is about that ‘other’ challenge.

This other challenge is about the yo-yo players that find just as much or more adventure in just picking up a yo-yo ‘with limitations’ and seeing just what kinda tricks you can SQUEEZE out of it?

Like doing Spirit Bomb on a fixed axle. Or trying to loop with 1A yo-yos. Or trying to do 4A with a looping yo-yo. Or trying to do 4A with Raiders. Trying to do a seriously loooong combo on a seriously sucky yo-yo, lol. Or…. Trying a hard trick you have wired already, but with a catch or two: throwing the trick with a lower performance yo-yo……and> eyes closed.

….Think of it this way> You go to a golf course and deliberately use the wrong club for the shot, just to ‘see’ if you can make it work.

I just start thinking about that last night. I was at work and only brought 720’s with me. After I did some looping, I looked in my bag and ‘no 1A yo-yo to be found🙀’. So I just started to try pulling off 1A tricks with a looping yo-yo, haha.

So, does anybody care to share your stubborn but adventurous side and share any stories/thoughts on deliberately using a yo-yo that you would personally give a low performance rating, but you purposely try to squeeze tricks out of it that shouldn’t be possible/probable?

Just….,for the challenge.

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Yea. This is a big big part of how i derive a sense of fun and accomplishment from yoyo.

Rail combo using a stock, responsive freehand 1.

String tricks on fixies are a blast too. Its a high hardly any other thing matches.

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Before I learned the limitations of my first yoyo ever which I think wasn’t a good choice I tried the same thing. this was about 16 years ago now when I had first gotten into yoyoing and bought a Chain Reactor.

I had no idea what looping was, or what butterfly shape was, and what it helped with, or what a good sized yoyo for 1A was. I just saw a video one day on youtube and was hooked.

I quickly learned what I wasn’t able to do very well with that little yoyo.

Looping was alright, offstring was a no no, 5A wasn’t even a thing in my mind yet, and 3A was much too expensive for me. So I tried 1A tricks and man did that yoyo stink for 1A, or maybe I did.

I tried trapeze after trapeze, boing-y-boing, skin the gerbil, atom smasher and all it left me was bruised knuckles and a brusied ego. I wish I’d gotten my x-convict first than the Chain reactor.

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It’s been ~3 years since I first learned to bind and my preferences have shifted from “how does it perform?” to “how does it feel?”

This seems to be a trend with “casual” throwers like myself. Eventually, we all start craving those sweet organics. I think it’s something about the limitations that make them more fun. I love how the “limiting“ factors of a yoyo can dictate the way I interact with it and lead to discovering new elements or ways of performing ingrained tricks that I may not have thought of before.

For me, any yoyo that has things like “power”, “stability”, “wide catch zone” and “long spin times” in the description makes me yawn so hard I almost fall out of my chair. Next!

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i tried to learn cold fusion on a yomega saber wing. that was just my favorite yoyo i had at the time that i could land all prior tricks on, i didn’t do it thinking it would be extra challenging since the trick was hard imo at the time too… i found it was too light and too responsive to actually pull it off most of the time, unless you have a perfect hard spin and keep your strings lazer straight, and movements very smooth, etc. i moved on to other yoyos to make the trick easier and more fun to execute. i would say i have an affinity for organics and it seems like that makes almost any string trick harder than say a competition v or h profile. can’t be slinging strings allover the high sidewalls without killing your spin and deflecting off center…

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would like to see someone deliberately (and successfully) try to land a finger spin on a wood fixie.

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I have a original YYF Popstar. Small but heavy, c bearing, mini throw. I try to do all my normal tricks on it. Helps improve my accuracy and attention.

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