Get rid of Delays and hustle up!

[Harris Chan]

Mitchell told me this trick that he tried: every time you start to hesitate/pause/delay, imagine hearing a loud "BUZZ" or something that'll "wake you up". It's kinda like when you're hitting the horse to make it go faster

Even though I didn't exactly use a loud sound in my head, I kinda heard, "KEEP TURNING! WHY ARE YOU SLOWING DOWN? MOVE IT MOVE IT!" lol...my hands got little shaky

anyway, you guys can try that out (if you haven't try already), and may be talk about something similar to this "trick"...


-Harris

 

[choipster]

haha, my hands get shaky when i'm trying to go fast too. makes the cube lock up and then i get longer times <_< instead, i just try to constantly think about what i'm supposed to be doing next. less pressure that way

 

[doubleyou]

actually I try and think as little as possible while solving F2L
but I will remember that trick and yell at myself inside my head when ever I get pauses.. funny stuff Harris

 

[joey]

F2L is the only place you need to think.

 

[doubleyou]

what I mean is that I try not to hestitate so much and just do what seems logical. You need to think at all times while solving cube

 

[cmhardw]

Hey Harris,

That's an interesting way to approach F2L, I've never before thought to try that. I've been working on it lately with mixed results and wanted to ask how you handle a certain situation. Basically what happens is sometimes when I tell myself to hustle up, I end up turning way too fast during F2L and I can't look ahead. Or sometimes I'll only catch the slightest glimmer of the pieces that I'm pairing and will place them in the incorrect slot because I thought they had different colors.

I've always practiced with the "go just slightly slower than your maximum speed" mentality to help lookahead. But I hear guys like you and Andrew Kang say "go absolutely as fast as possible". My brain simply can't keep up if I go full speed. I either have terribly long delays because I'm unable to look ahead after placing a pair, or I place pieces in the wrong slots.

Just curious how you handle going that fast without either having delays from lookahead or without solving pieces into the wrong F2L slots.

Thanks for the tip though, when it works I can get times in the 11's and 12's (which is fantastic for me!). The only problem is when my brain sort of overloads from going that fast I can get times over 20 :-(

Chris

 

[pjk]

I have learned that to improve my F2L time is to find the shortest route to solve the F2L. If you can avg around 30-36 moves for that, 10 secounds or so should be easily possible. I am still in the process of not only lowering the move count, but also working on moving a little quicker. I have had some nice smooth solves with 8-9 second F2L's where I wasn't going too quick at all. I had a nice fluent solve the other day that was 11.xx time w/ PLL skip, but the F2L was around 7 seconds. It is just a matter if finding the shortest solution in my mind.

 

[doubleyou]

I know I have had alot of these posts. but you are really highly skilled guys! mad props for being so talented!
The cool thing too is that this is something everybody can learn. the only ones who could never learn this are folks who dont want to
I look forward to have an F2L like that..

 

[Harris Chan]

During practice, I just start off nice and slow, but then once I kinda got into the zone, I just turn fast, and everything was in the in front of me. I think it's just that I'm used to that speed? After all, I've been practicing on the simulator for a long time, and I was going pretty fast on it too.

 

[cmhardw]

Ok I'm convinced. I've been practicing as you said, I start of fairly slowly but speed up as I go through the cross. By the time the cross is done, if I'm not moving very fast or at least speeding up a lot I yell in my head "HUSTLE UP!"

I nearly tied my PB average tonight trying this, the average I got was 14.38 again which for me is fantastic, nearly my PB by only 0.04 second!

15.94, 13.92, 15.01, 14.24, (16.45), 14.02, 13.37, 15.08, (11.80), 13.35, 16.02, 12.90 = 14.38

Thanks Harris, I will certainly yell things to myself in my head as I solve in the future ;-) That would sound bad to a cubing outsider lol, but hey as long as it works right?

Thanks for the help,
Chris