Suicide

You let go of a stick. The diabolo’s spin drags it around in a full circle, and you catch it on the way past. It is the first trick where you deliberately give up control, and it is the one that makes people watching go quiet.

It is also entirely learnable in an afternoon, which is not what it looks like.

Before you start

Do this outdoors or somewhere with nothing breakable, and expect to drop it a lot at first. A dropped stick is the normal outcome of the first fifty attempts and is not a sign you are doing it wrong.

The release

1. Get into a trapeze and get the diabolo genuinely fast. A suicide is driven entirely by the diabolo’s spin, so a slow one will not carry the stick round.
2. Let the loose stick hang so the string runs cleanly off the axle. Any wrap and it will not travel.
3. Open your hand and let the stick go. Do not throw it. Throwing is what sends it across the room.
4. Watch it swing round, and close your hand on it as it comes back past your hip.

The catch is the easy half. The release is where the trick is won or lost, and the instruction is genuinely just “stop holding it”.

The catch

Catch with an open hand from below, not a grab from above. A grab needs the stick to be exactly where you predicted; an open hand only needs it to be roughly there.

Keep watching the stick all the way round. The instinct is to look at the diabolo, and then the stick arrives unannounced.

What goes wrong

The stick does not go round. Not enough spin, or the string was wrapped before you let go.

The stick flies away sideways. You threw it. Open the hand and do nothing else.

The diabolo dies during the trick. Suicides are expensive. Start faster.

You catch it but the string is knotted. The stick went round the wrong way relative to the wrap. Unwind and try again from a clean trapeze.

When it is working

One release, one clean catch, diabolo still alive. Then two in a row, which is a different trick again because the string is not where you left it. When the catch stops feeling like luck, the whole family of release tricks opens up behind it.