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In the zone or a new norm ... I'm freaked out! (positive)

TheChaiCuber

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Joined
Sep 30, 2015
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224
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2016CHAI03
I'm shocked at my last hour an a half, before I go on here's a description of my day in terms of cubing:

Hung out with a friend the entire day, brought my yuxin 5x5 to keep my company during the transportation times with the bus and subway. I want to say I solved it around 10 times throughout the day until I got home. That's it! no 3x3 until literally 2 hours ago. Then stuff happens which blows my mind ..

I'm a 17-18s solver and I'll usually get 16s solves often to go along with my terrible 20s+ solves. Today I get out my Tanglong and I start cubing ... first solve is 15.17. My next 4 solves were all 17s solves, and I felt good (like I was flowing in my solve and very relaxed). Throughout many many solves afterwards, I consistently got 15 and sub-15s solves. I was like "ok, I'm in the zone". I've been there before, it happens to me sometimes either when I take a quick 1 day break from cubing or jamming lots of practice in and it suddenly starts clicking. Ok, nothing much to overreact here, but I continued solving and I realized all my records on Cstimer were nearly broken .. and I barely noticed.

I broke my Pb single, my ao3, ao5, ao12 within 30 solves and I thought this was pretty incredible. I went on to solve my cube 50 times for the day to see if I could break my ao50. I not only managed to do that, but I broke all my other Pbs literally a few solves after I set new ones .... I was dumbfounded.

At that moment I decided to go to 100 solves to see if I could break my ao100 which sat somewhere at the 17.5s mark. Keep in mind that that's my best ever time with 100 solves so when I finished up my 100th solve, I broke that average by an entire second at 16.52s.

A key difference in my solves from the past is that my F2L suddenly sped up from 10-11s to 8-10s (I know, I shouldn't look at the timer during solves it's a bad habit haha) and my LL, although I can't confirm it, it felt at least a second faster than before. I know the key reason to my faster times is because of that F2L increase, and somehow with no warning my recognition of F2L and LL went up like crazy. Up until now my improvement has been based on gradual increases in my recognition by slowing down and reading the pieces more carefully and predicting my next moves, but this is way too sudden for me to comprehend. I literally improved my recognition by 1-2 seconds by not solving the 3x3, messing around with the 5x5 and then solving the 3x3 the next day. Basically all my practice from before, where I saw very little improvement; it all came together and showed itself right in front of my shocked face after each solve.

Every solve was exhilarating because it felt NORMAL for me! I felt like I could do it again and when I actually did it I still couldn't believe it happened. Although I do have a question pertaining to whether this was truly a "zone" thing or a new norm, I just want to share this experience with everyone who reads this on the forum. What a great way to start off 2016.

I hope all of you experience what I experienced tonight.
 

biscuit

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I had an experience similar to this two months ago or so. I sat down and I started getting really really good solves. That continued on through out the entire day, and it felt like you said. Normal. The next day though, I was back to my old times, and it just didn't feel right. After about a week, my times suddenly went back down to what it was on that day and stayed there. It could be that a click happened in your mind as it did for me.
 
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I'm shocked at my last hour an a half, before I go on here's a description of my day in terms of cubing:

Hung out with a friend the entire day, brought my yuxin 5x5 to keep my company during the transportation times with the bus and subway. I want to say I solved it around 10 times throughout the day until I got home. That's it! no 3x3 until literally 2 hours ago. Then stuff happens which blows my mind ..

I'm a 17-18s solver and I'll usually get 16s solves often to go along with my terrible 20s+ solves. Today I get out my Tanglong and I start cubing ... first solve is 15.17. My next 4 solves were all 17s solves, and I felt good (like I was flowing in my solve and very relaxed). Throughout many many solves afterwards, I consistently got 15 and sub-15s solves. I was like "ok, I'm in the zone". I've been there before, it happens to me sometimes either when I take a quick 1 day break from cubing or jamming lots of practice in and it suddenly starts clicking. Ok, nothing much to overreact here, but I continued solving and I realized all my records on Cstimer were nearly broken .. and I barely noticed.

I broke my Pb single, my ao3, ao5, ao12 within 30 solves and I thought this was pretty incredible. I went on to solve my cube 50 times for the day to see if I could break my ao50. I not only managed to do that, but I broke all my other Pbs literally a few solves after I set new ones .... I was dumbfounded.

At that moment I decided to go to 100 solves to see if I could break my ao100 which sat somewhere at the 17.5s mark. Keep in mind that that's my best ever time with 100 solves so when I finished up my 100th solve, I broke that average by an entire second at 16.52s.

A key difference in my solves from the past is that my F2L suddenly sped up from 10-11s to 8-10s (I know, I shouldn't look at the timer during solves it's a bad habit haha) and my LL, although I can't confirm it, it felt at least a second faster than before. I know the key reason to my faster times is because of that F2L increase, and somehow with no warning my recognition of F2L and LL went up like crazy. Up until now my improvement has been based on gradual increases in my recognition by slowing down and reading the pieces more carefully and predicting my next moves, but this is way too sudden for me to comprehend. I literally improved my recognition by 1-2 seconds by not solving the 3x3, messing around with the 5x5 and then solving the 3x3 the next day. Basically all my practice from before, where I saw very little improvement; it all came together and showed itself right in front of my shocked face after each solve.

Every solve was exhilarating because it felt NORMAL for me! I felt like I could do it again and when I actually did it I still couldn't believe it happened. Although I do have a question pertaining to whether this was truly a "zone" thing or a new norm, I just want to share this experience with everyone who reads this on the forum. What a great way to start off 2016.

I hope all of you experience what I experienced tonight.

Wow! Congrats! I'm not sure what you were experiencing, but it sure does sound great. Haha I wish that happened to me!
 

Knut

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The 5x5 is the key here. When solving a 5x5 you track a lot more pieces than you do on a 3x3, and it's really good for building lookahead. Sometimes I'll take a couple weeks and only do 5x5, and when I do 3x3 again my times are always better.
 

willi pilz

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Aug 20, 2015
Messages
65
That is really cool, Conclusion: DO 5x5 SOLVES.

It's funny, because I'm doing right now big cubes only for one month. I'm not making new year resolutions, because no one ever keeps those :) (No offense, I'M never keeping it) so i decided to make a one month resolution. Can't wait to get to 3x3 again, and its only been 2 days now :) .
 

shadowslice e

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That is really cool, Conclusion: DO 5x5 SOLVES.

It's funny, because I'm doing right now big cubes only for one month. I'm not making new year resolutions, because no one ever keeps those :) (No offense, I'M never keeping it) so i decided to make a one month resolution. Can't wait to get to 3x3 again, and its only been 2 days now :) .
Actually, doing any bigger cubes help a lot including megaminx. The mega has really been helping with my second block (I use roux- but my SB still sucks... :/) so yeah :)
 

CubePro

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Hey! I too am a 17-18s solver and it happened to me like yesterday! IDK why but I just kept getting very good times. I broke my mo3, ao5, ao12 and ao50 yesterday, in the same session. Does anyone know why this happens?
 

shadowslice e

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Who on YouTube teaches finger tricks the best p.s. Respond back fast

Lol :p

But seriously, it depends what you're looking for. For basics in OH asmallkitten is very good, Guroux is best for roux OH LSE. I wouldn't say you need a fingertrick video for normal solving. Just double flick and M slice and you can just make it up from there.
 

TheChaiCuber

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Sep 30, 2015
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224
Location
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2016CHAI03
Who on YouTube teaches finger tricks the best p.s. Respond back fast

well I kinda wish I understood what the joke was, haha

anyway, though it's not a bad idea to imitate a faster or well-known cuber's finger tricking, I do believe a lot of "special" and unique finger tricking is unnecessary. I think some special finger tricking is most useful with all the G-perms (both rotation-less and rotation algorithms) and V-perms. For example, with one of the rotation-less G-perms (I forget which one) I will use the side of my ring finger to push the R-face upward. For my V-perm (R' U R' U' y R' F' R2 U' R' U R' F R F) I use a lot of thumb-tricking and on the final F move I actually use my left palm/thumb area to push the face because it fits naturally with my hand/wrist movement. Some unique finger tricking also helps with F2L if you can figure out how to pair your edges on the back-side of the cube to prevent too many rotations during solves.

My point is, try to develop your own style of unique finger tricking that allows you to flow the smoothest, I don't think there is a right or wrong/better or worse way to do solving. As long as they make you flow with minimal extra movement and pauses, the finger tricking you perform will look beautiful.

On that note, I have yet to find a way to finger trick those damn N-perms. Normal ones make my algs feel super static and I can't develop a flow/better way of finger tricking them.
Any alg recommendations? I have replaced those static algs I mentioned with better ones I found on algdb.net, but these algs still feel strange. my Nb-perm is a J-perm with like 6 extra moves before and after, and my Na-perm involves a z rotation and feels like a less-flowing rotation-less G-perm. It's pretty annoying ...
 

TheChaiCuber

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Joined
Sep 30, 2015
Messages
224
Location
San Francisco
WCA
2016CHAI03
I had an experience similar to this two months ago or so. I sat down and I started getting really really good solves. That continued on through out the entire day, and it felt like you said. Normal. The next day though, I was back to my old times, and it just didn't feel right. After about a week, my times suddenly went back down to what it was on that day and stayed there. It could be that a click happened in your mind as it did for me.

After a couple days of this thing happening, I haven't reverted to my old times, but I also haven't stayed at the same level I was before. Right now I'm solving pretty consistently 16-17 seconds. This feels less of a phenomenon and definitely more of a "click" in my F2L performance.

I figured out that my F2L improved because I'm rotating my cube much less than before. That's not to say that my F2L is rotation-less and without pauses, but without actually counting I think I turn the cube at most twice in a "bad" F2L solve in my current state. Usually I'm rotating the cube I want to say once, and I do a lot of "half" rotating where the cube is 45 degrees turned and I turn back to the face I was previously or continue to turn slowly for a full 90 degree turn, which makes it feel like it wasn't even a rotation since the distance between returning to a face and moving onto the next face is both 45 degrees. I'm intrigued, because I never truly practiced rotating less often during my F2L solves. I figured as long as I had good lookahead I could perform F2L without pauses because I've seen many top-tier cubers do rotations during F2L and flow nicely still. However, with less rotations my lookahead has been made super easy, I turn even slower than I already to (to practice lookahead) and I can still get sub-10 F2L. I never knew how much rotations affected lookahead until now.
 
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