Congratulations to everybody on your comp PBs and at-home PBs (
@pglewis). Nice weekend for BLD or so it seems!
I will have to make do with some at-home PBs myself
Broke all my 5x5 PBs (single, Ao5, Ao12, Ao50 & Ao100)
View attachment 7609
Fun fact. PB Ao5 has probably the lowest standard deviation I'll ever get on 5x5. The three counting solves were 2:34.xx: 2:34.26, 2:34.21, (2:40.74), 2:34.87, (2:18.34)
Nice, and amazing consistency there! I still need a calendar, not a Stackmat, to time 5x5 (I rarely practice or time it, but my spreadsheet says 6:30 PB
).
The most exciting thing for me about my current 3x3 trend is it's nearly all just from good ol' fashioned grinding; I'm taking eyes off each F2L pair I'm solving a tiny bit earlier. A little help from more attention to edge orientation and a little help from improved lookahead between stages (first pair is still dodgy but F2L -> OLL -> PLL is definitely improving).
I had a more holistic regimen mapped out but haven't stuck to much of it:
* Full CN: back-burnered for now. White/Yellow CN is "go", though; if I'm still frowning after a few seconds of inspection I'll go ahead and commit to yellow now, usually landing mid to upper 30s. That'll get faster with practice and already beats a crappy start with unfriendly white edges. I don't put any concentrated practice into it, just when white looks annoying.... maybe 1 out of 30 solves or so.
* OLL: Not being aggressive here, just following my mantra "if my current algs are all comfortable enough to use in speedsolves then pick up a few new ones". I'm up to 20 OLLs now including OCLL and all but the newest (Knight) are fairly solidified. I'm nearing the point where I can one-look OLL half the time and the expansion
is gradually helping the times.
* Cross drills: haven't worked on it at all. My blind exercise back in January had the unexpected side-effect of helping me visualize cross solving a whole lot better. Fewer cases where I just plan out 3 edges and let the 4th fall as it may but I haven't done concentrated practice.
* OLL/PLL TPS spamming: Hardly at all, mostly just what I get from spamming solves. I certainly don't do any time attacks or even much repetition except for new ones. I do analyze ones that annoy me for one reason or another, e.g. Ab this week. I like R/U/D unless there's a D2 involved but my D2 sucks. I've decided to try incorporating a single-pull D2 with the ring finger; from the left side it would reach to RBD and do the D2 in one motion. I'm already convinced that can flow much better than all my attempts at double flicking. That sort of thing is adding up to improvements but I'm still very much a slo-mo version of what most of you do.
That's quite a laundry list of things that can improve my times that I haven't even been working on. I picked an official sub-20 average as a major goal because it seemed ridiculously optimistic and ambitious at the time. In fact it was initially a sub 1 min goal-- which felt ambitious at the time-- but I went "crazy" and moved it to :20 well before I was at :60. I'm getting ahead of myself since I'm still a far cry from an official sub 20 but I'm feeling an urge to move that milestone lower. Maybe sub 4. Of course, a 3.9 won't make the second round by the time I get there.
.
