A narrow roll-cast loop is made by the shape of the stroke, not by how hard you throw it. Come forward in translation, rotate late, and finish with a small kick of the tip.

What the instructor says

• Tip down, out to the side, up to here, stop. That frame is the whole stroke.
• Translation does the work. Start behind your head and come forward mostly with translation — “not a lot of rotation until you are right about here.”
• Then the kick. “It’s just going to be a little tip of the rod tip” — hardly any work at all sends it out.
• The stroke is the hard part. A stiff rod without tip casting gives “a big old one” — keep the stroke smooth and the tip path straight across the anchor.

Putting it to work

1. Draw the frame with no line. Tip down, out to the side, up, stop, and hold it there.
2. Hold the rotation back. Come forward in translation until the tip is nearly at the stop, then let it flick.
3. Keep the tip path straight across the anchor — the 180-degree rule is that you never throw the line over itself.

Source

From the FFI CI walkthrough series by Dayle Mazzarella (Chapter 3 — FFI Casting Instructor Certification Tasks, Fly Fishing Coach International), lesson 9, 00:05:17. See the video library and the task pages for the exam wording; terms follow the FFI Fly Casting Definitions.