How Many Tricks Should a Beginner Know: A Realistic Benchmark

A realistic beginner benchmark is 4 to 6 tricks landed consistently, not just attempted, usually the ollie plus a small spread of flatground basics like pop shove-it, frontside or backside 180, and a manual. There is no official count that defines "beginner," but comparing yourself to a number pulled from thin air causes more damage than having no number at all, so this is a grounded target based on which beginner-rated tricks in Onbolts' data actually build on each other. Quality of those tricks (consistent, not just landed once) matters more than the raw count.

Why "how many tricks" is the wrong first question

The honest answer is that trick count is a weak measure of skill on its own. A skater with five tricks at consistent status is meaningfully more capable than a skater with fifteen tricks all sitting at landed once, even though the second skater's raw number looks more impressive. If you are going to use a benchmark at all, it needs to specify the skill level, not just the count, which is exactly what Onbolts' 5-level scale (learning, landed once, occasional, consistent, mastered) is built to capture.

So the real benchmark below is stated as: 4 to 6 tricks at consistent or better, drawn from the beginner-difficulty pool.

The beginner-difficulty trick pool

Onbolts' data rates a specific set of tricks as beginner difficulty, including ollie, pop shove-it, frontside 180, backside 180, manual, nose manual, 50-50 grind, drop in, kickturn, boneless, and no comply, among others. Nobody is expected to land all of these before moving on to intermediate tricks. A realistic beginner benchmark pulls a small, connected subset, not the whole list.

A realistic starter set of 5

Here is one reasonable set of 5 tricks to aim for at consistent status before considering yourself past the earliest beginner phase, chosen because they cover flatground, grinding, and basic transition riding without requiring you to master every category:

1. Ollie - 1–4 weeks in Onbolts' data, and the single most connected trick in the beginner pool
2. Pop shove-it - 1–3 weeks, requires ollie as a prerequisite, teaches board rotation without flip mechanics
3. Frontside 180 or Backside 180 - both 2–5 weeks, both require ollie, teach body rotation
4. Manual - 2–6 weeks, a completely different skill (balance, not pop) that rounds out your base
5. 50-50 grind - 2–6 weeks, requires ollie, your first taste of grinding if you have access to a ledge or box

This is not a mandatory checklist, some skaters skip grinding entirely for months if they only skate flatground spots, and that is completely fine. The point of the list is showing that a realistic beginner benchmark is small, connected, and achievable in a few months of regular sessions, not the dozens of tricks that highlight reels make it look like everyone already knows.

Why quantity chasing backfires

A common beginner mistake is trying to rack up as many landed-once tricks as possible, treating trick count like a video game achievement list. This backfires for a specific reason: most beginner and intermediate tricks share prerequisites, so an inconsistent foundation trick becomes a weak link across everything built on it. If your ollie is only at occasional status, every trick that requires it as a prerequisite (which in Onbolts' data includes pop shove-it, frontside 180, backside 180, 50-50 grind, boardslide, noseslide, and kickflip) inherits that shakiness.

Six tricks at consistent will get you further, faster, than twenty tricks at landed once, because the six consistent tricks are stable platforms to build the next layer on, while the twenty shaky ones are not.

How the skill tree changes what "enough" tricks looks like

The skill tree shows this structurally. Once your ollie is consistent, it directly unlocks a wide branch of the beginner and intermediate pool. Getting one foundational trick to consistent status often does more for your total unlocked-trick count than spreading effort across five unrelated tricks at learning status. If you are trying to decide what to work on next, checking which beginner tricks share the most downstream connections (ollie is the clearest example) is a better strategy than picking randomly.

What about kickflip or heelflip as a "beginner" goal

Kickflip and heelflip are both rated intermediate, not beginner, in Onbolts' data, with learning windows of 1–6 months and 1–4 months respectively. It is completely normal to be working toward one of these as a stretch goal while you are still building your beginner base, but they should not be counted against a beginner trick-count benchmark. Treat them as the bridge to the next stage rather than something you are behind on if they are not landed yet.

Where grinds and transitions fit into the count

The starter set above leans flatground because it is the most accessible terrain for most beginners, a driveway or empty parking lot is enough. But drop in, kickturn, and boneless are also rated beginner difficulty in Onbolts' data and belong to transition riding, a separate branch entirely. If you skate mostly at a park with ramps and bowls, a fair benchmark swaps one or two of the flatground tricks for these instead, since the underlying skill (weight transfer on a curved surface) barely overlaps with flatground pop tricks.

The count of 4 to 6 stays the same either way. What changes is which specific tricks fill those slots, and that should follow the terrain you actually have access to, not a generic list copied from somewhere else.

A benchmark by time, not just trick count

Trick count benchmarks work better paired with a time expectation, since raw count alone does not account for how often someone skates. As a loose reference: a beginner skating two to three sessions a week can reasonably expect to reach the 4 to 6 consistent tricks benchmark somewhere in the 2 to 4 month range, based on the individual learning-time windows in Onbolts' data for tricks like ollie (1–4 weeks), pop shove-it (1–3 weeks), and the 180 variants (2–5 weeks each), skated with some overlap rather than strictly sequentially.

Skating once a week or less will stretch this out considerably, and that is fine, the benchmark is a reference point, not a deadline.

What to do if you are behind your own benchmark

If you set a benchmark like the one above and a few months in you are nowhere close, the fix is rarely "try harder at the same approach." More often it means one specific trick in the set is stuck at learning or landed once and quietly blocking the rest, especially if it is the ollie, since so much of the beginner pool depends on it. Rather than spreading effort thinner across all five target tricks, concentrate sessions on the one blocking trick until it reaches consistent, then let the others catch up, since several of them share the same foundation.

It is also worth checking whether the benchmark itself needs adjusting for your situation. A rider with access to a skate park two or three times a week and one skating a single flat driveway once a week are not on the same realistic timeline, even with identical effort and attitude. Terrain access is a real variable, and a benchmark that ignores it will feel unfairly discouraging for no good reason.

Depth over breadth, even at the very beginning

The instinct to rack up trick count is understandable, it is the most visible, shareable form of progress. But the riders who progress fastest through the beginner phase are usually the ones who get a small handful of tricks to genuinely consistent status early, because those consistent tricks become the stable base for everything that follows. A rider with three rock-solid tricks (ollie, pop shove-it, and a 180 variant, for example) is better positioned to start intermediate tricks than a rider with eight tricks all sitting at occasional, even though the second rider's trick list looks longer on paper.

Track it properly instead of guessing

The easiest way to know exactly where you stand against a benchmark like this is to log your tricks honestly on the progress page using the 5-level scale, rather than mentally rounding "landed it twice" up to "I know this trick." Count only tricks at consistent or mastered when comparing yourself to a benchmark like the one above. Once you hit it, the skill tree will already be showing you what unlocks next, and the full trick list has the intermediate pool waiting once your beginner base is solid.