Tricks

Astrojax Gateway Tricks

Some of the "Gateway Tricks" shown in the video include:

0:24 - 0:24 -- EB Wrap -- EB stands for End Ball. Wraps are when the string wraps around your finger a couple of times. When you develop control of this you can decide how many times you want it to wrap around your finger, and make it stop and reverse in a nice controlled way.

0:55 - 0:58 -- FLO Pongs -- FLO is a term we sometimes use for the middle ball. (This is a sort of pun, invented by a player named Myc Wyse, for the terms ebb and flow.) For FLO Pongs you hold an EB in each hand. Unlike a Wrap where the string wraps a few times around a finger or the arm, the Pong is an immediate bounce/reverse of direction when the string (and usually the ball) contacts the finger or arm. As shown at 1:30, this can even be done on the shoulder.

1:05 - 1:20 -- FLO Swings -- With FLO Pongs you hold an EB in each hand and just swing the FLO. It can swing to the outside of the hands, or to the inside of the hands, or you can alternate outside and inside. As shown in this segment, it is nice to combine this with FLO Pongs.

1:36 -- OS (Outer String) Grab -- The player (ChrisManic) does the OS Grab in the middle of a bunch of tricks, but you can also do this while orbiting. Just grab the outer string, i.e., the string between the outer ball and middle ball, and let the outer ball do an orbit. From there you can either let go of the string, or move your grab to the middle ball. (Sometimes, I intend to grab the middle ball but end up grabbing the string, i.e., doing an OS Grab, and then move into a FLO Grab.)

2:03 -- Venus -- What is called the Venus here is what I nowadays prefer to simply call the Wrist Flip. It happens, unfortunately, rather quickly in this video. During vertical orbits (it's easiest when the plane of the vertical orbits is perpendicular to your arm) you let the end ball go over (rather than under) your arm, and then shortly after the string contacts your arm you give your arm a little flipping motion to flip the middle ball over your arm as well.