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Older cubers discussions

Eelephant said:
Heh! After watching many videos and reading many posts, it is easy to start believing everybody but me averages sub 20. Thanks for the reality check.... :)
Click to expand...

BTW, 20 second solves seemed unfathomable to me when I was at your stage as well. Learning the ropes of F2L will shave off time fairly quickly with practice, you'll pause a lot less. Then once you get under :50 - :60 you start reaping the benefit of more practice solves during the time you have available. A sub 20 average seemed like a crazy goal when I set it, and I still have a ways to go to get there, but it's a foregone conclusion now if I continue practicing. I moved my goal to a sub 10 average last year because it needed to be crazy again.
 
kbrune said:
@mark49152
I can't begin to say how impressive it is that you can go back and fix a cube you messed up your sequence. Reversing the wrong execution?? wow. My biggest attempt so far was 12 in 1 hour 15 min. And my mind was so cloudy from info retention that I found it difficult to stay on track even just making sure I knew if I was on edges or corners. I managed 9/12 so im hopeful for a successful 12 in the future.

But my hat's off to you!! Well done!

Question: Do you use a video camera on a tripod to get that angle on your videos?
Click to expand...
Thanks for the kind words. It's nowhere near as impressive as it sounds though. The wrong memo was XJ OM BD BL G. So all I did to reverse it was execute G LB DB MO JX. Not much more difficult than doing BLD in the first place :).

I use an SJCAM 4000 cheapo Gopro imitation on a mini tripod. The wide angle works well for competition tables.

kbrune said:
To all Blinders

Do you ever get brain fatique from frequent practice?
Click to expand...
Sometimes. Especially late in the day. Large MBLD attempts are particularly draining so I do them rarely and always allow a few days rest before a comp. The other problem with MBLD is that it takes a while for memo to fade and not contaminate the next attempt, if using the same rooms. If tired, I'll take a break or do something less taxing like comms drills or corners-only solves.
 
Update on speedsolving: I got my new cubes yesterday! Thank you everyone for the suggestions; they're wonderful. I am now instantly getting better times with freeslice on big cubes than I was getting with AvG with the old cubes, which is pretty amazing. I'm thinking maybe I'll just never go back to AvG, since it doesn't feel so depressing right now that I'm slower with freeslice, since it seems fast now. :-)

And I got a PB average of 5 on skewb with my very first average of 5 on my new wingy. It was pretty funny. I knew I was being held back by my awful skewb, but I had no idea it was this bad. I suspect I'll be sub-10 within a week.

As for BLD fatigue, I think it's a potential issue for everyone, but I find that pushing through it can make you better at surviving it later. Years ago I started forcing myself to do tons of BLD solves in a row, even though I didn't feel up to it. And the more I did it, the better I was the next day after resting at going a long time. You get used to it and it's not as rough. I still find that to be true; if I've done a bunch of marathon BLD recently, I'm so much better at getting good results on marathon sessions than I am if I haven't done it in a while.

I had pretty much success at Nationals last year despite having mostly not cubed for 2 years by doing about 350 3BLD solves in the 3 weeks leading up to the competition. It was not easy, but it was worth it.
 
kbrune said:
Do you ever get brain fatique from frequent practice?
Click to expand...
As others have said it is certainly tiring but you do get used to it like you do with physical exercise. Since overdoing it before the World Championships and having shocking results I now avoid actual solves close to competing. I'll do tracing and some execution but no memo. It works for me.
 
Hi guys, I was also fighting my 20 sec 3x3 barrier yesterday. My first timed rehearsal after last November. Made new PB single 15.99 full step, average of 5 was still little above 20.53 and my avg of 50 23.06. All my 3x3 results at home are much better then official WCA, but we have another national statistic for Slovenian national results, where I made more comps and results there are better( but not counting for WCA)

I am trying to get my first sub minute 4x4 solve, it was very close 1:00.74, and 1:08.91 AVG of 5. Very happy with 4x4 consistency, especially because I had not been rehearsing for months.

I am mostly rehearsing BLD events this month, preparing for nationals in April( they are WCA open for the first time). I want to do some official results, possible for 4BLD, and very short MBL.

@newtonbase thanks for that Daniel video tip about comms. Very nice, simple and made me understand them. Now i try them in stages. First one stickered xcentres, +centres, then two stickered wings, edges. Corners are much harder, but I do want to learn them intuitively first. It is also big fun to play with finding comms.
Have one month to nationals, probably I will use advanced M2,U2,r2 for the timed event, but slowly want to switch to comms.
I am still not fast enough in BLD, but very motivated.
 
Ok, I have been inspired and motivated to start tracking solve times and preparing for competitions.. I'm going to talk out loud about my strategy for moving forward, any input from you veterans would be welcome!

Right now I have set PB and Ao5 benchmarks for the 4 WCA events I know how to do. In order to determine which one needs the most work, I am comparing them to the world record Ao5. Like, for instance, my 3x3 Ao5 of 1:50 is approx 18.5 times slower than the WR (not exactly, cuz I didn't enter WR's down to the millisecond). My 2x2 and 4x4 Ao5 are also both within 16.5 and 18.5 times slower than their respective WR's. So, I know I'm fairly equally bad at all three :-). But the Pyraminx? Atrocious. I am 30 times slower than the WR. I freeze up a lot on the pyraminx. Not sure why, I might just not do it enough.

So, I plan on drilling the pyraminx until I get it down to the range the other 3 are at (16-19 or so). The question is, what next? Ultimately I would like to add skewb, 5x5, and megaminx (really only cuz I have those three on my shelf, and haven't learned them yet, they came in with my last purchase). So, long term strategy: maybe add one, drill it till it's within the range of the others, then drill them all in rotation till I hit a chosen benchmark on all (say, 15 times slower than WR). Then add another. Lather, rinse, repeat. Does that sound reasonable?

One wrench in the works: when I'll have to learn a new method to break a barrier. Most of my solves are kind of a mishmash of intuition, beginner algs/steps, and the like. When to pull the trigger, bite the bullet and just do it?

And then, just going to have to accept the fact that the going will be slow, cuz I won't be able to lay off the non-WCA puzzles entirely, just learning a solve for the fun of it. For instance, I'm pretty sure my next purchase/project is going to be a 3x3 mirror. I really dig the 2x2 mirror.

Anyway, just talking out loud... thanks!
 
Eelephant said:
Right now I have set PB and Ao5 benchmarks for the 4 WCA events I know how to do. In order to determine which one needs the most work, I am comparing them to the world record Ao5. Like, for instance, my 3x3 Ao5 of 1:50 is approx 18.5 times slower than the WR (not exactly, cuz I didn't enter WR's down to the millisecond). My 2x2 and 4x4 Ao5 are also both within 16.5 and 18.5 times slower than their respective WR's. So, I know I'm fairly equally bad at all three :). But the Pyraminx? Atrocious. I am 30 times slower than the WR. I freeze up a lot on the pyraminx. Not sure why, I might just not do it enough.

So, I plan on drilling the pyraminx until I get it down to the range the other 3 are at (16-19 or so). The question is, what next? Ultimately I would like to add skewb, 5x5, and megaminx (really only cuz I have those three on my shelf, and haven't learned them yet, they came in with my last purchase). So, long term strategy: maybe add one, drill it till it's within the range of the others, then drill them all in rotation till I hit a chosen benchmark on all (say, 15 times slower than WR). Then add another. Lather, rinse, repeat. Does that sound reasonable?
Click to expand...

One thing to consider when comparing your times to world class times is that the smaller the puzzle the more of the solve is done in inspection time. The WR 2x2 and pyraminx averages, for example, were almost certainly one-looked, so the recorded time is really just execution. I run roughly 7.5x the WR average for 2x2, but only about 3.5x the WR average for 7x7. You might find this thread interesting for a perhaps more accurate estimate of where you might rank.
 
Lol! I just did a little research into the pyraminx, and discovered why my times were SO bad, I was doing it in prolly the most inefficient way imaginable. Will most likely see very fast improvement now. Thanks, all!
 
h2f said:
My point of view is that one should focus only on few events. It's really hard - and for us older cubers it's harder due to lack o time - to be good at many events: not a world class but just good. So just practice what you like.
Click to expand...
I hear you, absolutely, but I would be afraid that even if you liked the puzzles you were working on, the lack of variety might be a problem? Must consider. Thank you...
 
I really like doing a variety of puzzles; I wouldn't want to discourage you from doing them all.

But it might be best to at least get pretty good on a few before moving on. Not necessarily really good - just learn a decent method first.

In particular you probably want to learn a decent method for 3x3x3 before moving on to 5x5x5 and even megaminx, because what you learn will carry over to the other puzzles, and if you don't, you'll further ingrain bad habits. I've fought that problem a lot.

In particular, if you decide to go CFOP for 3x3x3 (which you certainly don't need to do - there are other good methods to choose from), intuitive F2L is something that will be very good to learn before moving to 5x5x5 and megaminx.

And that won't take too long to learn - within a month or two you can be moving on to the other puzzles confidently. You don't need to be great at intuitiive F2L - you just want to be good enough at it that you're using good methods as you practice on all puzzles.

You can start skewb any time - it's quite an independent method to learn.

I love competing in every event at competitions - it's more fun in my opinion and it also means I usually have at least one event where I did pretty well.
 
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