My speed cubing page
ws.binghamton.edu
ws.binghamton.edu
They had a social media thing going around where you could tag your country for a chance to get featured. From a 14 second PB in my youth, it was still pretty trivial to get somewhere in the 25-30 second range on the janky stock cubes they distributed to all the athletes. It was probably the most I did for Team Canada during that trip.
https://www.thecubicle.com/products/yuxin-little-magic-3x3
The cube is only $6 (recently inflationed from $5) and it's one of the best cubes I've ever used. I have a stack of these sitting at home that I sometimes give to people who show an interest.
Incidentally, YuXin makes some very smooth and affordable larger cubes. Their 11x11 is insanely fun.
https://www.thecubicle.com/products/yuxin-little-magic-11x11
I remember back when I was getting into cubing, late 07-early 08 and you could only get up to 5x5 cubes. Vcube had a website up for what seemed like forever (I was 10 so it may not be as long as my memory tells me) showing that they were going to be selling 6x6 and 7x7 cubes, and at some point it started feeling like vaporware and I thought maybe the site was just a viral stunt. But eventually they came out and I bought a 7x7 which I still have, and I thought it was so cool. It's still the biggest cube I have but it's not great to use because it was before a lot of modern cube tech advancements.
I'm not super hardcore into cubes, every few years I look online into what the zeitgeist is saying to find the best new 3x3 speedcube and buy one to keep on my desk and do E-perms while reading or watching videos. And a couple years ago I bought a decent 5x5 (looking at the email receipt, it's - YJ MGC Magnetic 5x5 - Stickerless) and I've had a lot of fun playing with that sometimes while listening to podcasts. Though it is prone to pieces popping if I'm not careful with my turns
A giant Rubik's cube is the sort of thing that one person with a computer, a resin printer, and an obsession could design and test until it's ready to bring to market, and which is such a niche market that it'd be a terrible business decision to do it.
I'm so happy that large cubes are not only commonplace, but well made and affordable. I absolutely love my 7, 9, 11 and 13s.
And I still hate even-order cubes.
I am not a "real speedcuber" tho. My average is about 40s, but it's a nice cube and I enjoy playing with it.
The method described here nowadays goes under the name of CFOP (Fridrich's page made it very popular, so in former days it was referred to the "Fridrich" method). It's still popular and got refined over the years, see this excellent comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37430854
Another interesting topic is the question which (cross) color you choose: There are 6 possibilities (colors) and in the beginning even top solvers preferred one color (white is the most popular) to simplify recognition ("where are my pieces?").
Later, top solvers switched to "color neutral" solving, which in theory gives you more efficient crosses, as you can choose the color that gives you the shortest solution. There even seemed to be consensus that if you want to be at the top you had to be color neutral.
However even more recently this has been challenged and "dual color neutral" (only choosing between white and yellow) seems to be the way to go.
The reason is that during inspection (in competition you have 15 seconds to "inspect" the cube meaning to plan your solution (partly) ahead of time) the selection process to choose the best cross obviously takes some time. There's a trade-off between investing time to plan the cross (and additional blocks) in inspection and selecting the color that should be preferred.
Today, the best solvers have gotten multiple sub 5 averages [2] and most good solves can get sub 11 second averages with practice. In fact most intermediate solvers can get sub 17 second averages with advanced cube technology (better turning speed and fewer lock ups). I've even seen a 2.35 second solve [3]
[1] http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/fridrich/hints.html#limits
[2] https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/results/rankings/333/av...
Are the cubes all the same?
Interestingly, the official Rubik's cubes are very poor quality.
I have a GAN speedcube and can recommend.
Official Rubik’s cubes solve a different problem: being a good toy: sure they’re horrible to turn, but they also they never explode, can’t corner-twist, and can even survive being thrown into a wall.
That being said, I would never recommend this brand to any one above 12.
Rubik's cubes have a long history of being crap. They used to have crappy stickers that would peel off, and would explode. The newer ones don't explode.
You can definitely corner twist.
Modern Rubik's brand cubes have hidden screws under two of the faces (yellow and white, I think) where you can adjust tension to some extent.
That used to be true but hasn't been for years.
The Rubik's branded cubes (e.g. that you can get a Walmart) now have decent, fast action and real plastic faces rather than stickers. They don't have the beveled inner corners for the smoothest action, but are usable.
I've seen YT videos of people solving them in 20 seconds or less.
Definitely not.
Get a GAN with built-in magnets, it'll get you far.
Beyond that, rabbit hole is right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9mhOJflqgk
I haven't really turned a 3x3 for speed in a while.. but at the end I was using a Tornado V2, cheaper, and better than the Gan. Now there's better than that.
If you are interested watch the stuff from "The Cubicle" Phil does a good job of breaking down cubes and giving an honest opinion.
[1] https://speedcubeshop.com/collections/3x3-speed-cubes/produc... [2] https://speedcubeshop.com/collections/3x3-speed-cubes/produc...
These days I prefer to use though: http://algdb.net/
Generally the difficulty of a method is driven by the number of "algorithms", or sets of moves, you have to memorise in order to move between states. The "beginner method" is not very fast, but doesn't require a lot of memorisation. One comfortable with that, you can build up on it and replace parts with faster moves.
https://ruwix.com/the-rubiks-cube/how-to-solve-the-rubiks-cu...
and, for learning about cube algorithms and the notation for cube algorithms (which relies heavily on getting familiar with counterclockwise/clockwise turns viewed from one stable orientation of the cube for all faces):
As a beginner, get a MoYu RS3M 2021 (or one of the newer MoYu budget cubes). Watch the 10 minute tutorial by J Perm on YouTube, then watch RiDo's Hunting Story, it really improved my first 2 layers early on.
Once you approach sub-30, get a YS3M if you want to have a more controllable cube, or a WRM v9 if you want a faster cube, and get cube lube. If you're trying to get serious, invest in a SpeedStacks timer; it is a much better method of timing and it's used in competitions.
Also, go to competitions early on. It gives you a big motivator to improve. You can find competitions on the WCA website.
Good luck!
This is one of several competitive methods but it remains the most popular by far. I enjoy them all but the modularity and flexibility of cfop makes it my favourite and my home.
Thanks for the post.
I remember my 1st attempt taking me 1/2 an hour to get a success, times have dropped, but it's been a while since I did it. I should fix that :)
The OP (old Pochmann) is a super simple method. Learning 3bld if you can already solve a cube is actually less work then learning to solve the cube at first
The hard part is all up front. The first solve you do is the hardest, it took me 30m+.
I'd also recommend learning M2 over OP for edges. I used Noah's guide back when. M2 is so much faster, that unless you are going all the way to 3 style (which is a large jump) M2/OP is pretty optimal. If you've got more questions I'll try to scan every so often.
I also learned that actively memorizing is extremely exhausting.
The first to do it will likely be another olympic-level skilled 10 year old kid with a knack for puzzles, honed hand-eye coordination, and a naturally high level sense of visual acuity and a decent understanding of either functional composition or a base intuition of group theory.
The system described here is basically standard CFOP: Cross, First 2 layers, Orient last layer (OLL), Permute last layer (Pll). Though now most cubers don’t take advantage of the symmetry between algorithms, and instead do completely different algorithms for flipped cases. One reason for this is that most people aren’t perfectly ambidextrous, and the other is it can facilitate recognition.
The second most popular method, Roux, has also a lot of potential. Completely different from CFOP.
CFOP has been refined a lot. First the obvious: the cross is solved at the bottom, and so are the first two layers. That way you can better see the pieces that actually interest you: those that aren’t solved yet. And it saves you from flipping the cube over when it comes to solve the last layer. The first two layers are still solved mostly intuitively, but with a lot of tricks to make it faster, like pseudo slotting, key-holes… currently Tymon Kolasiński is the master of pseudo slotting, with extremely efficient F2L (and standing equal to him is Max Park, who is basically ambidextrous for this phase).
For the last layer there are also a lot of tricks, most of which requires recalling an ungodly amount of algorithms. Some are about inserting the last pair and orient the last layer (few cubers learn them all, but the set called "winter variation" is fairly popular). Sometimes the edges are already oriented, so we can orient and place the last corners (COLL), so at the end we only need to permute the edges (easier recognition, slightly faster algorithms than general PLL).
And then there’s ZBLL, from the ZZ method, where we start with edges already oriented, and we orient the corner and permute everything in a single algorithm. But there’s a crapton of algs to learn from, not even Tymon Kolasiński knows them all… well, one cuber does know them all (don’t recall his name, sorry), I believe his method to solve the last layer is to orient the edges at the same time he places the last F2L pair, then he goes ZBLL.
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If you want to learn speed cubing now, I recommend https://cubeskills.com/ and https://jperm.net/ — or look up the Roux method if you don’t want to do like everyone else.
However you can use different methods in different events (e.g. for one handed).
And the notable exception is 2x2x2 where if you want to be the top competitor you basically have to learn all the methods. During the competition you search mamy solutions and pick up one you can execute fastest.
Practice makes permanent.
My favourite technique for solving the Rubiks Cube involved orienting the edges in the first step (resp. with a lot experience possibly on-the-fly). I believe it was called the ZZ method or something like that. It reduced the number possible 3rd layer combinations to a few hundred. On his blog, Friedrich mentions an upper limit of roughly 1200 combinations. Back then ZZ was not invented, yet. It's been a long time, I don't remember well, but I believe a naive upper limit is higher. Nevertheless, in contrast to Friedrich's method (today refered to as CFOP, as a sibling commenter points out) solving the third layer was possible in a single step instead of two. There was situations were the two-step algorithm is far more ergonomic than the single step one, so one wouldn't reasonably choose the latter. This further reduced the number of combinations. Ultimately, ZZ was a manageble amount of algorithms to memorize. Also, the solving process felt much more natural than the Friedrich Method. More like, how it is supposed to be.
For experienced cubers this method lead to a low average solving time. On the other hand, due to the complexity of the edge-orientation step, instinctively exploiting advantageous situations was much harder than with Friedrich. Friedrich often allows you to skip steps or merge steps together, i.e. looking ahead in the solving process and reacting to what you see. While that is possible with ZZ, too, the simplicity of Friedrich's method allows for a much more freestyle solving process if you master it. Hence, for masters of the Friedrich Method the solving process becomes more similiar to the Heise method (Edit: Previously, I mistakenly wrote Roux), which not really is a method at all, but rather a way of understanding the cube. In principle, that's equally possible with ZZ, too, but in reality it is likely too complex for humans to master it as well as Friedrich's method.
In effect, the ZZ method while arguably superior to the Friedrich method did not allow for state-the-art speed. The best cubers not only achieved lower records with Friedrich, but lower average times, too (we're talking here about a difference of a one digit number of seconds). The ZZ method nevertheless lead to more reliable worst case times. If looking ahead in Friedrich fails, the ZZ method shines due to its overall smaller average number of turns necessary to solve the cube.
(However, all this information is 10 years old memories, so please check for yourself, if at the top level that's still true today or true at all.)
Also, it was a lot of fun to learn the ZZ method. I can highly recommend doing so. Learning several hundred algorithms is less than it seams. It likely takes at least a year, though, and that is if you learn several new algorithms per day. One does not need to learn them all at once. One can always resort to a two-step 3rd layer approach if necessary. But, getting the 3rd layer in a single step felt so awsome! (I was not even halve way through all algorithms, when life dragged me to focus on other things.)
I should definitely give cubing another try someday. Last time I took a cube, I couldn't even remember the two-step algorithm necessary to solve the particular 3rd layer situation that came up. However, this time I would rather focus on mastering ZZ's first step, i.e. orienting all the edges, instead of focussing on memorizing all 3rd layer combinations.