Jim’s passing

Pre-requisite: 3‑count (pass-self-self)

Jim’s idea: take a standard (synchronous) passing pattern like 3‑count, 4‑count, bookends (pass-pass-self-pass-self), … but one person crosses all their passes. You make it work by throwing with whichever hand has to. When a hand is forced to throw twice in a row, it’s called a “hurry”.

By the end of the workshop, everyone should be able to do Jim’s 3‑count and probably 2‑count. The rest of the workshop is then about giving you directions to try, depending on your interest.

Jim’s 3‑count

The original “Jim’s pattern” is based on 3‑count. Given the idea above, you could have a quick go, and see what happens. Some people intuitively make it work! You can make the passed clubs a different colour if you’d like to make it easier.

After doing a pass you are standing there holding a club in each hand. It doesn’t really matter which hand you just passed with, whichever hand the incoming pass comes towards, you can do a self with that hand to catch the pass. That self will force you to do a second self, and then you can pass back the same club that you were passed.

You still do 3‑count’s pass-self-self-pass-self-self-…. You can chant that pattern to keep track. It’s just that you have changed which hands you use to do the throws. It’s no longer right-left-right-left….

If you have collisions, look at where you are throwing your passes, and tell each other what’s causing problems. In particular, make sure the crossing passes are nice and wide. If you slow down, and throw slow and “floaty” (throw higher, locking your wrist to avoid overspinning), everything will be easier. But Jim’s 3‑count can be done low and fast!

Remember only one of you should cross any passes, and that person should cross all their passes!

If it’s too easy, see if you can swap back and forth between Jim’s and normal 3‑count on the fly. Make sure you can do it without making the passed clubs a different colour.

Random 3‑count

Having one juggler always cross, and the other always throw straight makes Jim’s 3‑count have a nice repeating pattern. You do two right-hand passes and then two left-hand passes (the crossing passer starts with a single right-hand pass before getting into this pattern). But, given the description above, it should work no matter which hand you throw your pass to! All the passes are still made with the same two clubs, which you can colour-code.

Random 3‑count is more of a game than a pattern: Do pass-self-self, but both jugglers choose at random whether to throw each pass crossing or straight, and do the throws with whichever hands they need to. This pattern is more collision prone! You’ll probably want to “scoop” the crossing passes (reach across when throwing them, to get a clear passing line). But the pattern is unpredictable by design: watch what’s going on and do what seems necessary.

Jim’s 2‑count

Same idea as Jim’s 3‑count. We stick to the pattern pass-self-pass-self-pass-self-… BUT! The hands doing the passes and selfs change! It’s now a symmetrical lefty/righty pattern.

You can no longer simply colour-code two clubs that make all the passes. But, just like Jim’s 3‑count you’ll end up doing two right-hand passes and then two left-hand passes. The juggler doing straight passes starts on the “2nd” right-hand pass. That is, they start with only a single right-hand pass, before being forced to do a hurry, a right-hand self, and then doing the first of two left-hand passes.

Aside: you can colour-code Jim’s 2‑count (video demonstration, and as in The Highgate Collection) if you’re keen to.

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous

Traditionally, Jim’s patterns are “synchronous”: both jugglers start at the same time, and whenever anyone has to do a “hurry” it can feel jerky.

If the person crossing starts late, after the other juggler, they reduce the pressure on the hand having to do the hurry. To make an asynchronous pattern, where the jugglers continue to throw at different times, the passes should be “floaty” (high but not overspun). Juggling this way could be seen as an “easy-mode” way of juggling Jim’s patterns.

What now? Choose your own adventure:

In the theory, the synchronous and asynchronous versions are different patterns. But you can smoothly shift between them, and might not think there’s a meaningful difference at first.

The reason the asynchronous pattern feel less jerky is that theoretically you always alternate between right and left hands (there are no “hurries”). The reason it appears that you sometimes do two right hand throws in a row, is that the left hand did “nothing” (a hold) for a beat in between. The passist web-app animates that hold as a small flip, so you can clearly see the beat for each hand (and that there are no real “hurries”):

If you don’t do the flip, it’s easy to crush the timing and morph the pattern back into standard Jim’s 2‑count.

Flip challenge: If you juggle asynchronously, and with nice floaty passes, you can try to juggle the flips like passist shows you. Actually, you’ll probably flip the club faster than passist does, so it barely leaves your hand. The pattern is pass-flip-self-pass-self, with the crossing juggler starting second with pass-self.

“Why-not?” is a challenging but beautiful and well-known 6‑club pattern that is compatible with asynchronous Jim’s 2‑count. If you can do Jim’s 2‑count, you can practice throwing a trick within in. Then once both jugglers can throw the trick every cycle, they are juggling “Why not?”! The trick is a new way to swap the side that you’re passing on. Instead of doing flip-self (or hold-self, which is easier), you now do “heff-zip” (a double self throw to the same hand, and a hand-across).

If you like why-not, its sibling “not-why” is also compatible, and you can swap between them on the fly. Then for a further challenge, “maybe” is another pattern with the same five throws, but in an order that’s not compatible with the previous patterns.

More Jim’s patterns

You can try to “Jim” any synchronous passing pattern you’ve done:

Some of them turn out to be nicer and/or harder than others!

The linked animations all show the asynchronous Jim’s versions, with flips that you could just hold. It’s probably easier to just try the patterns and see what happens than trying to understand the animations.

As you might have worked out, Jim’s PPS isn’t a nice symmetrical pattern. Fortunately Martin Frost invented/discovered a better crossing PPS pattern called “mild-madness”. It uses a zip instead of a hurry to get out of difficulty: PPSPPZS. The juggler throwing straight starts pass-pass-zip-self, the juggler crossing their passes starts pass-pass-self. A common mistake is to miss out the self after the zip, and wonder why it’s not working. The passes from this pattern can feed two people doing Jim’s 3‑count, giving the feeding patterns “Martin’s madness” and “Martin’s mildness”, depending on whether the feeder or the feedees do crossing passes. (See The Highgate Collection for details.)

The extra self in Jim’s chocolate bar makes the pattern mirror left-right. But you’ll find that the two jugglers don’t do the same thing.

Jim’s Bookends, or Jim’s PPSPS, is also known as “brainstorm”. It has a challenging long sequence, where both jugglers cycle through all four combinations of the hands that do the pass-pass. If you juggle it a lot, you’ll eventually internalize the whole sequence, but you can do it without brute-force learning. Chant pass-pass-self-pass-self, pay a lot of attention, and react quickly!

History: The original Jim’s 3‑count was named after Jim Brennan (of Lincoln, Nebraska) in the following article: Jim’s Jam “Unexpected Passing Variations” by Martin Frost, Juggler’s World - Fall 1996. Aidan Burn’s “The Highgate Collection” describes the asynchronous versions, and the link to “Why Not?”. I’m sure other jugglers have contributed to these ideas as well.