The Comprehensive Roller Thread

[Mark Ellis]

any advice on how to accurately throw FH rollers both cut and distance, and disc preferences?

After putting, rollers are the most difficult shot to learn. Rollers are like Frisbees on acid. Anything can happen from magical to horrible. You can play your home course and find very bad places you didn't even know existed with an errant or unlucky roller. Even if you start a roller perfectly, controlling the finish is very difficult. Most of the best players who throw rollers are also gifted putters. If you expect a good drive to land within 10 feet of the pin, you can only expect a good roller to get around the putting circle and can't be shocked if it is 50 feet away wedged in the deepest part of a bush.

Rollers require the correct angle and speed and landing spot. Without all three you are screwed (unless, of course, you get lucky, like can happen on any shot). So the biggest single key to rollers is long term practice. I dabbled with rollers for a decade before using them in rounds (short of no other apparent choice, emergency situations).

I love rollers. They are the most fun to drive with. But they don't love me back and I'm OK with that. I, of course, do not trust them and use them sparingly. I am not a roller master and my rollers make sure I remember that. I believe Joe Mela has a deal with the devil. If there is a better short range, trick roller guy than Joe, I'm not sure who it might be.

Disc selection: bright colors. Only bright colors. Only discs you are willing to lose. Just like with air shots, putters for short distance, mids for middle range and drivers for long range. I couldn't control a backhand roller to save my life so for FH, use whatever your primary driver is. My primary drivers are overstable as heck. For a roller which needs to finish farther left (rhfh) I use an even more overstable driver (Crush) and for a cut roller that I want to turn right and stay right, a less overstable driver (broken in Z Flash or Z Surge SS).

A roller which stands straight up will finish to the side of the top of the disc. So a rhbh roller will finish right and a rhfh roller will finish left, unless a stick or hole or bump interferes.

Throwing rollers in strong crossing winds is usually as effective pissing directly into a strong wind, unless you are a roller master or dumb lucky.

So I was playing a hole in Worlds many years ago. It was a long hole and there was a screaming head wind. I shanked my first drive into the trees on the left side of the fairway. My only real out route was a roller. So I cranked a blazing roller, hit the tiny hole perfectly at what I thought was the perfect angle. Nope, hit something, turned, caught the wind, rolled backwards, away from the hole for about 300 feet. You don't get many football-field-length negative yardage drives in the World Championships to fondly recall. I'm not looking forward to the next.

I was playing in a doubles match, all tied up, driving on the last hole with an noobie partner who deposited his drive in the closest bush. It was a long righty hyzer hole and my opponents had crushed a superb drive, looking at a long putt for deuce. So I pulled out the roller, threw what looked to be a perfect line and held my breath. It hit a bump, popped 20 feet into the air and wedged, OB, in a pine tree. Throwing rollers is like dating strippers. It may be fun but there is no security there.

[ChaseJuggler]

Huge FH roller fan here. I use a beat to hell champion valkyrie and give it some hyzer and it still rolls.

My technique is to roll your wrist at the end of the shot. On a good FH, you should finish with your wrist in the same position as flicking someone off -- middle finger pointing up. On a roller, I overthrow the wrist so that the middle finger's almost pointing directly down.

On a side note, I have actually gotten a disk to finish LEANING on the pole once from a roller! #15 at Chapel Hill, NC. Unfortunately nobody was there to see it, but it freaked me out big time when I finally saw where it ended up! (Hole plays downhill and isn't visible from the tee!)

[Timko]

With the current thread about rollers appearing, I figure it's a good time to bump this.

My Roller is getting much, much better now.

[Iman522]

So doing some reading on the old instructional articles I was reading that a fan grip creates more spin while a power grip creates more velocity. So do you want more spin or velocity on a roller? I would think the velocity would be nice in turning it into a roller but I also would think that the spin might help get more consistent rollers.

Rollers are awesome

[Blake_T]

heh, let me know where that article is as i might make some changes.

fan grips tend to have less spin and more nose down. regardless, i don't worry about anything like that anymore.

velocity dominates all, especially with rolling.

rotations = rolling. when a disc rolls on the ground its spin and velocity will become equal. this can happen by losing velocity or by losing spin. momentum is conserved better when a disc lands and loses some velocity to match the spin rather than landing with a ton of spin and spinning out on the ground until it finally grips.

a long-azz roller is more about landing with the correct angle after you have covered as much distance in the air as possible.

[JR]

Local holes don't usually cater for maximum distance rollers so i mostly use them as a get out of trouble shot. I've thrown some rollers in field practice on surfaces without a lot of resistance and i've never witnessed long rollers after long airborne flights. There might be a semantic difference in my understanding of what a long airborne part is in feet in a roller. So far the longest rollers i've gotten are way shorter in the air than my air shots landing at up to about 300' mostly way shorter hitting a wall just shy of 500' with a lot of speed left on the disc. I don't try to land within the first 50' though.

How long is long in an airborne part of a max D roller?

[Whiz]

I would estimate something like 40% of distance air and 60% distance ground based on sky rollers I have witnessed thrown by Avery, Nikko and other pros.

[Blake_T]

the 40/60 split is only really useful with a frame of reference.

it also depends if you want consistently long rolls or if you want max max max d rolls.

like, i know i can roll 400-450' if i land it 275' away with 75% success.

if i'm going for 600' i want to land it more like 330'+ away.

what you really have to keep in mind is success rate.

on my 330' in the air rollers, 600' might only have like 10% success. 500' on this same shot might be more like 20% success and so on with probably 30-40% of them not breaking 450'. the difference is that my 275' in the air rollers will break 500' like 1% of the time, so it's a trade off.

i've seen someone roll 500'+ that landed the disc like 60' away from the tee pad but if you had them throw 10 of those in a row like 6 of them would hit something on the ground and go waaaaaaaay off.

most pros i have seen will cover 250'+ in the air if trying to roll 500'. they are also throwing with way more velocity than the average dude. my launch velocity is in the upper 40's and those distances are used for my rolling. someone like beto, with a launch velocity in the low 70's will use a completely different set of discs and have completely different percentages (and roll behavior).

what i can say is that my longest rollers barely have any speed left on them when they hit the ground (but they have a lot of momentum). if you can land a disc perfectly going at a slow speed, it will not tip topside and it will take forever to slow to a stop. those are by far the longest rollers i have seen (upwards of 700+').