Spinning the plate

Mrs B has been hankering after a career in the circus after our trip to Zippo's. We bought the spinning plate there and she mastered it very quickly. I've been hopeless until today! You start with the plate sideways on the tip of the pole as shown in the top picture. It seems that the technique is to have a flexible wrist and wobble it from side to side. I was tending to keep it in one place and try to spin. I think the wobbling will be like trying to balance a pole on one hand. With the pole, you'll never get your hand exactly under the centre of gravity so you move it backwards and forwards to have the resultant moment first clockwise and then counter clockwise. In other words, the pole tries to fall first one way and then tries to fall back the other way. So on average it seems to stay balanced. I'm still thinking about the rest of the physics of the plate which must have something to do with angular momentum. Why does it stay horizontal when it is moving fast enough but fall off as it slows?