Introduction

For the purpose of comparing various juggling notation systems with each other, I have created a list of juggling tricks. I give it the terribly original name “Daniel’s 3 ball trick list”.

On the list are 22 patterns with 3 balls, and they are selected for being widely known and each having unique features compared to other items on the list.

This is a first attempt to create a ‘standard set of juggling tricks’ for research purposes. Although it was designed in an attempt to be generic, it is unavoidably also in many ways arbitrary, biased or incomplete. I explain how this list came to be in the chapter design choices.

There is also a video below to show which specific version of the trick I mean with the various trick names on the list.

UPDATE: There are now also transcriptions for 8 different notation systems for all the tricks on this list, you can find those here.

The list

The list consist of 22 different repeating 3 ball patterns.

Every item is displayed as follows:

  1. Trick name” (time in video)
    “Unique trick features that motivate its presence in this list”

They are grouped and ordered to have somewhat similar tricks appear near each other in the list.

The trick names are written as how I, Daniel Simu, have gotten to know these tricks, but in many cases there will be many alternative names.

For many tricks there are various ways they can be executed, in such cases the list refers specifically to the way they are recorded in the accompanying video below.

Tricks in the front of the body

  1. Cascade (0:03)
    Basic pattern

  2. Tennis (0:07)
    Inside & outside throws

  3. Mill’s mess (0:12)
    Multiple different cross hand throws and catches

  4. Cherry picker (0:19)
    Claw catches and throws, 3 column positions

  5. Shower (0:28)
    Galloping pattern, zips

  6. Box (0:33)
    Synchronous pattern with zips

  7. Shuffle (0:40)
    Slams (zip over the top of the incoming ball)

  8. Factory (0:48)
    Carry in a specific path, with specific timing, to a specific location. Drop, one handed columns

  9. Fake mess (0:57)
    Carry in specific path that does not go to a throwing location

  10. Siteswap 441 (1:07)
    Two throws almost synchronous in a 3 beat pattern

  11. Siteswap 12345 (1:19)
    Repeating a hand, longer sequence, many different heights

  12. Siteswap 423 with active 2’s (1:30)
    Active 2’s in a rhythmical pattern

  13. Three in one hand (1:40)
    One handed pattern

    Tricks around the body

  14. Overheads (1:48)
    Overhead position

  15. Penguin catches (1:58)
    Special hand position

  16. Under the leg throws (2:06)
    Lower body body throw

  17. Behind the neck throws (2:15)
    Upper body body throw

  18. 3 up pirouette (2:23)
    Pirouette, both hands empty

    Tricks in contact with the body

  19. Knee kick (2:35)
    Leg interaction, bounce

  20. Head roll (2:43)
    Non left/right body part interaction, roll

  21. Blind behind the back (2:53)
    Hands remain in special position, rolling contact

  22. Monkey juggling (3:01)
    trap & place

Video

Design choices

It’s difficult to come up with a list of general 3 ball tricks that are diverse and not too long. When you look in books, videos, courses or other resources you typically find lists of tricks that are way too extensive or way too niche.

It was my goal to create a list of tricks of which each trick is known or understood by most proficient ball jugglers. It had to include an as wide as possible range of features, while also not getting too exotic like some of the tricks in the Analyzing Tricks post. It had to include range of difficulties, but I wanted to be able to run all the tricks on camera which limited me to tricks that I could easily execute myself. Also, I wanted to at least attempt to not let myself be influenced too much by the features of notation systems, especially not mine, as I wanted this list to be suitable for “general purposes”, whatever those future purposes may be.

I attempted to remove my own bias towards notation systems by starting out with a resource that I created before starting this research journey. I used the list I created for my video Alphabet of 3 ball juggling, in 2020. Surely I’m biased, but I could not find an as diverse yet also small list of generally known 3 ball tricks. It also helps that I could already perform all of these tricks.

With help from my supervisor Owen Reynolds this list was modified and trimmed down from the original 43 to the final 22.

Some tricks were removed from the list because I considered them to be too exotic, such as Abracadabra and Treblas. Some tricks were removed as their features overlapped with other tricks, for example Columns are not very useful if the list already has the Factory. Finally some tricks were merged to shorten the list even more, for example Claws and Boston mess were merged into the Cherry Picker, which was not in the original video.

For the sake of brevity there was an attempt to include ‘something’ of a feature, not all variations of it. For example there is an upper body body throw, but there are many more interesting ones. There is one simple under the leg trick, but there are many more. But since there is not even a generic list of ‘juggling trick features’, it’s hard to even tell where one feature ends and the other begins.

After narrowing down the list from 43 to 22 it felt not too overwhelming, and still complete enough. But of course the list could have been expanded or narrowed down even more.

There may never be a perfect generic list of 3 ball tricks, but hopefully this can be a starting point for future trick lists. This is only a first attempt, after all.

Future applications

I’m using this list to compare notation systems. If you create or find a notation system you could compare it with this list too!

I hope other jugglers and researchers can find this useful too.

Maybe you want to write a juggling simulator and check what percentage of tricks on my list it can simulate.

You might be working on an AI system that can create new juggling performances, and want to see how many items on this list it is able to discover.

Perhaps you’re training 3 ball juggling and use this list to check if you have the general 3 ball skills to juggle all patterns on the list, set yourself the goal to reach 100 catches with each one?

If you use this list for anything at all, I’d love to hear from you!