First video so please be kind. My hands are freezing and was a little jittery but overall not too bad for me right now. Tips? General insights? What part of the solve does it look like needs the most work? Thanks in advance.
Solve 1:
You don’t use much inspection – did you plan out the whole cross? You turn slower during the cross than during the rest of your solve, so maybe you didn’t? It’s a good idea to ignore inspection timing, and just go for “as much as you need” until you’re really confident inspecting. Most of the solve is pretty smooth… except the cross > F2L transition, where there’s a second pause. This is pretty much a problem area for all CFOP solvers. The only way to eliminate it is to practice cross + 1 – i.e. scramble and inspect, trying to find not only the cross, but also the first pair (or at least where it might be), then solving the cross AND the first F2L pair. You can also track the 2 pieces for the 1st pair while solving the cross – the key is reducing the time you’re stopped between cross and F2L.
Your F2L to F2L transitions are pretty good and smooth. Your LL seems OK as well. Keep learning OLLs – don’t go out of your way to learn full OLL, but it might save you a second or so every now and then.
LL speed will come with practice, but there’s no harm in drilling PLLs and OLLs if you want to get faster quicker.
Solve 2:
Ouch cross! Around 8 seconds, I think. Also big pause after F2L pair 1.
Your F2L is really nice and smooth again, from 2nd to 4th pairs. This is great – you should continue to do F2L only as fast as you can look ahead!
Your J perm alg finishes with a U’, right? That solve was +2 (27 seconds), because you did the U’ at the end, so the cube wasn’t solved when you stopped the timer! It’s a good idea to look at any PLL algs that finish with a U/U2/U’ and basically forget the last move.
For example: your J perm is (R U R’ F’) (R U R’ U’) R’ F’ (R2 U’ R’ U’). Scrap the U’ at the end. It’s only required when you’re performing it from 1 out of 4 possible starting positions. Perform a J perm on a solved cube – that’s the position that you need the U’ from. From the other 3 starting positions, the last move will be either U, U2 or (in the case of your second solve) nothing! The more you practice an alg and use it in solves, the more you’ll learn what AUF (if any) is required after it. In this solve, if you HADN’T done the unnecessary U’ the solve would have a) been faster and b) not been +2!
Solve 3:
Tricky cross again.
F2L not so smooth as previous solves.
Last F2L pair you did a y2 to solve in FR. It’s the ‘beginners’ F2L case, so take a look at how you execute it, and see if you can do the same insert in the back slots. Set the case up, then do a y2 to put it in the BL corner. Now try performing the insert here. The best thing about doing this is that inserting in the back slots leaves the whole front of the cube on view, so makes lookahead much easier.
Solve 4:
What screws this solve up for you is the pauses in the cross and the first 2 F2L pairs. After that, it’s just fine. You only used 7 seconds inspection – would probably be worth using a little more?
Solve 5:
This should have been the fastest solve. The cross was MUCH better – you had a clear plan and executed it. Pauses were better (but still there) but it looks like you screwed up attempted 1-look OLL, or something? It’s a shame, would’ve been sub-20 without this.
In summary:
Bear in mind that Cross + F2L should be around 60% of your solve; LL should be around 40%. Take a look at
this thread.
Your PLL is fine for your speed. It will get faster on its own as you do more solves.
Your OLL is OK. Don’t pressure yourself to learn 1-look OLL, but it can’t hurt. I currently have around 10 OLLs left to learn, and it’s probably made a second or so difference to my times. Every now and then it saves about 2 seconds with some of the worse OLLs (i.e. 0/2 edges oriented).
Your F2L is pretty smooth. Keep doing what you’re doing – as your finger speed increases your F2L will just get faster on it’s own. Pauses creep in when you don’t know what you’re doing next, i.e. lookahead has failed. This doesn’t happen as much with you as with a lot of MUCH faster cubers I’ve seen – there are a lot of sub-20 or even sub-15 cubers who don’t look ahead well at all (myself included). I average around 18.5 and my F2L is not smooth in the least – I wish I’d learned good habits from the start. Make sure you don’t ‘rush’ inserts at the cost of lookahead.
The place you could probably do with the most improvement is the cross and cross>F2L transition. You have a 25 second solve with an 8 second cross. Bearing in mind cross+F2L should be c.60% of your solve and cross itself c.12%. If your cross had been 12% of this solve, the whole solve would have taken 67 seconds!! With a 25 second average, cross should be taking you c.3 seconds. If it's taking you more than that then the rest of your solve is having to be faster to compensate. What this effectively means is that this 25 second solve should've had a 3 second cross, and been a 20 second solve (yes, this logic is labyrinthine and not 100% true, but you get my drift!).
Practice BLD crosses – i.e. scramble and inspect for AS LONG AS YOU NEED (don’t be tempted to start solving and find that 4th cross edge while you’re solving!), seriously, inspect for 2 minutes if you need to, just make sure you know EXACTLY how you’re going to build the cross before you start turning. Then close your eyes and execute the moves. Open your eyes – is the cross solved? If not, why not? Keep doing this until the cross is solved 100% of the time, and you can inspect in <15 seconds.
If you’re feeling ambitious, try to work out where your first pair will come from as well. For example, if your cross only involves R, D and F moves, the BL corner won’t move – if that’s a cross corner you know it will be there when your cross is finished – so where’s its edge? Watch Badmephisto’s advanced cross tutorial. If you’ve watched it already – watch it again!
I need to work on my cross too - always remember cross + F2L are 60% of your solve, so you can't go wrong investing 60% of your efforts improving these steps. I think you have somewhere between 2-4 seconds you could knock off your cross, which will help your times massively and is definitely the best area to target if you're looking for immediate improvement.
So yeah… hope that helps!?
