A Few Tricks to Help You Avoid Cube Rotations

Thanks for the great videos, I'll watch them a third time. Sometimes you have the edge in the FR slot and taking it out with R and U would make it a bad edge, so you do a sledgehammer. But why not doing a simple F'UF or F'U'F instead ? It's one move less than the sledgehammer. Is sledgehammer that much faster to perform ? In both cases we need to go for a F move and a regrip.

I'm just about to get sub30 and target sub25 soon. My F2L average is 23sec at the moment, and I just found out yesterday that I do a whole lotta cube rotations during F2L, which messes up my look ahead since I never have a reference. Sometimes I even get confused on what slots are solved or not since they move around all the time. So, I'll be checking your F2L videos and do a lot of slow solves, avoiding unnecessary cube rotations and practicing look ahead as much as possible.
 
So, after two days of little practice doing slow solves, trying to figure out edge orientation, I finally timed myself yesterday. I went from 32sec average up to 40. I can't seem to get the F2L done in less than 30sec anymore. Hopefully this will get back to where it was before. I think the problem is that I now focus too much on edge orientation and it takes all my attention. Instead of tracking other F2L pair pieces I figure out how I'll orient an edge and so on. Also I have to do some weird moves sometimes to keep solving a pair with R,U,L ( edge being good of course ), especially when it is the last pair. The positive aspect is still that I could move from a 5-6 rotations F2L to a rotationless F2L. I guess I'll give it a few more days and edge orientation should become more of an automatic process.
 
My experience is similar - working on F2L efficiency leads to slower times for a while. That's OK. Practice speed, lookahead and minimizing pauses for a while without worrying about efficiency, and you'll find some of those new tricks just creep into your faster solving.
 
Yeah, I keep on doing F2L only at the moment, my best was 19.70, but I still keep thinking way too much of edge orientation, it's kind of blocking me and start to freak me out a little. I was so close to get sub30 and I feel I have another sea to cross now.
 
What's totally blocking me is that with my new way I have some pairs that I just cannot separate properly with R,U,L. If I have both pieces on the top layer, last slot to solve. White is on the side, and top colors are different. What I would have done before : cube rotation, I hide the corner, do a U2 to have the edge opposite, get the corner back on the U layer, do another cube rotation, put my corner on top of my slot and insert the pair. Now I have no way to separate the two pieces without "disturbing" the easy setup. I did an ao100, F2L only, I am at 35sec average, which is above my previous full solve average. I think I'm working on my upcoming panic attack.
 
In Part 3, I'm betting you're trying to just avoid regrips and B moves, but I find the Back Sledge Hammer really easy to do, and accomplished the same thing:

Lw U' Lw' B

I push with my thumb to do the U', and my pointer finger will be in good position to pull that B. The Lefthand Mirror is also pretty simple:

Rw' U Rw B'

Obv the inverse of each is the back Hedge Slammer, and with some practice they're all really quick.
 
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How do you guys recognize a F2L case ? I mean, there are 41 cases, assuming you have 3 slots solved and you have the corner on top of the slot to solve, or in the slot. But there's finally many more cases than this in real situations if you consider what actually happens during a solve and the shortcuts you might have with empty slots. I really used to brute force F2L, but I was kind of facing a wall regarding my times. I did too many cube rotations and so on. I would be happy to learn algs but I'm not sure it's the good way since I cannot even recognize cases, and I like the intuitive approach. The funny thing is, optimal solutions aren't really intuitive in the end. So, should I just keep on doing slow solves for a few days trying to focus on doing things properly and slowly increase the speed ?
 
aboeglin said:
How do you guys recognize a F2L case ? I mean, there are 41 cases, assuming you have 3 slots solved and you have the corner on top of the slot to solve, or in the slot. But there's finally many more cases than this in real situations if you consider what actually happens during a solve and the shortcuts you might have with empty slots. I really used to brute force F2L, but I was kind of facing a wall regarding my times. I did too many cube rotations and so on. I would be happy to learn algs but I'm not sure it's the good way since I cannot even recognize cases, and I like the intuitive approach. The funny thing is, optimal solutions aren't really intuitive in the end. So, should I just keep on doing slow solves for a few days trying to focus on doing things properly and slowly increase the speed ?
Click to expand...
I use completely intuitive F2l. No algs at all, and I still average 13-15 seconds for f2l (about 20 seconds for the whole cube). Look up intuitive F2L on youtube!
 
ChickenWrap said:
I use completely intuitive F2l. No algs at all, and I still average 13-15 seconds for f2l (about 20 seconds for the whole cube). Look up intuitive F2L on youtube!
Click to expand...
I know what intuitive F2L is, I do it since I actually started with CFOP. Like stated earlier in the thread I was about to get sub30 with this, my F2L was averaging 23sec more or less, but I felt like I had a lot of inefficient moves while solving F2L pairs. That's more or less where I started to get aware of edge orientation, which is somehow helping, but confuses me a lot at the moment. I was doing a lot of cube rotations which I'd like to avoid to help my look ahead. I had the feeling that cube rotations made me loose track of the current state of the cube and the pieces I was tracking. The problem I have with edge orientation is that now I hardly get my F2L done under 25sec, which means that my global averages bumped by 5sec or so which is really hard to deal with.
 
Not sure what you mean by asking how to recognise cases. They are fairly obvious. Recognising them quickly enough during a solve is a challenge though. I'm not the fastest so maybe not the best to advise, but I think it's about lookahead. By the time you finish the last turn to insert a pair, you should know where the next pair is, where its target slot is, whether the edge is good or bad so what moves you would use, and the whereabouts of any empty slots that might be useful. Probably you track the pieces on their way to arriving at the case so not sure that is "recognition" in the usual sense.
 
Here we can find the 41 cases : http://www.opticubes.com/cubing/f2l/, what I mean is that each single case, is actually a subset of the real case, meaning that each case can actually be found under different variants. Also if you look at the website, number 1 and 3 are almost identical since the edge and corner orientation is the same. Now my problem is, while solving, I found out that sledgehammer is doing some great stuff in a few particular cases, like orienting and pairing the two pieces, which is something I wouldn't do intuitively, but since I've been playing with it .. So, in some cases I avoid a cube rotation, and I have an easy case. My problem is that I just can't seem to identify these cases and reproduce it while I'm under time. Instead of this I actually see that my edge isn't properly oriented, which is something I believe I should not even be thinking about, and I then need to make the decision, should I do a sledgehammer, or should I just rotate the cube and solve the thing the way I'm used to. I mostly take the wrong decision apparently since I find my pairs harder and harder to solve somehow. Otherwise, the fact that I solve the pairs intuitively makes it hard for me to recognize a case and instinctively remember I should be using this or that way. I'm not even sure I solve two times the same case the same way actually.
 
Actually I just had a thought while doing a slow solve. I'm always doing slow solves when focusing on doing my F2L. But maybe I'll rather try to take every case one by one. Try to reverse them in a first place, and then solving them over and over, focusing on one single case at a time. This may help later to make quick connection between recognizing a case and automatically performing the moves to solve the pair. I could finally get an ao5 that was not that bad tonight even though it's still a little higher than what I'm used to, but I think it also comes from the fact that I may be integrating new ways of solving pairs after my last experiments. I'm quite sure I changed my way of solving a few cases, which is a good thing I guess, also I really like using the sledgehammer on BR and BL as I got efficient at doing the moves and that I can avoid lots of cube rotations this way. Anyway, I'll try to really focus on one case at a time, and I should feel the ones that are the least obvious and work out these over and over.
 
I think of the cases differently. For example, consider cases 11 and 12 (numbers from the SS wiki http://www.speedsolving.com/wiki/index.php/F2L). These are documented as two different cases. Instead I think of this as one case with a mirror. Do a y rotation to case 11 and you get a left-right mirror of case 12.

The more interesting case variants are target slot positions. With a top layer piece arrangement like case 12, the actual target slot could be in any of the four corners. If the edge is good for an insert to FR then it is also good for an insert to BL - just do U2 and mirror your solution to BL. However, if your target slot is at FL or BR the edge is bad and you need a different solution e.g. R' U2 R d' R U R' or the same mirrored to FL.

So instead of learning cases 11 and 12 as shown on the wiki, I learn case 12, and case 12 with slot at BR (after applying a d turn) and how to mirror them left-right and front-back. Case 11 plus U' is just the f/b mirror, but it helps me to think about target slot positions and mirrors rather than fix the target at FR and just treat 11 as a different case.
 
I see, a bit like the case 39 and 40 or 41 and 42. So what you're saying is that basically I should take care of mirrors to simplify things a little ?

I started from this list here : http://www.opticubes.com/cubing/f2l/. I got the 5 first worked out this morning. The most tricky one was the first one, this is what I came out with : R U R' U2' R U2' (R2 F R' F') U' R U R'. Another possible version would be : (R' F R F') R U' R' U R U' R' U2 R U' R' ( just found out this one is in the wiki actually ). I highlighted the sledgehammer in the algs. I'm definitely happy I've worked this one out, I'll try to reproduce it until I can integrate this in a solve ( that's the kind of case I would probably have done 2 cube rotations before ).

Has anyone of you guys tried to work on your F2L this way ? Like taking a case and doing it over and over until you found the moves that suited you the best and until it felt natural to solve the case that way ? I hear a lot of people say do slow solves, but then while going fast again it's like I forgot it all and I never really focus on a single case by doing slow solves ( even though I usually do the same scramble 5 times before moving to the next one etc ).
 
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