Fingerboarding: competitions and judging¶

Written 2026-10-27 from the project's own docs. Condensed from Fboard's research base (researched 2026-10-25); sources are named inline.

The research marks claims as verified (from the organizer, rulebook or organizer's blog), secondary (reported by a reputable third party), or unverified. Coverage outside Germany and the US is thin, and Fast Fingers' rulebook and judging criteria are not public.

Major events¶

Fast Fingers (Germany)¶

The world's main fingerboard contest, run by Blackriver. It began in 1999 at the Blackriver shop and was first billed as the Fingerboard World Championship in 2008. The 2022 edition was the first held online. Going forward it runs in person in even years and online in odd years (fast-fingers.com).

Winners the organizer publishes (results pages start in 2015):

The 2026 format ran a 45-second run round, then best trick (five tricks, best three count), then a 60-second run round, then a Game of S.K.A.T.E. final (fast-fingers.com schedule). In a Game of S.K.A.T.E., riders take turns setting a trick; a rider who misses a trick the other set gets a letter, and spelling the whole word knocks them out.

USAFBL (United States Fingerboarding League)¶

The league reports 80+ events in 40 states over six years. As of the research, its homepage said it was closing. It published the most detailed public fingerboard rulebook found, in two versions that conflict:

• Runs: two 30-second runs (web page) or one 45-second run (PDF). Points for landed tricks, difficulty, realism, style and flow, finger placement, and using the whole park. Points lost for bails, moving the board by hand, and (in street) using the thumb or three fingers.
• The no-pickup rule: after a bail the board must stay in contact with the park; you roll it back rather than picking it up.
• Finger rules: street allows index and middle fingers only. Vert and bowl also allow the thumb, but only for grabs.
• Switch and nollie bonus (PDF): tricks done in the less natural stances score more.
• Game of Skate (PDF): no trick can be landed more than once by either player, and a rider who runs out of unused tricks forfeits. The league recommends carrying a written trick list.

Tech Deck events¶

• 2011 U.S. Fingerboarding Championships: a qualifier tour attached to Tony Hawk's Birdhouse tour, with a US$5,000 prize. NPR reported a one-minute jam final across four table-sized parks, judged on "style, creativity and the difficulty of their tricks".
• 2021 USA Skateboarding Fingerboarding National Championship: entrants posted up to 45 seconds of unedited video on Instagram, judged by professional skateboarders.

Community contests run worldwide, from Vancouver and Chicago to Prague, Leipzig and Quezon City; most publish no formal rules.

Judging that has no skateboard equivalent¶

Fingerboard contests add criteria a skate contest doesn't need:

• Realism: does it look like a real skateboard trick?
• Finger placement during the trick and on landing.
• Finger restrictions: two fingers only in street.
• No pickup after a bail.

How real skateboard judging works¶

World Skate, the Olympic governing body, publishes its criteria. The research read the 2025 documents directly:

• A run is scored as one "overall impression" from 0 to 100, not as a sum of trick points. Five judges score; the high and low marks are dropped and the rest averaged.
• Seven criteria feed it: difficulty, variety, execution, use of course, consistency, flow, and repetition, which is subtracted: "the repetition of tricks or trick components or the continual use of specific obstacles … will be proportionally penalized."
• More tricks is not automatically better. The criteria say so in nearly those words.
• In some best-trick formats, repeating a trick from the counted run on the same obstacle scores 0.00.
• Scores are relative: they exist to rank a round, and no trick has fixed points.

Street League Skateboarding (SLS) instead scores every trick instantly on a 0–10 scale, built for spectators. Its format details come from secondary sources only.

Common formats¶

Why this mattered for Fboard¶

Real judging is bounded, rewards variety, and punishes repetition. Fboard's original combo scoring was unbounded and let repeats keep raising the multiplier, so the optimal strategy was to repeat the same chain forever (see The TAS tool and showcase run). The research proposes a variety-aware combo where only new trick-and-obstacle pairs grow the multiplier, plus a judged contest mode modelled on the 0–100 overall impression. Neither has been built.