Cross on the bottom - i'm struggling to get used to it

[DAE_JA_VOO]

I've got a 23.68 PB and a 30.80 avg, and i'm really trying to break the 30s barrier.

A bad habit of mine is that i do cross on top, and then flip the cube. For the last few days i've been trying to get into doing the cross on the bottom, but i just can't seem to get the hang of it. It's like i lose track of where the stickers are and where the others should be.

I'm thinking of peeling all the stickers off one of my cubes and leaving only the cross so that i can practice like that.

I don't know guys. Any pointers except "practice"?

 

[hdskull]

Try memorizing the cross solution, then solve it without looking, it should help you.

 

[brunson]

I'm thinking of peeling all the stickers off one of my cubes and leaving only the cross so that i can practice like that.

I stickered one of my DIYs with only centers and a yellow cross. My cross dropped by 2/3s in a week, it's a great, great learning tool. I'm going to do something similar for learning Petrus block building.

As hdskull pointed out, and many sites recommend, if you need to look at your cross that much, you didn't plan it as well as you thought. Memoing the entire cross is another great practice tool.

 

[Crzyazn]

If you know your color scheme by heart, It makes it much easier to visualize where the pieces go with relative position and whatnot

 

[blah]

If you know your color scheme by heart, It makes it much easier to visualize where the pieces go with relative position and whatnot

Disagreed. I'm one of the extremely few guys around advising people against memorizing your color scheme by heart.

Here's my argument: without knowing your color scheme, you can do opposite cross equally as easy as "regular" cross, and you can't possibly use all of your 15 seconds for inspection (since you're averaging around 30 seconds), so why not use this luxury of time to find out your color scheme on the fly, if you're like me and can't see as far as the first F2L pair anyway? It take less than 1 second, literally, to find out your color scheme by just looking at any two adjacent colors (I would assume you know opposite colors by now?).

I know many many many people who have a huge problem with opposite cross because they've got their color scheme memorized by heart, but since I personally use opposite cross about half the time (I don't have a "preferred" color, I work equally well with both yellow and white, so I usually have my cross in about 5-6 moves on average), this is what I'm trying to get others to do

About the benefits of opposite cross, I'm pretty sure there are other threads around to enlighten you. And then there's Chris' page, of course, which even comes with a graph of f(x) = 1 - (1-x)^2, and I have no idea what it's supposed to mean, but it looks like a sufficiently scientific-looking reason to convince me to do opposite cross

 

[brunson]

Blah, I'm color neutral, so I don't know my color scheme other than what colors are opposite each other. But, like you say, I can figure it out on the fly. You can always see to side faces, so I can always tell you the one's I can't see. I went three weeks always solving the same color (white) as an experiment. My times were not significantly better by the end of that experiment.

Thanks for chiming in on a topic I'd almost given up on.

 

[MTGjumper]

I can't do cross on D particularly well, due to D turns being difficult on my current cube, because that layer is particularly stiff (and if I loosen it, the other layers become too lose meaning it pops more; yes, I need a new one).

I'm going to be buying a couple of cube4you DIYs soon, so I'll try the "only sitcker the cross" idea to improve my time (I do the cross in ~2 seconds on U, excluding cube rotation afterwards, and ~4.5 seconds on D)

 

[fanwuq]

Ummm, NO. If your D face sucks, that's the perfect reason to use it as the cross colour, because you can solve the cube by using only 5gen. Just solve the cross turning D face 0 (sometimes 1or 2 makes the solution significantly shorter) times and never deal with that face again.
If that layer sucks, how can you do all your RU algs so fast?

 

[MTGjumper]

Ummm, NO. If your D face sucks, that's the perfect reason to use it as the cross colour, because you can solve the cube by using only 5gen. Just solve the cross turning D face 0 (sometimes 1or 2 makes the solution significantly shorter) times and never deal with that face again.
If that layer sucks, how can you do all your RU algs so fast?

I don't use it as my D face because it sucks, but because it is the white face, and it just happens to suck. Due to the fact that it feels stiffer, it is much quicker to do turns with my index finger on U than with my ring finger on D.

All my other faces are loose enough, and the D face doesn't affect them, so I can do RU algs quickly still.