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mananp

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help me reduce my f2l time plus last layer

hey guys i am pretty new to speed cubing cumminty . My average is about 29 seconds thats where i am lagging . I have timed that my cross takes 6 - 8 seconds then i flip the cube and find f2l pair my f2l plus cross ends in 19 sec then rest 10 sec i use the beginner way (making corss , aligning edges,alligning corner and orienting them.
Please help me. I use a WeiLong V2 and a ZhanChi. I have been cubing for 2 years now, why am I still slow?
Thanks in advance.
 
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Fawn

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For starters, solve your cross on the D face. Flipping the cube worsens your time by more than you may think. The cross can always be solved in under 8 moves. Typically much less. I recommend taking scrambles and planning out your entire cross before you actually make any moves. Once your cross gets efficient, it can easily be done in under 2 seconds.

When it comes to f2l, it's mostly a matter of efficiency, and not just speed. Over time, finding faster f2l solutions comes naturally, but I still highly recommend watching example solves from the greats. This thread was made extremely recently: http://www.speedsolving.com/forum/s...rteen-Cubers-One-Scramble&p=979646#post979646
Just watch the main video, and hopefully that will help shed some light

Definitely keep in mind how f2l pairs are dealt with. I know I've learned quite a few tricks from these sorts of videos.

When it comes to the Last layer, I highly recommend going to www.badmephisto.com
The OLL and PLL sections are very informative and useful. There are lots of threads here made for improving cubers' times, so I think it's good to stay involved with the forum and the community in general.

I see that this is your first post, unless you made a member introduction. In any case, welcome to the forum!
 

TinaIsAwesome

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hey guys i am pretty new to speed cubing cumminty . My average is about 29 seconds thats where i am lagging . I have timed that my cross takes 6 - 8 seconds then i flip the cube and find f2l pair my f2l plus cross ends in 19 sec then rest 10 sec i use the beginner way (making corss , aligning edges,alligning corner and orienting them.
Please help me. I use a WeiLong V2 and a ZhanChi. I have been cubing for 2 years now, why am I still slow?
Thanks in advance.

It all comes down to practice. Like Jim said, all crosses can be solved in 8 moves and most in 6. It seems like your cross takes a little too much time. Try practicing your cross to get it down to 2-3 seconds. You don't have to do cross on bottom but if you do it eliminates a cube rotation. As for F2L, you don't need to be fast at it you just need to have good look-ahead. Look-ahead is what is going to bring your times down. As soon as you finish your cross you should have already found your first F2L pair and there should be no pausing in-between F2L pairs. If you pause a lot during your solve that will worsen your time. It's better to go slower and not pause at all than to go fast and pause a lot. If you don't already know 4LLL(2-look OLL/2-Look PLL) you definitely need to start learning it. Okay, I think that's it. Just remember it takes time to improve but as long as you put the work in and practice, your times will get better.
 

crazycubes

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My average is around 36 seconds and i take some 15 seconds to solve the second layer using intuitive f2l excluding the cross. My lookahead is pretty bad. I know everyone tells to slow down and look for another pair while solving one but I can only locate one of the pieces, edge or corner and have to pause in between for searching the other one. For every pair, i take some 5-6 moves.
Any tips for improving or any mistakes iam making?
thnx
 

Hypocrism

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*not sure what thread this should be in, sorry if it's in the wrong one* I saw Mats Valk's example solves video(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM_bfV91QQg) and I noticed he did something to convert the cross step and F2L into one step. Is he doing the thing called Advanced Cross, or something else?

I am not watching the whole video, but it sounds like he's doing extended cross. That's solving a pair while you solve the cross.
 

goodatthis

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*not sure what thread this should be in, sorry if it's in the wrong one* I saw Mats Valk's example solves video(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM_bfV91QQg) and I noticed he did something to convert the cross step and F2L into one step. Is he doing the thing called Advanced Cross, or something else?

It's called an X-Cross, it's basically doing your first F2L pair and your cross at the same time. Advanced cross is a pretty general term, if could mean anything from an XCross to doing your cross more efficiently. Xcross stands for Extended Cross. It's usually used if a pair is already made when the cube is scrambled, or a few other different cases. If you want to look into XCrosses more, look into keyhole method and the Petrus method (particularly the 2x2x2 stage, that's really all an Xcross is)
 

jeff081692

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anybody tips for getting a sub 6 f2l
i average around 7-8 sec

Practice/learn new patterns. That is literally all there is to F2L whether you are going for sub 6 F2L or even faster. The reason practice is always said and the reason it will eventually make you faster is that over time you will pick up on new patterns subconsciously. If you know all your F2L algs and can do most of them from multiple angles then you have everything you need to compete with the best. I'm sure for some cases when doing 1 F2L pair you can immediately predict where the second pair will end up. Chances are you can't do this for every combination of 2 pairs and that is why you can't turn full speed with perfect lookahead. Sub 10 cubers can easily see where a pair will end up because they have solved so many times that all those little patterns of how F2L algs affect the surrounding pieces are ingrained in their minds. A sub 15 and a sub 10 cuber could both be using the exact same set of F2L algs but the sub 10 cuber is the one who has much more practice with this.

Another thing that concerns F2L is recognition and that can only be improved with practice. If you are not color neutral and you try solving on a different color then you will be slower because you have not adjusted to the colors of a different cross. Yet all the algorithms you know and the turn speed is stable. The only difference in F2L skill when going from one cross color to another is recognition. And so if you averaged 7 seconds on F2L with white but averaged 9 seconds with orange what would you recommend you do to improve at orange? It's practice and waiting for your mind to adjust to the new scheme.

Every so often look at fast cuber's reconstructions and compare what you do to what a faster person does. Sometimes you will see something that is completely better and you will want to change, this is learning new patterns. Other times you will see something and decide that both what you already do and what a faster person does can be useful because both algs will affect different pieces and so you can handle more combinations of cases efficiently.

Hope this helps and I will leave you with a pattern that you might not have known to get you thinking more and realize what is out there. Set up L' U L U2 R U2 R' U2 now many cubers will solve the FR slot first with U R U' R' and in my case to solve those two pairs would take 15 moves. But you can learn that in this case if you solve the FR with U2 R U2 R' then you have the next pair set up. for an easy insert with a 8 move solution for 2 pairs. The fastest cubers also know a higher percentage of little tricks like this but currently nobody uses full multislotting techniques all the time but that pair selection example is useful because it is simple to recognize with both pairs being in the U layer right in front of you.

So keep practicing and learn some new stuff every once in a while.
 
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Future Cuber

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Practice/learn new patterns. That is literally all there is to F2L whether you are going for sub 6 F2L or even faster. The reason practice is always said and the reason it will eventually make you faster is that over time you will pick up on new patterns subconsciously. If you know all your F2L algs and can do most of them from multiple angles then you have everything you need to compete with the best. I'm sure for some cases when doing 1 F2L pair you can immediately predict where the second pair will end up. Chances are you can't do this for every combination of 2 pairs and that is why you can't turn full speed with perfect lookahead. Sub 10 cubers can easily see where a pair will end up because they have solved so many times that all those little patterns of how F2L algs affect the surrounding pieces are ingrained in their minds. A sub 15 and a sub 10 cuber could both be using the exact same set of F2L algs but the sub 10 cuber is the one who has much more practice with this.

Another thing that concerns F2L is recognition and that can only be improved with practice. If you are not color neutral and you try solving on a different color then you will be slower because you have not adjusted to the colors of a different cross. Yet all the algorithms you know and the turn speed is stable. The only difference in F2L skill when going from one cross color to another is recognition. And so if you averaged 7 seconds on F2L with white but averaged 9 seconds with orange what would you recommend you do to improve at orange? It's practice and waiting for your mind to adjust to the new scheme.

Every so often look at fast cuber's reconstructions and compare what you do to what a faster person does. Sometimes you will see something that is completely better and you will want to change, this is learning new patterns. Other times you will see something and decide that both what you already do and what a faster person does can be useful because both algs will affect different pieces and so you can handle more combinations of cases efficiently.

Hope this helps and I will leave you with a pattern that you might not have known to get you thinking more and realize what is out there. Set up L' U L U2 R U2 R' U2 now many cubers will solve the FR slot first with U R U' R' and in my case to solve those two pairs would take 15 moves. But you can learn that in this case if you solve the FR with U2 R U2 R' then you have the next pair set up. for an easy insert with a 8 move solution for 2 pairs. The fastest cubers also know a higher percentage of little tricks like this but currently nobody uses full multislotting techniques all the time but that pair selection example is useful because it is simple to recognize with both pairs being in the U layer right in front of you.

So keep practicing and learn some new stuff every once in a while.

thanks a lot

btw i only average around 18-20 sec with 7 sec f2l solve which is pretty okay
any tips on that
i hope i posted this on the right thread
 

Future Cuber

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I assume the 7 seconds is not including cross. And for that 7.5 is enough to get sub 15. cross+1 or LL is probably your main problem then if your speeds are accurate.

okay
CROSS -- 5.188
F2L -- 7.392
OLL --2.070
PLL -- 2.936

well if u add all of them it would be 17.586
i know my cross ,LL sucks and have all the pauses between each subset
need improvement on both of them
;P
and yea u were right
7 sec without cross

Do you have a video of you solving? That looks very unrealistic. I have an 8-9 second F2L and average 14.5. And I know my LL sucks.

no i dont have a vid
belive it or not
but thats the truth
its up to you now
 
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TinaIsAwesome

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okay
CROSS -- 5.188
F2L -- 7.392
OLL --2.070
PLL -- 2.936

well if u add all of them it would be 17.586
i know my cross ,LL sucks and have all the pauses between each subset
need improvement on both of them
;P
and yea u were right
7 sec without cross

Your cross seems pretty slow to me. I average around 14-15 seconds with a slightly higher time for F2L sometimes but my cross is usually 2-3 seconds. I think you need to work on cross.
 

applemobile

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Do you have a video of you solving? That looks very unrealistic. I have an 8-9 second F2L and average 14.5. And I know my LL sucks.

Including or not including cross? My F2l without cross is in the low 7's and my global average is high 16's
 

TDM

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no i dont have a vid
belive it or not
but thats the truth
its up to you now
Now I've seen your splits, it's understandable. I thought you meant your F2L including cross was 7 seconds. Practise your cross a lot more, because it's very slow compared to the rest of your solves.
Including or not including cross? My F2l without cross is in the low 7's and my global average is high 16's
Including cross. Without cross mine would be 5-6.
 

jeff081692

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okay
CROSS -- 5.188
F2L -- 7.392
OLL --2.070
PLL -- 2.936

well if u add all of them it would be 17.586
i know my cross ,LL sucks and have all the pauses between each subset
need improvement on both of them
;P
and yea u were right
7 sec without cross

Well your F2L pairs is about as good as a sub14 cuber. And I wonder if you accounted for recognition time in OLL and PLL as that can take seconds for some people pushing you up to 20 seconds. If you decide to isolate practice for cross do cross+1 because you want to practice the transition. Since your F2L pairs is sub 14 level though I will just set a goal of 14 for every other step and so

cross+1 3.43
F2L pairs 7.00
OLL (no inspection) 2.31
PLL (no inspection) 3.01

are the ideals for you to balance out everything. You seem to meet the OLL and PLL requirements but I have a feeling that if you time without inspecting the cube first it will go over. Also it seems the cross is your biggest weakness if the OLL and PLL stuff is without inspection since you should be doing the cross and a pair in much less time.

So learn some better cross solutions. http://www.cubesolv.es/ pick your favorite cuber and study their crosses until you pick up some new ideas and practice cross+1 or just full solves. Sometimes they will have a solution that is too advanced for you but just try your best to understand and pick something up from each cross solution.

The way I do it is I will take the ideal for each step and practice until my best avg 100 is under the ideal and when that is the case for each step I do full solves until I break that barrier. When focusing on a new step watch youtube videos and learn as many new things about that step as you can and practice a lot (1 hour a day is nice enough to make great progress over time). I don't always like doing full solves so this suits me but find a way that makes practicing fun for you and you will improve but know your weaknesses and don't avoid them or they will hold you back. You came here for F2L pair advice yet your F2L pairs are the best part of your solve to an extreme. I was the same way I liked practicing the pairs and it was because I hated the cross so I avoided it in practice. It wasn't until I started focusing on weaknesses that I began to appreciate the cross and started making real improvements.
 
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Future Cuber

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Now I've seen your splits, it's understandable. I thought you meant your F2L including cross was 7 seconds. Practise your cross a lot more, because it's very slow compared to the rest of your solves.

How ??? and how to reduce my cross-f2l transition
 

TDM

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How ??? and how to reduce my cross-f2l transition
Try practising it blind. Take as much time as you need and plan your cross completely. That way you won't have to pause during your cross, reducing your cross times. In addition, during a solve, you can look for an F2L pair when making your cross, so just doing that actually answers both questions.
 
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