Awesome Trick Shots

We thought the only way to land a dart on a dartboard was to throw it through the air. This skilled “dartist” shows how it’s possible to place a dart right in the bullseye by tossing it into a vertical loop, where it spins around and hits the bullseye. If you have any doubt this was real, here’s the original How Ridiculous video.

Florian “Venom” Kohler is one of the world’s best pool trick shot artists. As he’s perfected his craft, he has developed over 10,000 tricks and techniques to make billiard balls do his bidding. WIRED met with Florian to demonstrate some of his wildly inventive trick shots. His mastery of ball physics is truly something to behold.

If you mounted a bunch of ceiling fans on their sides and tried to hit a target on the other side of them without hitting any of their spinning blades, chances are you would fail. But the guys from How Ridiculous show us how with enough tries and enough luck, it’s possible to pull off such a feat.

We’ve seen our share of cat videos and ping pong trick-shot videos over the years. This clip from Cat Navi Desk combines both of these internet pastimes into one. Regardless of their accomplishments, the cats seem completely over it.

Skateboarding site The Berrics dusted off and remastered this classic clip of trick shot master Billy Marks tossing around a bowling ball in a skate park. He might only knock down one pin at a time, but he does it with so much style and grace.

It takes a good bit of practice just to learn to throw and catch a boomerang, but champion thrower Logan Broadbent and Dude Perfect show off just how much precision you can achieve with enough time, effort, and skill.

Ping pong player Takkyuu Geinin proves that you don’t need a fancy paddle to accurately return a serve. Watch as he nails his target every time, using a variety of silly noisemakers to play the game. English subtitles available.

DoodleChaos made budget versions of basketball trick shots using wood, marbles, string and other small objects. It starts out simple, but quickly becomes more and more complex. The ball bouncing on the rolling cylinder was nuts.

YouTuber DoodleChaos starts out with a very simple ping pong trick shot, then gradually ramps up the difficulty with an ever more challenging series of trick shots, which require not just precision, but perfect timing to come together.

While he didn’t manage to nail it with every shot, it’s still impressive that Olympic shooting coach Zhou Shibing managed to cleanly take the caps off of several bottles of beer by firing at them with his air rifle on the Chinese reality show Impossible Challenge.

The dudes from Dude Perfect prove they’re not just good at sportball, and turn in some impressive trick maneuvers with the help of some well-aimed lightweight foam gliders. The breakaway bottles were a bit of a cheat though.

There are millions of trick shot videos on YouTube (and we’ve featured our share of them.) Now, Captain Disillusion is here to burst our bubble – and all of those basketballs, footballs, tennis balls, and golf balls, as he shows us some of the tricks of the trade.

Magician and card thrower Rick Smith Jr. teamed up with the guys from Dude Perfect to show off his incredible ability to use the edge of a playing card like the edge of a knife, and do it with an incredible degree of accuracy. That banana trick made us cover our crotches.

Devin Graham teamed up with Cinechopper to rig up some drones to carry a variety of objects, from basketballs to bowling balls, then applied their precision flying skills to perform a variety of tricks and cause general mayhem. BTS here.

We’ve seen pool champion Florian “Venom” Kohler work his magic in miniature, now watch as he literally takes aim at the hyperactive Dude Perfect dudes, then turns in a epic round of trick shots bouncing balls from table to table, across the room, and always hitting his target.

To celebrate the first ever World Trick Shot Day (who knew?), Harlem Globetrotter Buckets Blakes headed to the top of the 58-story Tower of the Americas in San Antonio, and took aim at the basket far below. We have no idea how he worked the wind into his calculations.