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[Help Thread] How did you learn 3bld

Joined
Sep 25, 2017
Messages
187
Location
Massachusetts
Hello, I have been watching different bld tutorial for about 2 weeks now. None of them do that good. This thread could also help others. How did you learn 3bld? BTW im trying OP/OP
 

pglewis

Member
Joined
Sep 23, 2016
Messages
1,268
Location
Cincinnati
WCA
2016LEWI07
It looks like the ruwix tutorial teaches a different lettering scheme than speffz, and I would highly suggest using speffz unless there is a compelling reason not to (eg, changing some of the letters for a non-English language). There is nothing inherently "superior" about speffz but it is somewhat standard these days and it makes it easier to communicate with others.

Setups should be fairly intuitive for OP; search for a cheat sheet and study how they work if you don't understand them. Learning 3bld did wonders for my intuitive feel for the cube.
 

Thom S.

Member
Joined
Sep 26, 2017
Messages
1,292
I have a rather interesting story(gonna be lomg)
There is a german site called speedcube.de and it was late at night so I wanted to go to bed but at least read the Text of it. They have a 50 Minute Video and of their PLL images, so I just did the Alternating Y Perm without explanation and immediatly knew how to do corners and invented Speffz with it. Feeling like a genius, I went to bed. The next day, I couldn't find out how to do Edges(granted, I was just 2-Look), so I looked at the site again just looking at the T Perm and did my first attempt. 12 Minutes - I did Parity by swapping the A and D Targets
Second attempt 17 Minutes - I did parity by doing an extra Y Perm after corners and at the end
Then I saw that this is not getting me anywhere, so I looked at the site a third time. Parity Ra Perm
Third attempt 24 Minutes - it was Friday night and I wanted my Memo to work - I revised so often, I finally forgot it somewhen on Monday, success
This is how I learnt 3BLD
 

Oatch

Member
Joined
Mar 10, 2015
Messages
240
Location
Australia
I initially learnt using Brian Yu's text tutorial. It's old, but it covers most of the necessary fundamentals for blindsolving. The only thing to add in addition to the tutorial is to use a lettering scheme for both edges and corners and memorise with letter pairs (e.g. Speffz or similar), whereas the tutorial only uses a lettering scheme for the corners. As others have mentioned, setups are all intuitive, and I wholeheartedly recommend you try coming up with your own setups, because then you're much more likely to remember them. All you need to know for OP setups is to ensure you don't disturb a specific region of the cube where your algorithm swaps pieces back and forth (e.g. for the Y-perm, you don't want your setup to touch the buffer, UB or UL so all your corner setups must not involve turning L, B or the U faces).

That's basically it from there. There's only so much you can read from tutorials - the best way to learn is to try it out! You just gotta do heaps of attempts and then eventually you'll get a success. Personally, I quickly found OP edges to be a bit cumbersome, and quickly changed methods. There's some excellent intermediate edge methods once you feel comfortable with the general concept of 3BLD. Most people recommend M2, but I've found more success with TuRBo myself. It's all down to personal preference and honestly how far you want to go with blindsolving.
 

Oatch

Member
Joined
Mar 10, 2015
Messages
240
Location
Australia
How do you tell if you have flipped/twisted corners/edges?
Flipped edges/twisted corners: What I tend to do nowadays is that while I'm tracing out my targets I just notice in passing that a piece is in its correct position, but oriented incorrectly, which comes with familiarity with your solving orientation. A strategy that might help you while you're first starting out is that once you've shot to a piece, place a finger on it. If at the end of tracing your fingers are touching all the pieces, then you're finished with no pieces to flip/twist. If some pieces are still untouched, then either its a disjoint cycle that you've missed, or flipped pieces, which you can then deal with accordingly.

Is there any other corner methods?
If you're just starting out with 3BLD, I recommend that you stick with OP corners, because you can still be fairly fast with it. After OP, I've switched straight to 3-style corners (as with most people) which is pretty much the best way to go, but it has a steep learning curve. More people are starting to get interested in Orozco as an intermediate method for corners - and it seems like a decent enough method that will also give you a leg up into 3-style since you'll know some comms (though I personally didn't bother since I thought that if I was going to use comms for blindsolving, I figured I might as well solve 2 pieces at once than just one at a time).

Other lesser used methods include R2 and variations (U2 and D2). They work a lot like M2 but for corners. Not many would recommend this pathway since the setups seem a bit cumbersome, but who knows, maybe you'll find some success with it?
 
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