azertyia
Member
I officially hit sub-20 (3x3, 19.07) with my timer a few days ago, and I thought I'd tell people how I got here. I haven't really posted here before so I'll just start from the beginning:
About a decade ago I learned how to solve a 3x3, so I had some knowledge how to solve the cube without making a daisy and without the weird but much more systematic last layer beginner's method I see nowadays (I used to learn it as Orient Edges -> Spam Sune Randomly for OLL -> Solve PLL corners using an A perm -> Solve PLL edges using a janky U Perm). It's been a while since then but I picked speedcubing back up when a few months ago, a speedcubing friend of mine gave me a GAN cube whose model I'm not sure of yet (it's got yellow magnets, a black inside, a blue spring strength selector, and a surface which feels more "grippy" and less plastic than other GAN cubes I felt).
My progression was as follows:
--- SUB 1M
- 2-Look OLL
- Full PLL (with really bad recognition and algorithms, THE G-PERMS WERE THE WORST PLEASE GO DO J PERM'S INSTEAD)
- Some parts of F2L
--- SUB 45
- Better F2L
- Keyhole
- (that was literally it)
- I still didn't use my inspection time at all that well
--- SUB 30
- BETTER PLL THANK J-PERM
- U-turn with left hand
- Some amount of lookahead
- Edge Orientation to base lookahead on (2-gen F2L is a lot faster for me)
- Experimentation with other methods (APB, 3-style, Roux)
--- SUB 25
- Really smooth lookahead (I get good F2L smoothness ~10s)
- Predicting the first pair with cross
- COLL (i love this so much, but I hate sunes because I have to think about perms)
- VHLS (RUR' and URU'R' last slot with EO, just for COLL)
--- SUB 20
For people that didn't notice, I never learned Full OLL and I never will desire to learn Full OLL because recognition and execution for sucky cases seem like too much work when I could just do 2 sledge hammers and a COLL to replace a dot case and three-quarters of the effort it takes to do a PLL. Before I was thinking about just dropping speed cubing once I hit sub-20, but I kind of want to keep going to at least sub-15 or sub-10. A few options I was considering looking into was multi-slotting to severely reduce my F2L time, "advanced F2L" (according to speedcubedb) so I don't have to look too hard for a case I can do, lookahead arrows as seen on cuberoot's site, where I just memorize what an F2L case does to all the other pieces, or any of the other ideas in the poll or comments.
About a decade ago I learned how to solve a 3x3, so I had some knowledge how to solve the cube without making a daisy and without the weird but much more systematic last layer beginner's method I see nowadays (I used to learn it as Orient Edges -> Spam Sune Randomly for OLL -> Solve PLL corners using an A perm -> Solve PLL edges using a janky U Perm). It's been a while since then but I picked speedcubing back up when a few months ago, a speedcubing friend of mine gave me a GAN cube whose model I'm not sure of yet (it's got yellow magnets, a black inside, a blue spring strength selector, and a surface which feels more "grippy" and less plastic than other GAN cubes I felt).
My progression was as follows:
--- SUB 1M
- 2-Look OLL
- Full PLL (with really bad recognition and algorithms, THE G-PERMS WERE THE WORST PLEASE GO DO J PERM'S INSTEAD)
- Some parts of F2L
--- SUB 45
- Better F2L
- Keyhole
- (that was literally it)
- I still didn't use my inspection time at all that well
--- SUB 30
- BETTER PLL THANK J-PERM
- U-turn with left hand
- Some amount of lookahead
- Edge Orientation to base lookahead on (2-gen F2L is a lot faster for me)
- Experimentation with other methods (APB, 3-style, Roux)
--- SUB 25
- Really smooth lookahead (I get good F2L smoothness ~10s)
- Predicting the first pair with cross
- COLL (i love this so much, but I hate sunes because I have to think about perms)
- VHLS (RUR' and URU'R' last slot with EO, just for COLL)
--- SUB 20
For people that didn't notice, I never learned Full OLL and I never will desire to learn Full OLL because recognition and execution for sucky cases seem like too much work when I could just do 2 sledge hammers and a COLL to replace a dot case and three-quarters of the effort it takes to do a PLL. Before I was thinking about just dropping speed cubing once I hit sub-20, but I kind of want to keep going to at least sub-15 or sub-10. A few options I was considering looking into was multi-slotting to severely reduce my F2L time, "advanced F2L" (according to speedcubedb) so I don't have to look too hard for a case I can do, lookahead arrows as seen on cuberoot's site, where I just memorize what an F2L case does to all the other pieces, or any of the other ideas in the poll or comments.
