Hi there! An old dog here trying to learn new tricks

mafergut

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Hi SpeedSolving community,

I'm a 44-year-old guy from Spain and I'm new to this wonderful place where i expect to learn a lot from you all.

I got my 1st rubik's cube 30 years ago when I was 13-14 and I learned to solve it with "beginners" method. My all time best back then was 48 seconds or so. Long time passed but last year I somehow got interested again in cubing and got a Dayan Zhanchi stickerless for me and another one for my 10-year-old son. Since then, I have been learning and practicing Friedrich method for like 6-7 months already and have gotten down to a PB single of 17.40 and an avg. of 5 of 22.48. I have learned all PLLs and almost all 54? OLLs. Still trying to work on my F2L look-ahead, empty-slot usage, back-slot insertion, etc. Also I think I need to work on my dexterity when executing OLL/PLL (my recognition is decent I'd say).

In those 6 months, I have also bought some more cubes, like MoYu HuangYing, Weilong and AoLong, Shengshou Aurora, FangShi ShuanRen, JY Sulong, a 2x2 MoYU LingPo and some terrible Diang Sheng 4x4 stickerless (I'm waiting for a MoYu AoSu to come in my mail soon, though). My main right now is the MoYu AoLong.

By the way, this NL that some people has on their signatures... does that mean Non-Lucky? If that is so, my PB single NL would be an 18.61 (no lucky x-cross, nor OLL-PLL skips).

So, being 44 I find it difficult to get extremely fast but, still, I hope I can get sub-20 and that's my goal. When/If I achieve that I would also like to try blindfold (I succeeded twice with classic Pochman but it took me more than 15-20 minutes).

So, this is me. Thanks in advance for your help in improving!
 
Welcome! It looks like you are doing the right thing, just keep practicing. You should be able to find a lot of good F2L stuff on this site. Maybe look at some COLL, Winter Variation, VLS, etc... There's lots of stuff for CFOP that can make you faster, and it looks like you don't shy away from new challenges, so best of luck to you!
 
Welcome. Great to see another oldie on board. Be sure to check out Marcel's thread in the off topic area. It's a kind of social club for aging cubers :D
 
I would say that the biggest thing is to really work on lookahead. After about 4 months of practice, I was still averaging about 27 seconds, and in the past 2.5 months or so, I have steadily dropped my times to being right on the brink of sub 20, and most of this was due to lookahead. This is what I would recommend, it really really helps!

P.S. I have a video on my YouTube channel about lookahead, I've been told it's decent, you should go check it out :)
 
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