Distinguishing edges in Big Cube BLD

[Tim Reynolds]

Hi everyone,
So today I had my most disappointing 4x4 DNF. The time was 29:30-ish, my best attempt by at least 4 minutes. My record in 4x4 BLD is approximately 1/18 now, so it's getting a bit irritating, since I haven't had a success since August after Nationals. Usually I make a lot of mistakes during edge memo and catch them, leading to 10-15 minutes of memorizing edges. This time I only made one mistake but it slipped through. The mistake was that I confused the two red/white edges. Thus, at the end, I was an OLL parity from solved.

I hold the cube white top, red front, and my starting piece is always UFr (a red/white one). I got to the LFd edge and saw that it was red and white and mistakenly took it to be the UFl edge instead of seeing the end of the cycle. Then I got to my last edge, saw it was red and white, and didn't check it was the right one. So I ended up with a 24-cycle instead of an x-cycle and a (24-x)-cycle as it should have been.

In retrospect, it is quite apparent that it is wrong, since doing a move of F from the LFd edge you can see that it's upside down. But my question is, how do other BCBLDers distinguish edges and make sure you know where they're going? How do you make sure you put them in the right places? I'm sure that, with practice, you can clearly see where it belongs, but for me, unpracticed as I am, what would you recommend? Memorize what the pieces look like in various positions, or do what I do--visualizing where they will land after turns and seeing if they're right? I think that, had I had a red center on that side, I would have seen that it was wrong, so I need to overcome my reliance on centers for the color scheme as part of it.

Thanks,
Tim

 

[Stefan]

Simply read around the adjacent corner always in the same direction. I go clockwise. You're talking about UFr and UFl. For me, UFr simply doesn't exist. For me, that's FUr.

 

[Tim Reynolds]

Thanks, but that's not exactly what I meant, I don't think I phrased that well...How, looking at an edge piece somewhere on the cube, do you tell if it belongs, say, in UFl or FUr? Like, if it's in BLd, with the front color on B and the top color on L, how do you immediately know if it's the UFl edge or the FUr edge?

 

[Stefan]

I look at place BLd, reading clockwise arund the BLD corner and thus see F first and U second, so I have FUr.

 

[ThePizzaGuy92]

I look at place BLd, reading clockwise arund the BLD corner and thus see F first and U second, so I have FUr.

the BLD corner... no pun intended?!

 

[Tim Reynolds]

Oh, I see, that makes sense. Thanks Stefan.

 

[masterofthebass]

Since I use r2, I mentally do the set-up to see which piece is interchangeable with the buffer. For example if I have RD in the buffer, then I look at what piece will be exchanged when I do that algorithm for RD. Seeing that RDb will end up in the buffer, I know to look there for the next piece. After a while, I don't need to do this anymore, because I just learned which piece is which.