Lord Voldemort

[Lord Voldemort]

Hi all, I'm Lord Voldemort.... Yes, Voldemort does solve Rubik's Cubes...
Well, I started cubing because I say my 9 year old cousin solving a cube (I'm 14) and I wanted to too. He taught me how to solve the 2x2x2, and then live 6 weeks ago I learned how to solve the 3x3x3. Now I can solve it in less than a minute, and I'm teaching myself a reduced Fridrich. (I posted a tutorial here if any of you are interested. So yeah... That's pretty much all with cubing. Other than that, I'm in High School, I play chess and tennis, and super smash bros brawl.

 

[Fobo911]

Welcome, and have fun. =D

Speedcubing FTW!

 

[IamWEB]

Welcome to the forums

*I play Brawl as well, but not lately due to school work*

 

[Lord Voldemort]

Same here...
I used to play a lot over the summer, but I haven't touched my Wii for weeks now. (That sounded wrong )
Hopefully I'll be able to get sub-30s by the end of the year. (Owning my cousin, but he's only 9, so that's not too amazing)

 

[Garmon]

Keep practicing and sub 30 will be on the way.

 

[Escher]

well you have a month and (nearly) a week.
sub 30 should be quite possible with enough motivation.
once you are comfortable with fridrich f2l practice smooth/slow turning, big look ahead solves OFTEN. and time them. in fact, i dont recommend you do any solves BUT lots of lookahead solves
occasionally practice beginners method solves with really really fast execution, just to keep up with your lookahead.
you can get sub 30 with ridiculously fast execution but gappy between pairs and LL steps, but you wont go much further with it.

seriously now, LOOK AHEAD. you will begin to naturally alter some of your intuitive fridrich so that you can avoid bad cases, & you will be prepared after every pair you do. in fact, you will loathe the fact that you have to finish pairs as you will already know which pair will be best to do next...

 

[pjk]

Welcome to Speedsolving.com!

 

[Lord Voldemort]

well you have a month and (nearly) a week.
sub 30 should be quite possible with enough motivation.
once you are comfortable with fridrich f2l practice smooth/slow turning, big look ahead solves OFTEN. and time them. in fact, i dont recommend you do any solves BUT lots of lookahead solves
occasionally practice beginners method solves with really really fast execution, just to keep up with your lookahead.
you can get sub 30 with ridiculously fast execution but gappy between pairs and LL steps, but you wont go much further with it.

seriously now, LOOK AHEAD. you will begin to naturally alter some of your intuitive fridrich so that you can avoid bad cases, & you will be prepared after every pair you do. in fact, you will loathe the fact that you have to finish pairs as you will already know which pair will be best to do next...

So is looking ahead something that's more intuitive, or are there some guidelines and patterns that fit?

 

[tikva]

Honestly, I found looking ahead very hard before I was very comfortable with all the F2L cases.

I was averaging 28 at the time. Basically what I did was: find a pair while doing no moves, solve it while looking at it, then repeat.

Then I discovered the power of lookahead . Someone suggested practicing with my eyes closed, and I think it helped me a lot. So... you find a pair, close your eyes, solve it, repeat. After 10 solves like this I could look everywhere on the cube, except the pair I was solving! So I could find the next pair usually after, say, first three moves of the current pair. Very soon my average dropped to 24. This was a moment, when I felt the appeal of the cube, once again (the first being when I first got the cube). Note that I'm executing the F2L algorithms pretty slowly. Now I only need to practice execution. That should be easy.

Also, don't learn the F2L algorithms by heart. Understand what they do, then as you practice this "intuitive F2L", the algorithms will come to your muscle memory. A great benefit of this approach is that you will be able to insert the pair in all the slots, therefore minimizing cube rotations.

So to sum it up:
Don't practice speed until you have no gaps.

Don't get me wrong, you should fingertrick all the algorithms you do, just don't concentrate on speed, but instead on not looking at the pair you're solving.

And...
People in this forum are all more-or-less world class cubers. Don't be disappointed if you don't catch up on them in a month.

P.S. You will need practice, lots of shovels of practice. Sub-30 is not as easy as it seems

 

[Escher]

what he said