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Older cubers discussions

SpartanSailor

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May 21, 2016
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2016DUEH02
Sat dow for some easy casual solves this morning and just landed my first sub-20 Ao12...

Generated By csTimer on 2019-3-24
avg of 12: 19.80

Time List:
1. 21.94 L2 R2 D2 R2 U' R2 D' F2 D2 B2 R2 B L2 D L R F L U F2 R'
2. 19.36 B2 D2 R2 B U2 B L2 U2 L2 F R2 D' U' B2 R' F' D B2 U' R2
3. 21.79 F2 L' D2 F2 R U2 B2 L2 D2 L' D' L' R2 F2 L2 F D B R'
4. 20.11 F D' L2 F2 R2 F2 U2 L2 U R2 F U2 R2 B' U2 R' B' U2 R2
5. (17.39) D2 L D' B R U D' B R2 F2 U' B2 R2 D2 R2 U B2 D' R2 L
6. 17.68 U F2 D2 B' R2 F R2 F' D2 U2 B2 R2 L D' L2 B' L' B R' U F'
7. (24.67) R F2 L B2 R' F2 L U2 B2 R U2 B' F L2 B L U' B U L'
8. 19.44 L2 F L2 B' R' D2 R U' R U2 L F2 R' F2 D2 R2 F2 R D2 F
9. 18.86 F U' L2 U' L' D R F2 L' D2 R2 F' U2 B2 D2 F U2 D2 R2 B2 L'
10. 18.94 R F R2 D2 U2 B' R2 F2 L2 U2 B2 U R D2 L D B' L' F' R F2
11. 22.44 F2 D2 F2 L2 D' R2 D L2 B2 U' R2 B U' L2 B' D' L' D U B F2
12. 17.47 D2 U2 F2 R' D2 R' U2 L2 U2 R' D2 U B2 R D L B R2 B2 R' D2
 

SpartanSailor

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2016DUEH02
Might as well dip your toe into mbld while you're at it, it'll give more practice on longer memos. Locations are a super easy way to help mentally organize/subdivide things and full image memo with associations between them helps me with retention. I have total faith you'll find what works for you, I haven't even attempted a 3bld solve this year so I have to live vicariously through others.
Last year I tried a little MBLD like 2 or 3 cubes... more like “few BLD” than “multi”. I can’t see going down that path much beyond 3 or 4 cubes. To do that, however, I’ll have to learn a variation on the Roman rooms method. My current 3BLD method is memo and execute a sting of letter pairs... no audio or images. I’m sure if I learn some additional techniques I can improve my 3BLD times too.
 

pglewis

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Sep 23, 2016
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Cincinnati
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2016LEWI07
Sat dow for some easy casual solves this morning and just landed my first sub-20 Ao12...

Even with me focusing on 3x3 and you focusing on blind I can't catch you :D. Nice batch of solves there!

To do that, however, I’ll have to learn a variation on the Roman rooms method. My current 3BLD method is memo and execute a sting of letter pairs... no audio or images.

There's really nothing to "learn" IMO. For mbld I just have two locations per room, one for edge memo the other for corners. My office is one room and edge memo goes on my chair and corner memo on my desk, that's all there is to it. You can add more locations within each room for flipped/twisted pieces or different piece types for 4/5bld, or just use more rooms. We have good image memory-- random strings of letters, not so much-- so the key is to leverage what your memory is good at. 3bld should be fast enough to just wing it, it's a different animal because the retention time is short.
 

openseas

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Oct 11, 2015
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2015PARK24
Question for the 4BLD solvers:

Do you find that practicing 4BLD (or learning in my case) improved your 3BLD?

I notice a small bump in my lookahead with 3x3 after I focus on 4x4 for awhile. I’m wondering if there’s a comparable effect with BLD.

It helps in terms of memo speed (as Mike mentioned). You'll feel much easier for 3BLD (of course, much less number of target) when you do enough 4BLD practice.
But as other pointed out, execution speed, not much.

On the other hand, 5BLD practice definitely improves 4BLD :)
 

Oldmancfop

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Mar 25, 2019
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I have been learning cfop for around 6 months and practicing a lot. I have been making steady progress but i was wondering if it is considered a good idea to take a break for a few days now and then, I'm wondering if I'm over practicing.
 

SpartanSailor

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2016DUEH02
I have been learning cfop for around 6 months and practicing a lot. I have been making steady progress but i was wondering if it is considered a good idea to take a break for a few days now and then, I'm wondering if I'm over practicing.
I have found that following large amounts of practice that a couple days of rest actually improves my time.

It may just be due to my frustrations by the time I take a break, but it certainly can’t hurt to try.

I don’t think you have to be worried that everything will be lost in a couple days... take a break. See how it goes.
 
Last edited:

openseas

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2015PARK24
Wow, I just cracked the 5-minute barrier on 4BLD! 4:57.56[2:49.21], on the SpeedSolving weekly competition this week. My previous best was 5:27.51, so this was a huge jump!

I'm coming for the 10-minute barrier on 5BLD; I'm getting close.

Wow, great! What's your 3BLD time these days?
 

pglewis

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I have been learning cfop for around 6 months and practicing a lot. I have been making steady progress but i was wondering if it is considered a good idea to take a break for a few days now and then, I'm wondering if I'm over practicing.

It might be the case sometimes, I brought this up recently myself. Between work and life I occasionally go a few weeks with minimal practice. It might take 3 or 4 days to clear the cobwebs when I return and I might have forgotten an OLL or three but I've seen a bump multiple times after a break. When I've been working on a lot of new things I do suspect my brain continues to process things subconsciously for a while without much practice. At the same time I have no way to know if I'd have made the same or better progress without the break, so ultimately it's pure speculation and a big ol' shrug from me.

More importantly I think: if you feel like taking break, take a break. If you're fully enjoying yourself and seeing steady progress I don't think it hurts to just keep at it.
 

Mike Hughey

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Wow, great! What's your 3BLD time these days?
Heh, not good. I probably average a little over 1:30 right now, whereas a few years ago I averaged less than 1:10. I cannot maintain my speed at 3BLD without practicing fairly much; I would probably have to do about 500 solves over a period of several weeks in order to start even getting close to my old speed.

I guess that's one thing I like about big BLD over 3BLD - just a few attempts per week is enough to keep improving. Of course, when I say a few attempts a week, I mean 3 4BLD attempts, 3 5BLD attempts, a 6BLD attempt, and a 7BLD attempt each week. :)
 

openseas

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Heh, not good. I probably average a little over 1:30 right now, whereas a few years ago I averaged less than 1:10. I cannot maintain my speed at 3BLD without practicing fairly much; I would probably have to do about 500 solves over a period of several weeks in order to start even getting close to my old speed.

I guess that's one thing I like about big BLD over 3BLD - just a few attempts per week is enough to keep improving. Of course, when I say a few attempts a week, I mean 3 4BLD attempts, 3 5BLD attempts, a 6BLD attempt, and a 7BLD attempt each week. :)

I feel you. Just couple of days without any practice drops the time at least 10s of 3BLD. I might need to start more focusing on big BLDs once I finish all edge comms.
 

OldManCuber

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Old cuber question here about better practicing... So, I'm learning 4x4 for a tournament, and realized I don't have the time to do a ton of the the long solves I could do with 3x3, 2x2, Pyraminx, Square-1, Clock. Typical story... married, kids, full time job, so I'm lucky to get a full hour a day practicing cubing.

So, here's my question... Does anyone have tips on focusing your practice time? For me, since I'm just learning Yau, I'm doing 30-40 repetitions of first 2 centers and first 3 edges and STOP. I need to get that down before moving and smooth before moving on to last 4 centers and last edge. I can do the full Yau solve in 3 minutes now, but it's all very slow. If I focus on just parts I need to improve, that makes my practice time more efficient and I don't need to spend 2-3-4 hours a day like these kids can.

Thoughts?
 

SpartanSailor

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Old cuber question here about better practicing... So, I'm learning 4x4 for a tournament, and realized I don't have the time to do a ton of the the long solves I could do with 3x3, 2x2, Pyraminx, Square-1, Clock. Typical story... married, kids, full time job, so I'm lucky to get a full hour a day practicing cubing.

So, here's my question... Does anyone have tips on focusing your practice time? For me, since I'm just learning Yau, I'm doing 30-40 repetitions of first 2 centers and first 3 edges and STOP. I need to get that down before moving and smooth before moving on to last 4 centers and last edge. I can do the full Yau solve in 3 minutes now, but it's all very slow. If I focus on just parts I need to improve, that makes my practice time more efficient and I don't need to spend 2-3-4 hours a day like these kids can.

Thoughts?
I think it’s good to focus your practice. What are the next focus areas for you? I would add building the remaining centres (as a next step when you are ready to move on) then edge pairing for another focus area.

After that, it’s just the 3x3 phase.

Perhaps donsome warmup drills with the OLL and PLL parity algs so you can have those in muscle memory.

Best of luck at your up coming competition.
 

h2f

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So, here's my question... Does anyone have tips on focusing your practice time? For me, since I'm just learning Yau, I'm doing 30-40 repetitions of first 2 centers and first 3 edges and STOP. I need to get that down before moving and smooth before moving on to last 4 centers and last edge. I can do the full Yau solve in 3 minutes now, but it's all very slow. If I focus on just parts I need to improve, that makes my practice time more efficient and I don't need to spend 2-3-4 hours a day like these kids can.

I would recommend doing full solves. Reasons? In 4x4 you need to be good at all parts, not only the beginning. After doing doing centers and cross you need as well to be comfortable with edge paring in 3-2-3 scheme. Next goes normal solving but recognition of f2l is different than in 3x3 becasue of double edge - you brain needs to used to it. And the final - parities. Without practice it can be harder to recognize it. That's my opinion. Literally doing full solves let you to be comfortable with 4x4 and Yau method. You can bring your times quite easily to 2 minutes barrier.
 

AbsoRuud

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I just wanna add my two cents here on 4x4x4. Yau says that you have to find three white-colour edges and pair them up around the white center. For Roux, this does not matter at all, in my experience. I often find other pairs that I can quickly move to the white edge, saving me a lot of time trying to find all the white-colour edges.

After the edge pairing, when using Roux, I only ever get two parity cases, so that's fairly easy to memorize. I get the "swap two edges" and "flip one edge" parity case. That's it.

Something to consider when solving 4x4x4. If you use Roux, you don't have to deal with many parity cases and you don't have to fixate on finding white-colour edges for the first three edges.

That's how I use Yau with Roux on 4x4x4. :)
 

Sergey

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Feb 16, 2018
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I just wanna add my two cents here on 4x4x4. Yau says that you have to find three white-colour edges and pair them up around the white center. For Roux, this does not matter at all, in my experience. I often find other pairs that I can quickly move to the white edge, saving me a lot of time trying to find all the white-colour edges.

After the edge pairing, when using Roux, I only ever get two parity cases, so that's fairly easy to memorize. I get the "swap two edges" and "flip one edge" parity case. That's it.

Something to consider when solving 4x4x4. If you use Roux, you don't have to deal with many parity cases and you don't have to fixate on finding white-colour edges for the first three edges.

That's how I use Yau with Roux on 4x4x4. :)
AFAIK, there are no more than those 2 parity cases - "swap two edges" aka PLL- and "flip one edge" aka OLL-parity, regardless on solving method. But there are more than two advanced methods to solve parities (something like ZBLL for 3x3 last layer) - for example.
 

OldManCuber

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I would recommend doing full solves. Reasons? In 4x4 you need to be good at all parts, not only the beginning. After doing doing centers and cross you need as well to be comfortable with edge paring in 3-2-3 scheme. Next goes normal solving but recognition of f2l is different than in 3x3 becasue of double edge - you brain needs to used to it. And the final - parities. Without practice it can be harder to recognize it. That's my opinion. Literally doing full solves let you to be comfortable with 4x4 and Yau method. You can bring your times quite easily to 2 minutes barrier.

My point was that I don't have a lot of time to do a lot of full solves every night, so I was wondering for folks that don't have a lot of time, do they focus on specific areas during practice sessions? Last night I did 40 cycles of First 2 Centers with First 3 Edges then stopped. After which I did 10 full solves. FYI, my fastest 4x4 time is just 2:30 so you can so that in a regular practice session there's not a lot of full solves being done.
 
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