Skateboarding Tricks and Difficulty: A Trick Reference

Every skateboarding trick belongs to one of a handful of families, and knowing which family a trick comes from tells you roughly how a judge will read its difficulty.

Flip tricks are board rotations done in the air after an ollie — the board flips or spins under the feet before the skater catches it and rolls away. Grinds and slides involve locking the trucks or the deck onto an obstacle (a rail, ledge, or coping) and travelling along it. Manuals are balance tricks rolling on two wheels. Transition tricks are airs and grabs done out of a ramp, bowl, or quarterpipe.

Within every family, difficulty climbs along predictable axes: more rotation (180 to 360 to 540), a more technical catch, a harder obstacle, and a harder stance. A 360 flip is harder than a kickflip because the board rotates a full turn while flipping. A kickflip backside lipslide on a tall rail is harder than the same flip on flat ground because the obstacle adds consequence and precision.

There is a critical point that separates skateboarding from sports like gymnastics or diving: there is no difficulty table and no coefficient. A judge does not look up a trick and multiply a number. Difficulty is one of several things assessed at once (difficulty, variety, execution, flow and consistency, use of the course, and repetition), all folded into a single overall impression.

This guide is a technique and trick reference, not a scoring breakdown. For how those criteria turn into a number on a 0–100 scale, see our skateboarding scoring guide.

Grinds and slides are how a skater uses an obstacle. A grind rides on the metal trucks; a slide rides on the underside of the deck. The obstacle (flat bar, handrail, hubba ledge, A-frame) and the stance entering and exiting it drive the difficulty far more than the lock itself.

Core grinds

• 50-50: both trucks on the obstacle, board parallel. The most basic grind, low difficulty alone.
• 5-0: back truck only, nose up, like a grinding manual. A clear step above the 50-50.
• Nosegrind: front truck only, tail up. The mirror of the 5-0 and similarly technical.
• Smith grind: back truck on, front wheels dipped below the obstacle, deck angled down. A balance-heavy grind read as solidly difficult.
• Feeble grind: back truck on, board angled the opposite way to a smith, nose hanging over the far side.
• Crooked grind ("crook"): front truck only, nose angled along the obstacle. Technical and high-value, especially flipped in or out.

Core slides

• Boardslide: deck across the obstacle, board perpendicular, leading with the front of the board over it. The foundational slide.
• Lipslide: like a boardslide but the back of the board goes over the obstacle first — the skater turns into it, raising difficulty and consequence on a rail.
• Tailslide: sliding on the tail with the nose pointing away from the obstacle, a ledge staple read as technical.
• Bluntslide: the back wheels and tail are above the ledge while the deck slides — a high-difficulty ledge trick, especially with a flip out.

What moves a grind or slide up the difficulty scale a judge perceives: a flip into or out of it (kickflip backside lipslide), a switch or nollie entry, a longer or taller rail, and a clean controlled exit rather than a chattered slow-out.

Stance is the single biggest difficulty modifier in street skating, and it is the part casual viewers miss. The exact same trick can be low or very high difficulty depending purely on the stance it is done in.

There are four stances, defined relative to a skater's natural footing:

• Regular: the skater's natural stance, popping off the tail in the direction they normally ride.
• Fakie: riding backward but with the feet in the normal position, popping off the tail while moving the "wrong" way.
• Nollie: riding forward but popping off the nose instead of the tail, feet shifted forward.
• Switch: riding and popping with the opposite foot forward — the skater's non-natural stance, as if a right-hander wrote a full sentence with their left hand.

Why switch and nollie read as harder: a skater has spent years grooving regular-stance muscle memory. A switch tre flip requires reproducing that same precision with the body's non-dominant configuration. It looks identical to a regular tre flip to an untrained eye, but a judge knows it is a different order of control.

The perceived difficulty ladder for the same trick, roughly: regular → fakie → nollie → switch, with switch generally the hardest. A switch heelflip frontside boardslide is read as a high-difficulty trick precisely because every element (the pop, the flip, the lock, the exit) is performed in the non-natural stance.

This is also why "all-terrain" switch skating is a recurring note in elite judging: a skater who runs the same level of trick in switch as in regular is demonstrating control that directly feeds the difficulty and the overall-impression read. Stance terms and trick names are defined in the skateboarding glossary.

NBD stands for "Never Been Done" — a trick or trick-on-obstacle combination landed for the first time. It is the informal benchmark the skate community uses to mark the moving ceiling of difficulty, and it is the engine behind why the sport keeps escalating.

An NBD is not a separate scoring category. There is no bonus field on a judge's screen labelled "first ever." But an NBD is, almost by definition, at the very top of the difficulty read at the moment it lands, and it usually shows up in best-trick rounds and in video parts where the stakes for progression are highest.

Related terms worth knowing:

• NBD: a combination nobody has landed before (a specific flip into a specific grind on a specific famous rail).
• ABD: "Already Been Done" — the counter-term, used when a trick a skater claims has in fact been landed before, so it carries less progression weight.
• Bangers: the hardest, highest-impact tricks in a run or part, often saved for the end.

Progression in skateboarding has historically moved along clear lines: more flips (single → double → triple), more rotation in the air (540 → 720 → 900 → 1080), harder stances applied to established tricks (the switch version of a trick becoming the new bar), and known flips taken onto bigger or more dangerous obstacles. Olympic and World Skate best-trick formats — five attempts, only the best counting, with the TNS option to discard a landed score and retry — are deliberately structured to reward exactly this kind of risk-taking, because a skater can keep pushing a progression trick without a failed attempt sinking the score.

In judging terms, progression does not change the rules; it changes what the top of the difficulty band looks like in any given era. The criteria stay constant; the tricks that sit at the high end keep getting harder. For how attempts and the best-trick format are scored, see the skateboarding scoring guide.