Older cubers discussions

I heard rumours that he gets a telegram from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth next year.....and he used to take his lucky cube with him in his Spitfire on every mission he flew...
 
Logiqx said:
First time ever!

I think I can probably call myself sub-19 now as my last 1000 timed solves average 18.8. Recent sessions have varied between high 17s and high 18s.

Two other cool things about the session... exactly half of the solves are sub-18 and the big averages are within 0.07 of your PBs. :)
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And I am way off my own PB's so that makes you quite a bit ahead of me on this moment. Time for me to catch up :)
 
Thanks for the encouraging words on the school program. The teacher is waiting to hear from the principle. I will let everyone know how it goes.

For my cubing excitement I finally graduated the race to sub 25 this week. I also got my first sub 3 min 4x4 solve. :) Feel kinda silly with that since y'all are talking about sub 2 5x5. I'm really not practicing much still except 3x3, but 4x4 is fun and I'll do a few solves a night sometimes. 2x2 I'm around 12 seconds now, it's fun I'll be glad to compete in it.

I get any algs messed up except two handed on 3x3! 4x4 I can't even tell if I have parity half the time, oh my!!
 
Jason Green said:
Thanks for the encouraging words on the school program. The teacher is waiting to hear from the principle. I will let everyone know how it goes.

For my cubing excitement I finally graduated the race to sub 25 this week. I also got my first sub 3 min 4x4 solve. :) Feel kinda silly with that since y'all are talking about sub 2 5x5. I'm really not practicing much still except 3x3, but 4x4 is fun and I'll do a few solves a night sometimes. 2x2 I'm around 12 seconds now, it's fun I'll be glad to compete in it.

I get any algs messed up except two handed on 3x3! 4x4 I can't even tell if I have parity half the time, oh my!!
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I clearly remember struggling to get below 3 minutes on 4x4. I even had DNF's on competition for not reaching the 3 minute cutoff. :) Now I am averaging 1:45 but do get the occasional +/- 1:30 average in the weekly contest. Currently I am doing more 4x4 solves than 3x3 just because I think it is fun. I do Hoya as method and I remember going from 3 minutes to 2 minutes average just by switching to Hoya. I think I need to do a few Yao practice sessions to see if I can become faster just by switching method again. I like the freedom of picking the best center pieces to start with in Hoya, but I think it is not gving me a lot of advantage (time wise).

h2f said:
I've finished with ao100 -20.83 (pb) but next 50 I was doing twice: 30 in the night and 20 just before in the morning.
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Cool! I try to make a Ao100 this evening or tomorow morning to see where I stand these days.
 
Heard a lot of good things about Hoya. Was chatting online to another UK cuber last month and he nearly gave up solving then took up Hoya on 5x5, think he averages ~1:50 now. I am not sure it would improve my 4x4 times by much ~1:10 average but it stands a good chance of improving my 5x5 where I use reduction.

Been using Yau on 4x4 for 4? years and very quickly got to sub 1:20 with it. Perhaps I should start trying to adopt max tps on all puzzles to see if there are improvements to be had :D
 
Selkie said:
Heard a lot of good things about Hoya. Was chatting online to another UK cuber last month and he nearly gave up solving then took up Hoya on 5x5, think he averages ~1:50 now. I am not sure it would improve my 4x4 times by much ~1:10 average but it stands a good chance of improving my 5x5 where I use reduction.

Been using Yau on 4x4 for 4? years and very quickly got to sub 1:20 with it. Perhaps I should start trying to adopt max tps on all puzzles to see if there are improvements to be had :D
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Well, since you are very good at looking ahead I really must advise Hoya to you. You start at making four centers. Starting any color but your top color. You solve green cross right? Let's say you start with yellow, then white, then green and red as last. That leaves your top (blue) and front orange (f face) centers unsolved. Now you can use R and R2 and U and D to create green edge pairs. And this part of the solve with good look ahead you can follow easily where everything is at and have pauze-less solving. When cross is in place, you still have an unsolved orange and blue center. Now you make a F move to put the fixed cross edges aside, and fix last two centers with R U (and R2 U2) and undo the F with an F' to restore cross. Now you can go further as in Yao with 3-2-2 (or whatever).
 
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earth2dan said:
Nice. My 4x4 times were around 2:15 when I started breaking sub-30 on 3x3 so I'd say you're right on pace. I'm still not great at 5x5 either, but I've been practicing a bunch and am close to pulling down sub 3:00 averages. Cyoubx has a 5x5 video series that really helped me. After taking some of his pointers I went from 5:00+ to sub 4:00 in just a few days. Here's a link if you want to check it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEEXkFtTfXA.

There are some big cube PLL algs you could look up that might make life easier for you, depending on what 3x3 algs you're using now. My approach was to practice slowly executing PLL's on 3x3 and paying close attention to how they work. Sometimes when we commit them to muscle memory we totally forget how to execute them slowly, which will kill you on big cubes. This can also help you recover from a botched PLL.
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I have been so focused in 3x3 at the beginning of my "cubing career" :p that now I'm so slow at big cubes in comparison. I'm still around 2:10 with Yau at 4x4 and I just started solving 5x5 like 3 weeks ago and have solved it probably no more than 20 times. My 5x5 times are still around 5 minutes so I definitely plan on checking that video series and see if I can get to sub 4 as you say.

Regarding botching PLLs what I have the most problem with is OLL and, in fact, I revert to 2L OLL in like half the cases as I am not confident that I will be able to do the 1L alg without messing up the cube. Of course, there are some PLLs that give me some problems as well but not as many. That's because I had to re-learn more slowly my PLLs for OH recently, meanwhile I have not relearnt most of my OLLs (I also revert to 2L OLL in OH for a lot of cases).

Mega sub-5 Ao12 race: Did the 1st 3 scrambles of this WC and have gotten down my Ao5 to sub-5 for the 1st time (Ao5 = 4:51.65). Last 4 solves all sub-5 so, race becomes interesting now...
 
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muchacho said:
Megaminx PBs:

Single: 5:01
Ao12: 5:53

Not looking good for me.
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Finished the other 2 solves for the WC, also sub-5. Running Ao12 = 5:05.67, so close... I think with the next 5 solves I can bring the Ao12 to sub-5 but that will have to wait until next Tuesday at least. I will give you some room to catch up and will practise some 5x5 and 4x4 ;)
 
Selkie said:
Heard a lot of good things about Hoya. Was chatting online to another UK cuber last month and he nearly gave up solving then took up Hoya on 5x5, think he averages ~1:50 now. I am not sure it would improve my 4x4 times by much ~1:10 average but it stands a good chance of improving my 5x5 where I use reduction.
Click to expand...
I just started breaking down the 3:00 wall on 5x5 using reduction. I wonder if adopting Hoya could improve on that... I tried Hoya for 4x4 a while back, but I think I'm married to the Yao method.

mafergut said:
My 5x5 times are still around 5 minutes so I definitely plan on checking that video series and see if I can get to sub 4 as you say.

Regarding botching PLLs what I have the most problem with is OLL and, in fact, I revert to 2L OLL in like half the cases as I am not confident that I will be able to do the 1L alg without messing up the cube.
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For 5x5, if you're anything like me, edge pairing used to take forever. If you're not using the free-slicing method yet, I recommend you look that up. I also always solve white/yellow edges first. That might not be good advice, but it made a big difference for me. I can find white/yellow edges fastest, and it makes it easy to look ahead and keep track of the first 8 edges.

I only know about half my OLL's anyway so I still 2-look a lot even when solving 3x3 :/ and a couple of the OLL algs I know use slices, which just doesn't translate well to 5x5 (for me anyway). I wouldn't worry too much about 2-looking your OLL on big cubes. Better center and edge building is where you'll make up the most time.
 
3BLD update...

I'm starting to get the hang of M2. Still haven't had a successful solve yet, but it's coming together. The UF/DB and FU/BD edge targets are still messing me up. I know I have to swap algs on even targets, but I keep forgetting which alg is which to swap it :/

I had an extra AoLong that I hadn't set up or restickered yet, so I took a sharpie and wrote all my letters on it to help with memorization (I know that's cheating, but it's helping me learn my letter scheme)

I really struggle when I run into more than 1 cycle during memorization too.

I'm sure I'll sort out the bugs with more practice... Looking forward to that first successful blind solve :)
 
earth2dan said:
I just started breaking down the 3:00 wall on 5x5 using reduction. I wonder if adopting Hoya could improve on that... I tried Hoya for 4x4 a while back, but I think I'm married to the Yao method.


For 5x5, if you're anything like me, edge pairing used to take forever. If you're not using the free-slicing method yet, I recommend you look that up. I also always solve white/yellow edges first. That might not be good advice, but it made a big difference for me. I can find white/yellow edges fastest, and it makes it easy to look ahead and keep track of the first 8 edges.

I only know about half my OLL's anyway so I still 2-look a lot even when solving 3x3 :/ and a couple of the OLL algs I know use slices, which just doesn't translate well to 5x5 (for me anyway). I wouldn't worry too much about 2-looking your OLL on big cubes. Better center and edge building is where you'll make up the most time.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the feedback. What have brought me from "forever" to 5 minutes is basically starting to get the hang of freeslicing for the 1st 8 edges and also solving the white edges first and leaving them tucked down as a cross, if possible. What still takes me a lot of time is centers, which I expect to improve at with just more practice, and the last 4 edges, which I might need some tutorial to speed up a bit.

And good luck with your 3BLD. I have not had the chance to watch any M2 tutorial yet but I might steal your idea (I think also Selkie showed a photo of that some time ago) to "annotate" a cube with Spefz letter scheme.
 
I also labelled a cube with my lettering scheme (only for edges and not Speffz), it definitely helped.


10014 3x3 solves in Prisma Puzzle Timer, I'll try to make a graph.
 
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I dont think writing letters on stickers is a good idea because it doesnt force mind to learn letter scheme. I've never done it. Maskow said in his tutorial he never did it. Etc. Noah Arthurs never mentioned that tricked but he told about something better - assamble the cube take a piece (edge or corner) and name letters of edge or corner you took. But maybe I'm wrond and its good idea...
 
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