Prompted by the yet another high-profile bld cuber quitting, I have put together some of my thoughts about bld. Although the tone may turn out rather negative towards the events, I am in no way putting those who still blind solve down. I totally respect those who do and in some ways wish I had the desire for it.
In basic terms, blindfolded cubing is a very different animal to sighted events. I think the main foci of sighted events are turning speed, lookahead, alg learning and prediction. While blindfold cubing has turning speed and alg learning, memorisation speed and volume are introduced and are major aspects of the solve.
When I started cubing it was for fun. I really enjoyed the colours, the therapeutic turning, and most of all the challenge of beating my own times in a very measurable hobby. Solving a cube blindfolded was a challenge I accepted so that I could prove to myself that I could do it – I was never really addicted to getting faster at solving blindfolded in the way that I was for sighted events. This was the case for big bld too and multibld. Of course over time I improved slowly and my times got quicker, but practise was never fun enough. I shall try to explain why by breaking the solve down into its 2 components: Memorisation and Execution.
Here are 3 ways to approach the memorisation stage.
• Slow and steady. This is what you do when you just want a success to prove to yourself you can do it. Once that was done, I never practised like this because it seemed like a waste of time. It would just be going slower than I was able to and therefore gave no self-satisfaction. Improvement would also be very slow as you never stretch yourself.
• Normal pace. I imagine this is what most people would do the majority of the time. It’s a speed that requires 99% concentration and you think you will successfully memorise everything but you are pushing yourself to do it quickly. I believe this does result in improvement to both speed and recall accuracy, and I undertook most of my practise at this pace. The problem I had with it is that it was very stressful. I was constantly worried about whether I would remember everything and after each solve I was mentally drained from the 100% concentration I was trying to attain.
• Too-fast pace. This is the pace at which you think that you won’t manage to remember everything at. It’s a very risky memo that often results in massive recall fails. But for me it yielded the best results. If I felt like it was time to cut time off my average memo, I’d just memo 20 seconds faster and see what happened. More often than not I did better than I expected and that fast memo time would soon become my normal pace. I found this the most enjoyable for a number of reasons: I was proving that I could do things I didn’t think I could, the attempts were over quicker and I cut chunks off my times when it worked.
Execution was a very boring stage for me. As far as I was concerned, the hard work was done during the memorisation, and while execution required some concentration, it was just a case of getting it over and done with. A lot of the joy I get from cubing sighted is either because I don’t know what’s coming next, or I am trying to predict what will happen next. This doesn’t exist in blindfolded execution because it’s just regurgitation of memory. Think of it in terms of memory sports: Competitors might memorise lists of numbers for 5 minutes and then spend 10 minutes writing them all down. I can’t imagine the writing of the numbers is particularly interesting or enjoyable. It’s the same for me with blindfolded execution because I cannot even see the cube.
Multibld was a similar case to bigbld, except that the annoyingly boring execution stage went on even longer. What was even more annoying was carrying 20 extra cubes across Europe. I knew I could memorise 20+ cubes. I knew I could memorise 50 or 100 cubes with enough time. I had nothing to prove to myself any more.
Hopefully that has given you insight into why blindfolded cubing was simply not very enjoyable to me. Now you might ask why I did practise and reach a world-class level despite apparently not liking it! I shall explain.
Once I started going to competitions, my competitive instinct kicked in massively. It was clear to me that not only were the non-existent bigbld NRs my best bet of getting a record, my natural talents also happened to be in blindfold cubing. So I set about learning to solve a 4x4 and 5x5 blindfolded and duly got official successes. After a while, I realised that my steady improvement didn’t leave me all that far from and ER or WR, so again I practised hard with that goal in mind. Once that goal was reached, there was little else to achieve so my interest disappeared completely. Practise was not fun for the reasons I’ve detailed above, and there was nothing to aim for. So, that was the end of blindfold cubing for me. While chasing these records I lost sight of the reasons I started cubing in the first place. Quitting blind has helped me rediscover the spark again. I could compete in 4 and 5bld still, but what’s the point? I have no aim and all it does is create stress for myself during the competition. Will I return? I can’t envisage it currently, but I wouldn’t rule it out. Competitions are always the best weekends I have without fail and I don’t wish to spoil them.
Now I’ve written all that, I realise that I didn’t go much into why others quit bld as well, but maybe some of the points apply. It has certainly helped me to get my head round it and clear my thoughts
