Finger Stalls Part 1 - Notation

For the first (proper!) post in this blog I figured I'd start with a theme I've been playing around with for a good few years now. A lot of people call them "dipod" stalls, but before I heard this I gave them the name "finger" stalls as it just seemed to make sense, and especially since I branched out for the regular index-middle stall it seems a lot more apt for me to use now.

To start with I should mention that I started trying this trick because of a video MCP posted several years ago.


As far as I know she was the first person to really explore this kind of stuff and did a lot of the switches/passes that I do now back then. After learning the more basic stalls and the switches through this video I began to realise that there is a whole world of stall points around the hand, and thus a huge number of combinations that can be made by switching between these positions. Obviously, getting the regular stall point to a good level of consistency takes a lot of time, so going on to learn countless variations and then figure out these combinations is a bit of a daunting task at first. However once you get over the challenge of learning that first basic stall, the whole process gets (slightly) easier and progression is a lot more apparent.

Next I should probably talk about the notation I use to make it much easier to type and explain this kind of trick (at least at first). It might also help to get across the scale of the tricks that are available to you just in this one tiny section of your body! This could be complete nonsense and only legible to me but bear with it, I will only cover the more practical tricks here as going into every variation would take far too long (and scare everyone away from this blog from the beginning).

Looking at the above picture, I label the fingers as follows;
T = Thumb
1 = Index finger
2 = Middle finger
3 = Ring finger
4 = Pinky/little finger

Thus, the trick done in the picture above would be simply called "2", or a "2 stall". Please note this isn't meant to be an official declaration of what these tricks should be called, it's simply being used to make things easier to understand and make the following text a lot easier to write!

Using the above notation, this trick becomes "1-2", meaning the index and middle fingers are used. If you used the index and pinky fingers, it would become "1-4". As you can see, using this method it's nice and easy to understand what trick is being done and how to keep a record of it for little sequences (to me at least, not to anybody else!). The problem is, this currently only applies to the hand in a vertical position, only using the tips of the fingers. So, what about the knuckles?

This diagram should (hopefully) explain. In these cases the same vertical trick is done, however instead of balance on the finger tips there are 3 sets of joints which can be used, starting with J1 (the joint closest to the tip), down to J3 (the knuckle). When combined with the typical 1-2 stall, this becomes J1 1-2, J2 1-2, and J3 1-2 respectively. In the case of the thumb, there is only J1 T and J2 T. Makes sense right?

Next up, non-vertical hand tricks.

I chose to name this one a "Horizontal" for pretty obvious reasons. In this case theres not much point doing it on anything other than finger "1" so I chose to write it down simply as "H". If you want to get super deep/obsessive you can of course label this for each finger (H1/H2/H3/H4), and also do the same for the hand turned upside down, starting with the pinky and working down! Also, in this position you can balance the ball on the finger with your palm facing up or down (as opposed to the 90 degree angle I chose). This could be given a notation as well but seeing as I never use those stalls I won't do it here. Kyle Johnson on the other hand seems to use the palm down type in a few videos, so it's really up to the person.

I used the same idea for the thumb also.
In this case it's probably worth splitting this into 2 types, "Up" (the left picture), and "Down" (the right picture). So, it should be HTU (Horizontal Thumb Up) and HTD (Horizontal Thumb Down). It's useful to differentiate these two as they can be used to butterfly between each other or be used alone, but I'll get into that later on.

The last worthwhile one to point out is crossing fingers.
In this case simply put an X before the number, so it would now become X1-2! Again, these could be done flat or mixing fingers with joints, but I'm not lunatic (or flexible) enough to do much of it, so I'll leave it at this for now. Feel free to try though!

That should be about it, hopefully this all didn't confuse you too much! For the next post I'll go into some tips for balancing different stalls, and then after that go into combinations and ways of putting them together. To finish I'll write a little about where I think this stuff could go if someone took it far enough. At least everything should be a whole lot easier to describe now this bit is out of the way. If you have any questions or thought of something I missed out (which most likely I did), please let me know in the comments! For anyone not interested in finger stalls, bear with me I'll be moving on to another topic soon enough! There will be quite a wide range of topics (not just notation/trick tip type of things), so there should be something for everyone (I hope!).