How To Deal With An Unresponsive Yo-Yo

Video Transcript

"We are going to talk about unresponsive yo-yo playing. Unresponsive yo-yo play is the yo-yo isn't grabbing the string. It's like this. When I pull this yo-yo up it's not coming up. It's not grabbing the string. That's unresponsive play. If you look back 6 years ago, if you could look back at yo-you videos. We're in 2007 now, so I'm talking about back in 2001. Yo-yos came back. No matter what almost. You jerk the yo-yo, it came back to your hand. That's how people played with yo-yos. Today, you'll notice my yo-yo has a lot of room weight; it's got metal on the edge. What this does is it puts all the focus on the weight towards the edge. This is a great design because with the plastic in the center, it's a lightweight in the middle, and with metal on the edge, it puts all the momentum on the edge and it keeps this yo-yo spinning for a really long time. You'll also notice when I open up. This is just kind of to exaggerate unresponsive play to you guys. I have something in here called a concave barring. If you notice the barring actually dips in a little bit. It might be hard to see in the video, but some people play with this. My yo-yo uses an O ring to come back up. This is a great response system because it allows just enough friction for the string to grab the yo-yo when you want it to. For the most part, it doesn't grab it and plays unresponsive. Let me show you why this is important. I'll put my yo-yo back together here. For unresponsive play, the yo-yo doesn't just come back to your hand. You have to actually put string into the gap, which is called a bind. I'm going to be teaching your binding in the next segment. What's great about unresponsive play is the gap's really wide, so when you're doing the string trick, the yo-yo will spin on the string a very long time. It's going to be smoother because there's not as much to grab onto the string. You got a wider gap usually, more weight in the barring. This one concaves, so it's even grabbing the string less because the string's in the center. Something like that from responsive play. It helps out with tricks later on that we're going to be teaching you where you're actually catching the string around the yo-yo like so, or even shooting across your arm. All that stuff benefits from unresponsive play. You don't necessarily need to do it. It's just a great way to learn tricks faster. I recommend it in terms of learning those string tricks that we're going to be going over next."