Soroban Abacus Moving Techniques

Use the thumb and forefingers to manipulate beads on a soroban. The thumb moves the earth beads up toward the beam. The forefinger moves everything else.

Bringing up one earth bead so that it touches the beam gives a rod a value of 1. Three earth beads touching the beam give that rod a value of 3. To make a value of 5 clear all the earth beads and move one heaven bead down so that it touches the beam. Pinching together one heaven bead and two earth beads sets a value of 7 and so on.