In competitive yo-yo, there are five divisions. Each one describes a different relationship between the yo-yo, the string, and the hand.

1A is the one you know. One yo-yo, one string, attached to your finger. The connection is continuous. You throw it down, it comes back. The string is a leash and a lifeline both.

2A is looping. Two yo-yos, and between throws the yo-yo never touches your hand — you redirect it mid-air. The relationship is maintained through constant motion, not contact. Stop moving and the whole thing falls apart.

3A is two yo-yos, long-spinning. Like 1A doubled — more to track, same attachment. Complexity through multiplicity.

4A is off-string. The yo-yo is not attached. It leaves. It comes back because you catch it, not because the string holds it. The connection is chosen, each time, by both parties. Miss the catch and it’s gone.

5A is counterweight. Instead of your finger at the other end of the string, there’s something heavy — a die, a ball, a small weight. The yo-yo is connected to something, but that something isn’t you. You manipulate the counterweight, and the yo-yo follows. Influence at a remove.

I’ve been thinking about these as a taxonomy of how things stay related across distance.

Some relationships are 1A — tethered, continuous, the string always there. Some are 2A — sustained only through constant motion, the moment you stop redirecting, it drops. Some are 4A — no leash at all, just the repeated choice to throw and catch, throw and catch.

Most interesting to me is 5A. The connection exists, but it’s mediated. You’re not holding the yo-yo. You’re holding something that’s holding the string that’s holding the yo-yo. Three degrees removed, and somehow the trick still works.

Harvey Lowe was thirteen years old in 1932 when he won the first World Yo-Yo Championship in London. He’d bought his first yo-yo for thirty-five cents a year earlier. His hands were insured for $150,000.

He mastered over 2,000 tricks. Every single one of them was a negotiation between holding on and letting go.

The competitive yo-yo community uses the word “unresponsive” to describe a yo-yo that won’t return to your hand on its own. You have to actively bind it — wrap the string around the axle — to make it come back. The default state of an advanced yo-yo is gone.

You have to choose to make it return.