How did you start Speedcubing?

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  • Start date Start date

How did you start Speedcubing?

  • Got bored one day and decided to try and solve it

    Votes: 47 19.9%

  • A friend or someone of relation showed you

    Votes: 80 33.9%

  • Surfing the Web and found something about it

    Votes: 29 12.3%

  • Heard about speedcubing through news about competitions etc.

    Votes: 1 0.4%

  • Saw the cube and felt a sudden urge to solve it

    Votes: 62 26.3%

  • Other

    Votes: 17 7.2%
  • Total voters
    236
My uncle showed me how to do the F2L, but its only half a year later when i stumbled on my rubik's cube that i decided to try to finish it so i checked jasmine's site. but i wanted to impress people (or more specifically someone) so i moved on to speedcubing.
 
I was really in to the cube (and magic/pyraminx, etc) when I was a child (9-13) and was able to solve in just over a minute with a completely beginners method. Then I just lost interest because of sports, girls, studies and computers.

Then, 1.5 years ago (I was 28 then), my girlfriend came back from a small vacation and said she saw 4x4x4 and 5x5x5 cubes and asked me if she SHOULD HAD bought them for me.

0.5 years ago we bought them at that same place (They were Eastsheens and only 10 Euro/13 Dollar). I spent two months figuring them out by myself and succeeded, except for the parities on the 4x4x4 (5x5x5 was no problem, just slow).

Then i got online to search for the parity fix and found out about speedcubing and knew that I was going to waste a lot of them on this. I checked a lot of sites and finally learned the beginners method from deepcube (http://www.deepcube.net/beginner.html?) which got me a 55 second average at the Belgian Open this year. Since then I learned the intermediate method (http://www.deepcube.net/intermediate.html?) which got me a 35 second average.

I am currently starting to learn a partial Fridrich, but mostly I focus on 4x4x4 and 5x5x5 which I am starting to get quit good at.

Also meeting Jo?l van Noort, Ron van Bruchem, Lars vandenbergh, Matt Walters and many other world-class speedcubers was very inspirational and really makes me want to break 20 seconds average one day.

On a final note, I have plans to get more girls into cubing. Starting with my girlfriend and niece who can both do 85 seconds now with a very basic method, but are improving by seconds/week.
 
Originally posted by AvGalen@Aug 9 2006, 07:36 AM
On a final note, I have plans to get more girls into cubing. Starting with my girlfriend and niece who can both do 85 seconds now with a very basic method, but are improving by seconds/week.
Click to expand...
Hey Arnoud,

That's great.. I also might know a girl that wants to learn it.. ;)..
 
I started cubing when my GF's (ex GF by now) little sister got one for 'Sinterklaas' (long story, kinda like Santa Clause). I was facinated by it, and decided to buy one myself. Then, I thought.. there must be some information on the internet about this.. :) And that's when I found all these websites about cubing. I started off at Jessica's site and DanK's site. They inspired me a lot, and I learned a lot from them. However, the algs on other sites were a lot better, so I learned algs from all different sites.
 
Is that a new potential girlfriend you are talking about :P ?

It would be great to have more girls/women actively involve in speedcubing. At the Belgian Open we only had Maureen and Grada.

I think that if I teach Sandra (my girlfriend) or Marianne (my "niece") to solve a 4x4x4 or 5x5x5 they could possible be the only females in that competition.

To go a little off-topic on the algs. I have noticed a few on your algs-Excel-file that even I know shorter AND faster algs for. Like the first F2L-alg (R U R' U2 R U' R' U R U R') I perform it like R U2 R U R' U R U2 R2 and its inverse (R U R' U' R U2 R' U' R U R') I perform like y L' U2 L' U' L U' L' U2 L2 or like y' R' U2 R' U' R U' R' U2 R2
 
I know one girl who's interested in cubing. She can actually finish one if she has a sheet in front of her with all the algs I gave ger so at least she understands the basics. If I can get her to start actively speedcubing like me, all of my hard work would have paid off. I'd have a girlfriend!!! The same girl I've been crushing on for 3 years!!!
 
my girlfriend finally got into it. she learned how to do an intuitive f2l and has been doing it for several months. she loves to problem solve and is really drawn to the centers and edges of the 4x4 and 5x5. she refused to learn any of the last layer algs (or any algs at all). i reduced the LL to 4-look LL and showed her the 7 algs so now she's able to completely solve.

now, she's starting to realize that she IS using her own algs for f2l and she's asking me for shorter ones. however, she still stands her ground and states that she absolutely does not want to become a speedcuber. so, i'd doubt that i'll ever get her to learn even the PLL algs. she hovers around 2.5-3.5 min solves.

we'll be sitting there "watching tv" and both realize that we have no idea of what is happening on tv as we've both been solving over and over again.
 
Second day of science class, the teacher began fiddling with a cube at his desk while we were reading. He seems really, really slow now (~2-3 minutes), but back then, boy was he fast. Everyone would stare in awe when he finished the cube, and I thought it was amazing. I then found out another teacher also cubes, and races with my teacher, so I'm guessing they're in the same timeframe.

I think I bought my second cube (First one I got when I was like ten, lost it not too long afterward) a few days after witnessing this amazing act. As soon as I got home I began to research beginner methods, and I was able to solve it without help from a piece of paper or webpage for reminding me within a week and a half.

Pretty soon I started to feel that natural crave to be faster, and now I average under 40 seconds. Took me five months from the checkout line at target to become a "official" speedcuber. Every single day of school I would have my cube with me, and if we didn't have anything to do, I'd practice.

I ordered my first 4x4x4 the other day, can't wait to try out the new challenge :)
 
It all went back to that one faithful day, around October 15-20, 2005. I was sitting on my comfortable dinner-room-chair...I turned on the TV, hoping to watch a newer episode of...well some cartoon show back in those days alright...then...during the break (between the cartoons)...I saw the guest of the day in The Zone (two people doing somethings on TV between the cartoon shows)...with a Rubik's Cube in his hands (I didn't know what it was called back then...but i know about it). Then, the moment of truth came. Sugar and Carlos asked him to solve it. In around 30 seconds, even with my thoughts of that it was a impossibility...I saw it. Solid colour on each 6 sides of the cube. I was amazed. As usual, I felt confident, and set a goal to be able to solve the cube as well. That's just the start. Because of Dave Campbell.
 
I saw Guus Razoux-Schultz on Dutch television talking about the World Championchips of 1982. Then I found Chris Hardwick's solving video on the internet, and I was hooked (love that vid).
 
I first decided to try and solve the cube when I saw a thing about it on "I Love the '80s" on VH1. So I went and dug up my Mom's old cube from like 1979 and started playing with it. In a few hours I finally solved it on my own. I played with it for a couple weeks and eventually could solve it in about 7-10 minutes using my own method. By this time I had got into it a lot and wanted to solve it faster. So after doing some research and learning a beginners method, I was able to solve the cube in under a minute on average. I'm now in the process of learning the Fridrich method and can average around 30 seconds.
 
MasterofRubix said:
My uncle showed me how to do the F2L, but its only half a year later when i stumbled on my rubik's cube that i decided to try to finish it so i checked jasmine's site. but i wanted to impress people (or more specifically someone) so i moved on to speedcubing.
Click to expand...


One day, in my bedroom, I saw an interesting shape! A Cube, filled with colors! And then...

I just asked my dad to print me some instructions from the net... I wanted to be faster, so I moved onto F2L and 2lokk PLL and 2look OLL!
 
One day I had bought a cube from Walmart so I would have something to do on my lunch break at work. I figured out how to solve the first 2 layers but was stuck on the last. I decided to look up some tutorials on youtube and came across Yu Nakajima's 6.57 3x3 solve. At the time is took me around 10 minutes to solve a cube, but once I got the hang of it, my times went down. Even though I average around 19.50 sec....I still wanna get faster.
 
My sister showed me how to solve it with begginner method, then I showed it to my friends and they got into it. After about five months one of my friend told me about Fridrich, I was instantly amazed, found LanceTheBlueKnight's tutorial on youtube and then got faster since then.
 
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