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Left cross/ Bottom cross

Dene

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I think it depends on each individual cross. Bottom cross can be very awkward sometimes, I often use the left in those cases. I occasionally use the front as well. Not so often I'm forced to use the top face, but I don't like to do that.
 

Skrato

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I always use the bottom, because I don't need to look at the white colours. Only the colours matter, and I am quite confident I get them right 100% of the time without having to check.
 

alexc

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I use bottom. It gives you the best view of the U layer and will allow you to "look ahead" easiest. But with bottom, you are more likely to make awkward cube rotations. On left, you don't have as good a view of the U layer, but you have less awkward regrips. (Main regrip is x, x', l, and l' compared to y or y' on down.) It is just your personal preference. Most of the really good cubers do cross on down, though.
 
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When I use Fridrich I do cross on bottom. I can't seem to look ahead/figure out what do with with the corners and edges when I do it on the left.

I know Pembo uses cross on left though, and he is sub 15.
 

4GO57O

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like a lot of other people said you'll be slow at first but when you get used to doing it you'll decrease your overall time because you predict better..
 

blah

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Sorry for bumping into a really old thread, but I had a thought about left cross today, it's probably not new, but I've always heard people saying there are no real pros or cons to each, it's just a matter of personal preference. But I found some pros and cons today.

For people who try and try and try and still can't get their left hand to work as they'd like it to (for example, me), cross on left is definitely a much better option isn't it? There are zero L moves for F2L with cross on left (excluding empty slot tricks and such). All you do are RFU moves. And you do l/l' for cube rotations rather than the annoying d/d' for cross on bottom. Yeah I agree that look ahead isn't as good, but after weighing the factors, I'd say cross on left still wins for "exclusive rightys".

On the other hand (pun intended), if you're ambidextrous, there's absolutely no reason to do cross on left, you're just wasting your valuable ability. If you're ambidextrous, you can easily do your entire F2L with cross on bottom with at most, say, 3 cube rotations. And of course look ahead is much better with cross on bottom. I think the potential of cross on bottom would be very underutilized if you can't do left hand triggers, you're much better off doing cross on left.

Here's another thought, for those who insist on cross on bottom but whose left hand sucks, would it be a good idea to alternate between bottom and left cross during your F2L? Because a z rotation is definitely much much faster than a y.

And you can mirror all your OLLs and PLLs like that too. I've always did Antisune as the reverse of Sune, today I tried doing the mirror of Sune with a z cube rotation and it turned out surprisingly smooth! zU'R'UR'U'R2Uz', I did the last U with left index push (as in OH), but you could probably do it as z'L since you need to do a z' in the end anyway.

For non-ambidextrous people like me, rather than doing an annoying y2 rotation before some of your PLLs, "translate" the alg so that it can be done with a z rotation. I hope you get what I mean by this.

I dunno, this is probably a very old idea, but I got this idea from OH, which I started less than a week ago. So can anyone please give some comments? Thanks.
 

blah

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I think I just convinced myself to alternate between bottom and left crosses during F2L. I've been messing around with this "alternating cross" strategy for the past hour or so and here are some examples of the many surprising things I discovered:

u0.png

What do you do when you get this F2L case in the BL slot? You could do a y2 rotation then your usual algorithm. Or if the corner-edge pair happens to fall in the same slot then you could do L2' U L2 U L2' U2 L2 (kinda like a left hand Air Jeff). But what if it doesn't, or what if you're not comfortable with L moves? Do a z rotation then (R U R' U')*3 (the exact same algorithm!). And there's a bonus, if the corner-edge pair doesn't fall in the BL slot you could stop at z (R U R' U')*2 z' then AUF and insert it in the right slot.

u3.png

Likewise for this case, if it was in the BL slot, you could do y2 then your alg. Or, z R2' U2 R2 U' R' U R' U2' z'.

u4.png

z R2' U2 R2 U R U' R U2' z' in BL slot.

These are probably not new, but they were really shocking results for me, because I haven't seen anyone talk about this anywhere else. And I've always been doing the stupid y2 rotations, and now I'm suddenly relieved :)

By the way, should this be moved to the Speedcubing section?

Edit: if you want to experiment with my examples, here are the setup moves: First one is a pretty obvious self-inverse. Second one, R2 U R' U R U2 R2 U2. Third one, F2 U' F U' F' U2 F2 U2.
 
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LarsN

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