Older cubers discussions

[Mike Hughey]

Glad you figured it out! Knowing the notation well is a big step on the way to improvement.

 

[newtonbase]

MBLD PB 7/7 39:00 (29:06)
Been getting annoyed at failures on my 10 cube attempts so went a bit smaller. Still good practice. Went super safe on memo and execution. Previous bests 5/5 and 7/9.

 

[Sergey]

Got 3x3 PB 15.715 with this full of gifts scramble:

I think there are many months ahead to reproduce such time After about 4,5 months my best times are: ao5 23.541, ao12 25.029, ao100 26.141 with random lucky sub 20 (about 1 for 100 solves). CFOP, some F2L algs, some OLL algs (basically 2-look OLL), full PLL. Still need to work on cross, F2L, lookahead, fingertricks and turn accuracy. Don't understand why many cubers says that there no need of lookahead for sub20 - not my case, I get good times only when I try to lookahead.

 

[SpartanSailor]

My PB single is an outlier by a large amount too and much faster than my normal times. As to look ahead... there’s no way I’d get sub-20 without look ahead!

I don’t worry too much about what people say regarding times and techniques. Everyone is so different that it’s really hard to legitamately make that claim about look ahead.

I do, however, take advice and look to improve. For example, if I want to start learning a new alg set or something, I will. I don’t wait to be sub-“whatever” to add new stuff. I also took a very inefficient path to learning 3BLD because it worked for me... in retrospect I could have been faster a little sooner, but oh well. I’m enjoying myself.

So, for look ahead... some people can turn and recognise setups so much faster that they can solve sub-20 without much trying to look ahead. I’m so much slower at recognition that I need to have good look ahead to offset my slow turning and alg recognition.

I struggle with look ahead during F2L, but interestingly enough, when I practice 4x4 and 5x5 a lot, my 3x3 look ahead seems to improve....

 

[h2f]

Don't understand why many cubers says that there no need of lookahead for sub20 - not my case, I get good times only when I try to lookahead.

Sub20 was really hard to me. I think if you are sub20 no leakahead means in fact 3-5 seconds pauses at all. But when you are over 20 you often got 3-5 seconds pauses before every f2l pair. So yeah - lookahead helps a lot.

I'll practice 4x4 for a week and I got first sub50 solve today.

 

[40yearstosolve]

MBLD PB 7/7 39:00 (29:06)
Been getting annoyed at failures on my 10 cube attempts so went a bit smaller. Still good practice. Went super safe on memo and execution. Previous bests 5/5 and 7/9.

Bonkers! I get annoyed when I can’t solve one! I seem to get a complete mental blank every now and again and seemingly unable to use the right algonst the right time. I am impressed however that I have yet to throw my cube in frustration!

5/5 and 7/9 is just unbelievable

 

[Sergey]

PB 15.715 very lucky scramble:

R' D' R' B2 L' F' U F' L' F U2 R' B2 R U2 B2 D2 B2 U2

Reconstruction:

z2 y L D2 F B2 D2 //cross
L' U L // 1st pair
U l U L' U' M' // 2nd pair
U' R U' R' // 3rd pair
y R U' R' U R U' R' // 4th pair
R U R' U R U2 R' // OLL sune
x R2 D2 R U R' D2 R U' R x' // PLL A perm

 

[SpartanSailor]

PB 15.715 very lucky scramble:

R' D' R' B2 L' F' U F' L' F U2 R' B2 R U2 B2 D2 B2 U2

Reconstruction:

z2 y L D2 F B2 D2 //cross
L' U L // 1st pair
U l U L' U' M' // 2nd pair
U' R U' R' // 3rd pair
y R U' R' U R U' R' // 4th pair
R U R' U R U2 R' // OLL sune
x R2 D2 R U R' D2 R U' R x' // PLL A perm

I’d have NEVER solved those F2L pairs like that... with the wide-L turn and the M’. That first pair was slick too.

This is the type of stuff I’m going to have to figure out to make a real breakthrough.... then, of course, I’ll have to do it at speed.

 

[Sergey]

I'll practice 4x4 for a week and I got first sub50 solve today.

Wow! sub50 for a week! I don't practice 4x4 as hard as 3x3, only 2-3 solves a day for the same 4 months and my PB is only 1:39.574

 

[Sergey]

I’d have NEVER solved those F2L pairs like that... with the wide-L turn and the M’.

This is one of the F2L algs I've learned and train to avoid rotations.

 

[h2f]

Wow! sub50 for a week! I don't practice 4x4 as hard as 3x3, only 2-3 solves a day for the same 4 months and my PB is only 1:39.574

It's not a first time when I do 4x4. I was globally sub 1:10. Now I got 1:04.xx ao100, after 400 solves.

 

[SpartanSailor]

I need to do something different with 4x4 too... I’ve been stuck mid 1:20s for months and can seem to crack the code to get 1:15 or better. I can’t imagine a sub-1:00 at this point let alone a sub-50.

 

[xyzzy]

So, for look ahead... some people can turn and recognise setups so much faster that they can solve sub-20 without much trying to look ahead. I’m so much slower at recognition that I need to have good look ahead to offset my slow turning and alg recognition.

I struggle with look ahead during F2L, but interestingly enough, when I practice 4x4 and 5x5 a lot, my 3x3 look ahead seems to improve....

That's mostly my experience with cubing a few years ago too.

Big cubes (and OH) force you to turn slower, which makes it easier to track pieces, which improves your lookahead a bit. It does eventually reach a point where the lookahead you get from practising big cubes / OH isn't good enough to keep up with your full turning speed on 333, though. I used to have better lookahead on 333 after doing big cubes exclusively for a few days, but nowadays the opposite happens to me.

I need to do something different with 4x4 too... I’ve been stuck mid 1:20s for months and can seem to crack the code to get 1:15 or better. I can’t imagine a sub-1:00 at this point let alone a sub-50.

Something that seemed to have helped me was to try variations of a method. My 444 method is mostly like Yau, but with two differences. One is that I do half-centres together with the first three cross dedges; the other is that when finishing the last cross dedge, I also try to pair up one F2L edge, then solve one F2L pair before going into 4-3 edge pairing. (Never quite liked 3-2-3, to be honest.)

Then again, I've always been doing weird stuff in my solves, and most other people seem to prefer conventional methods, so your mileage may vary!

 

[megagoune]

Long time no posting but I enjoy reading this thread.
I got into the habit of doing some practice in the morning while having breakfast and waiting for the kids to be ready. And I use cstimer for timing. As a result, I now have some kind of statistics of my improvements. I thought I'd share the graph here. This is the curve of my rolling ao12. I think I am getting closer to sub-20!!

 

[40yearstosolve]

Long time no posting but I enjoy reading this thread.
I got into the habit of doing some practice in the morning while having breakfast and waiting for the kids to be ready. And I use cstimer for timing. As a result, I now have some kind of statistics of my improvements. I thought I'd share the graph here. This is the curve of my rolling ao12. I think I am getting closer to sub-20!!

View attachment 9216

Fascinating. Do you download each timing and collate them all manually?

 

[40yearstosolve]

@40yearstosolve / Key chain cubes are small and easy to carry but 1) really bad in turning and 2) pops up easily. There is a relatively small cube called Valk Mini. But, just regular cube is not that bad to carry. I always carry one cube with me so that I can play with it anywhere. I believe folks here all same.

Here is the MoYu keyring, it’s not bad as a ‘practise inconspicuously’ but very slow and liable to falling apart I suspect. Certainly what I expected and just about worth the £5 I paid! I just ordered the Valk Mini at £20 so it's double the price of my AuLong but I reckon it’ll be a good buy thanks for the suggestion

 

[SpartanSailor]

That's mostly my experience with cubing a few years ago too.

Big cubes (and OH) force you to turn slower, which makes it easier to track pieces, which improves your lookahead a bit. It does eventually reach a point where the lookahead you get from practising big cubes / OH isn't good enough to keep up with your full turning speed on 333, though. I used to have better lookahead on 333 after doing big cubes exclusively for a few days, but nowadays the opposite happens to me.


Something that seemed to have helped me was to try variations of a method. My 444 method is mostly like Yau, but with two differences. One is that I do half-centres together with the first three cross dedges; the other is that when finishing the last cross dedge, I also try to pair up one F2L edge, then solve one F2L pair before going into 4-3 edge pairing. (Never quite liked 3-2-3, to be honest.)

Then again, I've always been doing weird stuff in my solves, and most other people seem to prefer conventional methods, so your mileage may vary!

My 333 turning is much too fast for my look ahead... I try to slow down to reduce pauses, but still struggle to keep up. If I’m focused I am able to improve a little. Ive accepted that my progress is incrimental at this point, rather that large improvements.

OH for me is so slow that I can see multiple pairings at a time and mentally struggle to choose the pair I want first, rather than just finding a pair at all! Hahahah.

 

[pglewis]

So is there any hope for me? Can I ever achieve a sub 1 minute?

How I solve is (please don’t laugh)...

1. Daisy
2. 180 degrees to Cross
3. Solve white corners
4. Solve first two layers: White facing away
5. Solve yellow: Look for yellow symbols and use algorithms: right sune amongst three or so others.
6. Last later: I have two here. One to solve where no corners match. And another to solve where I just have middles to solve.

It takes me a long time. FIVE FULL MINUTES! But finally I can do it without reading my notes.

I can’t have any distractions otherwise I get it wrong.

The last two algos really hurt my head to remember, I’ve had to craft some weird techniques to remember them. As well as the yellow symbols, I have little memory joggers to remember the rule.

Is there any chance I can speed this up or does my technique confine me to a perpetual 5 minutes!!

Early on it's all about learning the ropes. Use a scramble generator to get comfortable making arbitrary face turns. It'll be slow at first but you'll also be practicing reading notation, it'll get faster. Finger-trick practice won't hurt a bit at this stage, you're basically learning the alphabet. Especially get comfortable with M, M', and M2 slices, they're incredibly useful and they were awkward for a while for me, personally. Time will melt off surprisingly quickly with practice, the more time you shave off your solves the more solves you'll get during your practice sessions.

I agree with other advice out there to ditch the daisy step early and learn how to solve the first four white edges straight to the bottom. This is an easy habit to break at this stage. As you progress, a lot comes down to what you're able to see and solving the "cross" on the bottom means you're displacing other edges from the bottom that you need to see for the next step.

Next, I would learn F2L instead of doing corners then edges. If you pay close attention to exactly what happens when you do step 4 you'll see that you remove a corner you'd solved earlier, pair it with the edge you're about to insert, then put them in place together. F2L just connects a corner/edge and solves them as a single entity, cutting your work in half. If things are still a little dodgy doing corners first then I'd say you're fine sticking with it long enough that it's reasonably comfortable... but the moment it is reasonably comfortable, ditch it for F2L. It's a dead-end with zero advantage other than being quicker/easier to learn.

Step 5 is called "OLL" (orient the last layer) and Step 6 "PLL" (permute the last layer). You can get a lot faster without changing what you're doing here. I would add another PLL whenever your current set of algs is comfortable and not at risk of being forgotten. For OLLs, most people first focus on the 7 "OCLL" algs that just deal with the cases where all 4 top edges are already oriented. No big rush in my opinion as the first two layers is likely to be the biggest bottleneck for a while.

I just accepted OLLs and PLLs as "magic" for a while. Somewhere along the way things started clicking more intuitively, as my 3D IQ improved and I did a lot of F2L practice. A lot of OLLs are just taking a pair or pairs out and reinserting them in different ways (trace what Sune does with the pair in the front-right slot). Whether or not I understand what a particular OLL or PLL does I still treat them as magic without thinking. For solving quickly you want to reach a state of "don't think, just do".

 

[newtonbase]

Posted this in the wrong thread yesterday.

MBLD PB 7/7 39:00 (29:06)
Been getting annoyed at failures on my 10 cube attempts so went a bit smaller. Still good practice. Went super safe on memo and execution. Previous bests 5/5 and 7/9.

 

[SpartanSailor]

Nicely done. Seems like going from 7 to 10 would be a pretty big jump.