National Spintop Contest

Rules of National Spintop Contest

A. Eligibility

  1. Open to US Residents. The competition is open to any player resident in the US. Competitors need to be ITSA full members. If you are not a member you can become a member at https://spintops.org/membership/ ($10 annual cost). You can also become a member or pay your dues in person at the contest with the ITSA Treasurer.
  2. Registration. Follow registration instructions for the National Yoyo Contest. Register under Spintop Championship Freestyle.
  3. Cost. Registration fee is to cover the expenses of the hosting Yoyo National contest. The cost is $(?).

B. Divisions

Open Freestyle (US National Champion title)

C. Music

Players in the Open Division should provide a 3-minute music track. Follow the National Yoyo Contest instructions or email an mp3 file to nats2025@spintops.org. Also bring music in person on a flash drive to the contest. The music should be appropriate for all audiences.

D. Copyright and Liability

  1. The player grants ITSA the irrevocable and unlimited right, without compensation, to broadcast and use video of the performance, as well as photos taken during the contest, to promote the association goals.
  2. The player acknowledges that this is a physical activity and as such involves the risk of injury and exonerates the organizers of liability for accidents that might occur during the contest.

E. Open Freestyle Rules

  1. The freestyle is performed to music with a duration of up to 3 minutes.
  2. Any spinning top will be permitted, including fixed-tip, bearing-tip and one-way bearing tip, as well as over-sized tops. The number of spintops used or available for back-up is not limited, but the player cannot exit the stage to retrieve them. All tops used must be wound by the player. No assistance will be permitted.
  3. The winner will be the 2025 ITSA World Spintop Champion.

F. Open Freestyle Judging

  1. Routines will be given a technical score of up to 85 points and a performance score of up to 15 points.
  2. The raw technical score will be calculated by adding the difficulty, originality and risk of each trick completed in the routine. It is the judge’s decision if a combo trick qualifies as two tricks or one more difficult trick. To promote exceptional tricks over quantity of tricks, judges may give double points to tricks that are spectacular and make the routine memorable. Because the scores of each individual judge will be normalized, it is not important what scale the judges use, as long as they are consistent from player to player.
  3. The raw technical scores of each judge will be normalized so the player with the highest normalized score for that judge has 85 points. The scores of the other players will be divided by the highest raw score and multiplied by 85. The performance score will be assigned for showmanship and overall quality and interest of the performance. Each judge will assign a score between 1 and 15, not normalized.
  4. The final score will be the sum of the normalized technical scores and performance scores, averaged over all the judges.
  5. The winner will be the player who gets the maximum final score. A tie is possible.

G. Situations Not Covered by the Rules

The Judging Panel will make decisions on situations not covered by these rules.