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.

Flip tricks are the technical backbone of street skating. They start from an ollie — the skater pops the tail of the board against the ground and drags the front foot up to level the deck in the air. Everything else builds on that motion.

The base: ollie

The ollie is the foundation. No flip, grind, or gap trick happens without it. On its own a clean ollie is low difficulty, but ollie height and pop quality feed directly into how every harder trick is judged.

Kickflip and heelflip

A kickflip flips the board one full rotation along its long axis, the front foot flicking off the toe-side edge. A heelflip is the mirror image — the front foot flicks off the heel-side edge and the board flips the other way. They are roughly equal in difficulty; the catch and the pop quality separate a clean one from a sketchy one.

Varial flips

A varial kickflip combines a kickflip with a backside 180 pop-shove-it, so the board flips and rotates 180 degrees together. Varial heelflip is the heelflip equivalent. Adding rotation to a flip raises the difficulty a clear step.

360 flip (tre flip)

The 360 flip, called the "tre flip," combines a kickflip with a 360 shove-it — the board flips once and spins a full 360 underneath. It is a benchmark trick: landing a clean tre flip is widely treated as the line between an intermediate and an advanced street skater, and judges read it as solidly higher difficulty than a plain kickflip.

Hardflip and other technical flips

A hardflip merges a kickflip with a frontside shove-it, the board passing vertically between the legs. It is awkward, low-percentage, and read as high difficulty. The inward heelflip, laser flip (a 360 heelflip with a varial), and double/triple flips sit at the technical ceiling — these are the variations that show up in best-trick rounds and progression clips.

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.

Park and transition skating trade the rails and ledges of street for ramps, bowls, quarterpipes, and coping. The trick vocabulary shifts to airs (going above the coping), grabs, lip tricks, and big spins. Amplitude (how high above the coping) and flow through the bowl matter as much as the trick itself.

Grabs

A grab is a hand catching the board mid-air. The named grabs are a vocabulary every park judge reads instantly:

• Indy: trailing hand grabs the toe edge between the feet.
• Mute: leading hand grabs the toe edge.
• Melon (melancholy): leading hand grabs the heel edge.
• Stalefish: trailing hand grabs the heel edge behind the back leg.
• Nosegrab / tailgrab: hand grabs the nose or tail. Grabs alone are not high difficulty; their value comes from being combined with rotation and amplitude.

Lip tricks and inverts

Tricks done on the coping itself: rock to fakie, disaster, axle stall, and inverts / handplants where the skater plants a hand on the coping and goes upside down. Inverts and handplants are read as high difficulty because of the inversion and the control needed to come back in.

Spins

Rotation in the air defines the upper difficulty band in park:

• 180 / 360: standard, low-to-medium.
• 540: a step into high difficulty, often with a grab (the McTwist is a 540 with an inverted flip and mute grab).
• 720: two full rotations, high difficulty.
• 900: two-and-a-half rotations — landed in competition only by a small group of skaters, read as the top of the difficulty band.
• 1080: three rotations — progression-level, rare in contest runs.

A park run is judged on the whole package: amplitude, the difficulty and variety of airs and spins, flow without unnecessary pushes, and use of the full bowl including the deep end, hips, and extensions. For how that converts to a 0–100 run score, see the skateboarding scoring guide.

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.

This is the part most newcomers get wrong. Skateboarding has no difficulty table, no D-score, and no multiplier. A gymnastics judge adds up declared difficulty values and a separate execution score. A diving judge multiplies the execution score by a published degree-of-difficulty coefficient. Skateboarding does neither.

Under World Skate rules, judges score on a 0–100 scale using Overall Impression — the whole run as one piece (each best-trick attempt scored separately). Difficulty is one input among several assessed simultaneously: difficulty, variety, execution, flow and consistency, use of the course and obstacles, and repetition.

That has direct consequences for how trick choice plays out:

• A clean kickflip with great style can outscore a sloppily landed 360 flip. Difficulty does not win on its own; execution and flow are weighed against it.
• Doing the same trick family twice (two backside flips on different rails) is read negatively under variety, even if both are technically hard.
• A high-difficulty trick that is barely rolled away from — a wobble, a sketchy chatter, a credit-card landing — is penalised on execution, which drags the overall read down.
• Using only one obstacle and ignoring the rest of the course caps the use-of-course read no matter how hard the tricks are.

So when you watch a panel and a technically harder run scores lower, the panel is not wrong and the system is not random. The skater traded execution, variety, or flow for raw difficulty, and the overall read reflects that trade. A five-judge panel (highest and lowest dropped, middle three averaged) usually lands within a tight band, which is the practical signal that difficulty is being weighed consistently rather than guessed.

For the full criterion-by-criterion breakdown and the trimmed-mean math, see our skateboarding judging guide.

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.