Question about splits times

[jms]

Hi.

This may be a dumb question, but when you guys post your splits times, how to you measure them?

Do you just do cross a bunch of times and measure that. Then do F2L a bunch of times, or do you do a full solve and somehow gauge when you go from cross to F2L to OLL etc?

Just wondering because I'd like to know what my splits are like to see where I need to focus.

 

[TDM]

Some timers such as cTimer give you the option to time splits. Click 'breakdowns', and then adjust the number of splits you want e.g. if you want to time cross/F2L/OLL/PLL, you want to have four steps. Pressing space starts the timer, and then pressing it again stops the first step and starts the second. At the end of the solve you're left with the overall time, plus if you look in the box you can see your split times (and it gives you averages for each split too).

 

[jms]

Wouldn't having to press spacebar 4 times kind of affect your solve though?

 

[TDM]

Wouldn't having to press spacebar 4 times kind of affect your solve though?

Yes, it does. I don't like timing splits this way for this reason - it makes you slower, so you don't get an accurate estimate. Another way of timing splits is to record yourself solving and then watch the timer, and you can then see how long it takes you to do each step. However, whenever I try to do this I either fail or do much better than usual, meaning I can't really get a good estimate using this either.