Hello everyone. I'm one of the two delegates who attended the Legnano Open yesterday. I'll try to clarify all the doubts that emerged in the last day.
1. How do you know this? I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm just interested in how you know who the scrambler was. Your name isn't on the competitor's list so you must have got your information from somewhere else.
2. Can you tell me how you can run a round of Square-1 with a single group, without having to rely on competitors who are not competing for scrambling? I mean, in this case there was a scrambler available who wasn't competing, but that will not always be the case.
Stefan got this informations from me. I was the scrambler in the square-1 final. As you can see from my official profile, I have some experience with the square-1. I decided not to compete yesterday for mainly two reasons:
1) I was the only one able to scramble this puzzle fast except for the other competitors and it was just a single round, so I thought the best thing was not to divide the competitors in two groups;
2) I haven't been practicing this puzzle for months, so my solves would have been a waste of time from the organizing point of view.
I'm not a newbie when it's about square-1. I know a bit about it, as you can see from my profile on the WCA database. I don't find this result so strange because I have a personal best at home of 8.xx seconds, made when my average was about 28-30 seconds. Sometimes scrambles are very lucky and you can skip almost everything after getting back to the cube shape, as mostly of you surely well know.
I can assure everybody that the scramble was correct. I checked it, of course, before letting the judge taking the puzzle. It matched with the scrambling sheet. At that point of the competition, just three competitors were still solving, and Andrea was also the first one getting the puzzle for the 5th attempt. All happened very quickly, I gave the puzzle to the judge, who brought it immediately to Andrea. He was still the fastest solver in the event, so there were a lot of witnesses to the solve.
After the solve, me and the other delegate (Matteo Colombo) checked again the scramble. I remembered it and it also matched with the sheet and with the other two square-1 that were waiting for a judge at the scrambling table. We also asked the judge of the WR solve if he remembered the scramble and it was it.
Unfortunately, there's no video of the solve. That happened because Andrea started his average badly and decided not to film himself after the second attempt. Still, he has an official average of 23.20 seconds and his previous best single in competition was 15.91. This was a NR at the time (2011), and he averaged 37 seconds in that round. I think that yesterday he was a bit rusty at the beginning of the event, but I know that he has a lot of sub20 averages at home. So, I think that his abilities with this puzzle are doubt-proof.
After the solve, I obviously talked to the competitor. He just told me he got really lucky, that he placed the cube in a wrong orientation on the table (confirmed by the judge), he skipped a whole layer after reducing the square-1 to the cube shape and that he then had just one single algo left to complete the puzzle.
Then I asked him for a reconstruction (Matteo was there too), but Andrea was really upset and couldn't find it again. So we thought that he could've got lucky because of the initial mistake he made (placing the puzzle in the wrong orientation after the inspection). We valuated his behaviour as genuine, he was sincerely shocked about what he just did.
I have no doubt that everything was done following the rules.
Cheers,
Lorenzo
