Older cubers discussions

Nice first solves Jason My first average was worse 30.something It was also very close to what I was averaging at home.

muchacho, there are no DNFs or +2 at home, it is known.

I have a 2x 3x, 4x, OH, BLD 4BLD Multi and Pyra comp in two weeks, I expect disaster in all events except maybe OH because I have a ****** average. I haven't practiced much lately.
 
Nice first solves Jason My first average was worse 30.something It was also very close to what I was averaging at home.

muchacho, there are no DNFs or +2 at home, it is known.

I have a 2x 3x, 4x, OH, BLD 4BLD Multi and Pyra comp in two weeks, I expect disaster in all events except maybe OH because I have a ****** average. I haven't practiced much lately.

C'mon! Go for it! I'm trying to expand the list of puzzles I solve lately so I decided to learn to solve skewb (Sarah's beginners) and pyra (WO) this past week. Result? I am a patzer at both skewb and pyra and my 3x3 times have suffered again the lack of practise. At this pace I will never graduate from the Race to sub-20 thread :(
 
Awesome thanks! I kept checking but it appeared while I was sleeping of course. :)

Mike, do you need anything else to get me on the over 40 list? Yob again is 1974.

Thanks Raul! I agree, the first DNF I think I counted at home was about a week ago prepping for the contest. Oh no, I had one in the forum competition also. For casual practice I usually don't keep them. :)
 
Awesome thanks! I kept checking but it appeared while I was sleeping of course. :)

Mike, do you need anything else to get me on the over 40 list? Yob again is 1974.

Thanks Raul! I agree, the first DNF I think I counted at home was about a week ago prepping for the contest. Oh no, I had one in the forum competition also. For casual practice I usually don't keep them. :)

I just keep DNFs (or over 30sec solves when I drop the cube, or fail LL and have to go back to F2L, etc.) for the sake of avoiding a distortion of unofficial PBs Ao5 and Ao12 because if I delete a solve and then I get a good Ao12 I don't remember if the DNF was in the middle of the average or not so I can't count it as PB or whatever. Same for long averages, how can I say that I have a PB Ao100 of X if I deleted 3-5 bad/DNF solves in the middle of it? But, as I know I'm slower when not warmed up, what I do at times if I have a long session interrupted in the middle of it is to do some warmup solves in a different session in csTimer before continuing the average. Unluckly this means that a good solve will happen during warmup that will be lost for the average for sure (Murphy's law, you know).
 
I could do some warmup solves, this morning I though yesterday was just a good day... ao100 was ruined but after 15 solves or so good times started to come back.

I've received a stickerless yuxin 4x4, I hoped colors would be good, but nope, yellow and green are too similar for my eyes, I'm going to dye the green pieces (with RIT dye or something alike). If that works I'll buy the yuxin 5x5 in stickerless also.
 
C'mon! Go for it! I'm trying to expand the list of puzzles I solve lately so I decided to learn to solve skewb (Sarah's beginners) and pyra (WO) this past week. Result? I am a patzer at both skewb and pyra and my 3x3 times have suffered again the lack of practise. At this pace I will never graduate from the Race to sub-20 thread :(

Don't start to practice pyra with WO! Not all the cases are good enough. Start with Keyhole and then go for 1-Flip :P
 
That's a good point on the PBs if you don't count DNFs. I have never paid a lot of attention yet to any PB averages, I think my ao5 is 21.x something? But if I start tracking those, which I should, then I would agree to keep bad solves. Probably good to have some discipline I guess, I've heard discipline can be good in life just never tried it. [emoji14]
 
Don't start to practice pyra with WO! Not all the cases are good enough. Start with Keyhole and then go for 1-Flip :P

I cannot unlearn WO now but I can learn other methods and stop practising WO :) But here I come with some thinking I did on these top-first methods in case you can help me:

From the dozen or so solves I did with basic WO yesterday I realized that in the bad cases where you need to solve 2 or even 3 bottom centers, the need to repeat 2-3 times the five-move alg (something like R' L' R' L R or it's mirror) is quite time consuming. So unless you get a very good case (like a scramble with top already solved) I understand it's not the best method.

So, the idea of keyhole, I assume, is to use that free spot on top to solve the 3 bottom centers in just 1 move each, with maybe a U / U' setup move in between centers to put the keyhole "on top" of the center to be solved, am I correct? I can see how that would be much faster than WO but what I don't see is how to solve the 3rd top edge after that without affecting the already-solved bottom centers. I assume there must be an easy alg that I must learn for that. EDIT: It was much easier than I expected, once you have the pyra in front of you the 4-mover is intuitive enough :)

But, then I came to Oka, and I can easily see that having an edge solved and another in the wrong spot can lead to the same solution than before and the 2 top edges can be solved after bottom centers with a 3-mover like R U R' (put the 3rd edge in while extracting the wrong one, rotate the top as needed, put the extracted edge in its place) without affecting the bottom centers. So, it looks like Oka would be a better method than keyhole unless you have a scramble with two top edges solved already. EDIT: And, in this case, it looks like the opposite, the 3 move to solve the two last top edges only works for certain orientations of the edge on the bottom. Will have to watch a video tutorial for this :)

Anyway, either with WO, keyhole or Oka, the bottom edges can be solved either with the 4-move 3-cycle or, I assume, with specific algs for each case if you wanna get faster, but basically the same algs for all methods, right?

Last but not least, 1-flip I assume is more algorithmical and maybe good for advanced pyraminxers and for cases where you already have an easy 1-flip top.

If my reasoning is correct maybe I can learn basic keyhole and Oka in like a day? (without learning specific algs for the 3LE other than the 3 cycle, as they can be solved with at most 2 consecutive 3 cycles in the worst cases).

Thanks for your advice!
 
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I could do some warmup solves, this morning I though yesterday was just a good day... ao100 was ruined but after 15 solves or so good times started to come back.

I've received a stickerless yuxin 4x4, I hoped colors would be good, but nope, yellow and green are too similar for my eyes, I'm going to dye the green pieces (with RIT dye or something alike). If that works I'll buy the yuxin 5x5 in stickerless also.

The Yuxin 5x5 is a fantastic cube. The 4x4 is OK but I prefer the Cyclone Boys.
 
I have another OK cube (Yusu), but I had to try, stickerless cubes are beautiful, I will probably also buy the Yuxin 5x5 even if I can't speedsolve it because of the colors.
 
I cannot unlearn WO now but I can learn other methods and stop practising WO :) But here I come with some thinking I did on these top-first methods in case you can help me: Don't stop practicing it, when you see an easy case in inspection, go for it :)

From the dozen or so solves I did with basic WO yesterday I realized that in the bad cases where you need to solve 2 or even 3 bottom centers, the need to repeat 2-3 times the five-move alg (something like R' L' R' L R or it's mirror) is quite time consuming. So unless you get a very good case (like a scramble with top already solved) I understand it's not the best method. That's the problem of WO (or even Nutella), the bad cases are sooo bad.

So, the idea of keyhole, I assume, is to use that free spot on top to solve the 3 bottom centers in just 1 move each, with maybe a U / U' setup move in between centers to put the keyhole "on top" of the center to be solved, am I correct? I can see how that would be much faster than WO but what I don't see is how to solve the 3rd top edge after that without affecting the already-solved bottom centers. I assume there must be an easy alg that I must learn for that. EDIT: It was much easier than I expected, once you have the pyra in front of you the 4-mover is intuitive enough :) I was about to tell you this :P

But, then I came to Oka, and I can easily see that having an edge solved and another in the wrong spot can lead to the same solution than before and the 2 top edges can be solved after bottom centers with a 3-mover like R U R' (put the 3rd edge in while extracting the wrong one, rotate the top as needed, put the extracted edge in its place) without affecting the bottom centers. So, it looks like Oka would be a better method than keyhole unless you have a scramble with two top edges solved already. EDIT: And, in this case, it looks like the opposite, the 3 move to solve the two last top edges only works for certain orientations of the edge on the bottom. Will have to watch a video tutorial for this :) Some prefer keyhole, some prefer OKA... the best thing is to use both of them, because they are not so difficult to learn.

Anyway, either with WO, keyhole or Oka, the bottom edges can be solved either with the 4-move 3-cycle or, I assume, with specific algs for each case if you wanna get faster, but basically the same algs for all methods, right? There are only 3 cases for the bottom 3 edges (5 if you count mirrors). If you use a top-first method, they are always the same. Just learn them in 10 minutes and profit!

Last but not least, 1-flip I assume is more algorithmical and maybe good for advanced pyraminxers and for cases where you already have an easy 1-flip top. 1-flip is so intuitive and so easy to 1-look all but last 3 edges in inspection with it.

If my reasoning is correct maybe I can learn basic keyhole and Oka in like a day? (without learning specific algs for the 3LE other than the 3 cycle, as they can be solved with at most 2 consecutive 3 cycles in the worst cases). Of course, you can learn the two methods in half an our or less ;)

Thanks for your advice!

Hope it helps you!
 
Hope it helps you!

It helped a lot, as always. Thanks!!! But I still was wrong in so many ways, I guess. E.g.: I was all happy with keyhole and then I get the case where you orient the bottom centers and the 3rd edge ends up flipped in place in the keyhole :( I already checked some videos and found out that the fastest way to fix that is to do a two-flip between that and an adjacent bottom edge. Anyway, mi times still vary a lot between like 15 and 25 (or even worse) seconds. I need TONS of practise.
 
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