Red Bull Rubik's Cube World Championships

[lejitcuber]

This was announced today: https://www.redbullmindgamers.com/rubiks

Edit: WCA response here: https://www.worldcubeassociation.or...-the-red-bull-rubik-s-cube-world-championship

 

[Ordway Persyn]

Huh? okay thats interesting, don't now how popular it will be if it's not an official WCA comp.

 

[Sajwo]

Rubik told me in June that they would start organizing competitions themselves, if we would not cooperate with them, under their conditions.

Short summary:
Rubik's decided to cooperate with Redbull. You have national qualifiers and the final in Boston, US. You need to use Rubik's Brand cube and there are 3 events:
- 3x3 1vs1, best of 5 solves
- 3x3 OH, best of 3, without inspection
- "rescramble", best of 1 - you need to copy the scramble. Probably a nice event for top BLDers.

Probably it will be their first competition in the RSA(Rubik's Speedsolving Associacion), which was announced at the beginning of this year. It is actually made only for the fastest cubers in the World - aspects of real sports are starting to show up right there.

This obviously will be a big competition to WCA, as Rubik's and Redbull are huge companies with a lot of money. Awards can be mind-blowing. I think speedcubing will expand very quickly in 2018, which is obviously a good thing for our community.

Generally I really like the idea and I am curious what will be the outcome of their actions in the upcoming years. Maybe we will se Rubik's Cube on 2024 Olympics, as Erno promised. I just don't like the events, they are just silly and reckless.

 

[Underwatercuber]

I am so done with Rubik’s right now.

 

[Ordway Persyn]

Interesting, though the Rubik's brand lawsuit against the cubicle is going to turn many people away. Theres a lot of things on my mind and I'm not very good at expressing my thoughts through text, so I'm going to think of this for a while. This will probably be the biggest change in cubing since the formation of the WCA itself.

 

[Sion]

Ehh... at least in the case of the lawsuit going through, I got my Rubiks v2 to become a crunchy and fast speedcube to keep my passion. I need more work on that really crappy 4x4.

 

[applezfall]

cool I guess I might compete in one in hungry or something

 

[efattah]

The same shift to 'versus' mode happened at the first ever mega-sponsored freediving/breath holding competition in 2005-- definitely more spectator friendly, kind of as we saw at worlds with the team competition.

For the rescramble event, you could use a BLD method, but simplified LMCF would probably be the fastest method for that event by far. LBL methods have too poor recognition for this style of event, during F2L & LL, but a fast corners first method doesn't suffer from recognition problems as you can (in such methods) pre-solve the corners during the inspection, and even solving the edge pieces one at a time you can still get sub-10 solves.

 

[shadowslice e]

I'll leave this here

 

[imvelox]

This is just terrible news in my opinion, that will damage speedsolving.

I'll report Chris Morris' comment here, which I find very interesting:

Spoiler

This is a huge blow for multiple reasons:

First, this is being run by people who do not understand the puzzle or the competitive scene AT ALL. This is proven many times in the article where they spread blatant misinformation and based on what the general public's perception of the cube is:
"The Rubik's Cube, is the ultimate symbol of intelligence, problem-solving and creativity" - We all know this one.
"...to find out who is the fastest and smartest Cube solver in the largest, most professional Rubik’s Cube tournament the world has yet seen." - Umm did Worlds 2017 not happen? Or any other WC/ National Championship before that?
In addition, the sheer monstrosity that is the "rescramble" event proves that these people have no idea what they're doing; The regular event and OH rip-off are at least relevant, but they might as well hold redi cube if they're gonna just start making **** up.

Second, as Ron pointed out himself, this was organised in secret. Why not involved the largest speedcubing organisation in the world to help you organise something? Oh because that's not what the public want, right, gotcha, they just want to see "omg he turn fast". This is the main issue in my opinion; leaving the WCA out of the organisation of this is giving the finger to all the hard work done over the years to build what we have today.

This will damage speedcubing in my opinion, as it will totally misrepresent the image of speedsolving by holding events in weird formats (1v1 knockout are you ****ing kidding) so new competitors that are intrigued by this will expect this when starting out. It's blatant pandering to the general public without taking any of the speedsolving community or its established practices into consideration.

One last thing, better give Dana a quick congratulations for winning the "female only" event they're holding. The concept of that is a whole nother kettle of fish that I'm not touching.

 

[CornerCutter]

This is not good for the speedcubing community. It's really to bad this is happening.

 

[DGCubes]

My first thoughts:

This is disgusting. I honestly can't believe they're doing this to cubing. As cool as it would be to have a hyped up super-competitive scene, the truth is that's just not what cubing is. I don't go to competitions to compete and win prize money; I go to hang out with friends and experience the amazing community. I honestly hope a lot of fast 3x3 solvers vocally boycott this and explain why it's not the way cubing should be done. The most competitive thing I ever want to see in cubing is a Worlds-style head-to-head final round.

I'm appalled by their blatant disregard of the WCA. None of us would be doing this without all the amazing people who have put so much work into growing cubing into what it is today. Sure, Rubik's made the cube, but people like Tyson, Ron, and way too many more people to name have brought it into the 21st century.

Maybe my opinions will change after giving the idea some more time, but that's where I stand as of now.

 

[Ordway Persyn]

After a little more thought, I still like some of the concepts this has, but I do not like the execution.
Having large competitions sponsored by large companies is a very cool concept that I like. I also like the Idea of having many regional/Qualifying competitions where the top competitors get spots in a "Finals" Competition. However ,I feel as if this would not be nearly as fun as WCA comps because of the fact that the people running it are not cubers themselves, and probably don't know what cubers really want. As many people have pointed out, I feel as if they have completely left out the WCA and it seems to be because they didn't accept some of the terms they wanted. They don't seem to care much about the community either which is not really helping their case. However, I do think that if it is successful, that It would greatly increase the number of cubers, and as a result WCA competitors.

 

[Tabe]

I'm going to break from the crowd a little bit and say that I actually like, and welcome, most of the things Rubik's and Red Bull are doing here. I welcome the idea of larger competitions that feature spectator-friendly events and bigger payoffs.

I especially like the idea of events that feature no inspection. I have long believed that the true world speed record should feature no inspection time at all.

However, like others have said before me, I do strongly reject the bypassing of the WCA. The WCA are the ones who have set the standards and processes. They should be a partner in this venture.

 

[Underwatercuber]

My thoughts:

I think that this is messed up that they would try and do this to cubing. They want to make cubing a competitive thing where it's all just to show off. They don't give a crap about the WCA and the years of hard work that they have put into this amazing community and what it is. I am also appalled that those in the video were willing to do that although my opinion may change later after I see how they organize this. If they did it solely for the money then I have lost all respect for those in the video.

I hope my opinions change with this as more information but for now I am disgusted at how Rubik's has flipped the bird at the WCA and with it the entirety of the speedcubing community (except those few who got some money out of this)

also I think best of 5, best of 3 and best of one formats are dumb for these events and no inspection is pointless

 

[JustinTimeCuber]

I really hope that all the fast people boycott this. Like people before have said, it's not right that Rubik's should just sweep in and benefit from the 14 years of hard work put into the WCA. Just stop.

 

[Underwatercuber]

I really hope that all the fast people boycott this. Like people before have said, it's not right that Rubik's should just sweep in and benefit from the 14 years of hard work put into the WCA. Just stop.

Well they already have the approval of Michal Rzewuski, Dana Yi, The weyer brothers and Alexandre Carlier and they could probably buy some more approval.

 

[VenomCubing]

Cubing isn't a spectator sport in the slightest. if it was, this would've happened a long time ago, and nobody would've cared. Cubing is for cubers, not spectators. The whole idea of 1v1 is completely stupid. I would quit speedcubing if all events ended up turning into this cesspool.

 

[efattah]

I really hope that all the fast people boycott this. Like people before have said, it's not right that Rubik's should just sweep in and benefit from the 14 years of hard work put into the WCA. Just stop.

Well the WCA benefitted from 22 years (1981-2003) of Rubik's original product, Rubik's original world championship and the other competitions it spawned and the community that they created... While I'm not a big fan of the Rubik company, that's the truth.

I've seen this type of thing happen in other sports. In the end it doesn't matter if you 'like' something or not. The people with more money, and the better eye for media & sponsorship always win in the end, if they execute well. Newcomers to an established scene rarely win, but it does happen. A similar example could be said of a video game community that was dominated by Nintendo and Sega. Until the giants (Sony and Microsoft) came in and destroyed the old community and created a new one with the Playstation and Xbox. And before that the game community itself was created by Atari, until Nintendo and Sega came in.

 

[Tabe]

lolwat

Here's where I'm coming from on the "no inspection" thing:

1) To me, inspection is a skill and, as such, it should be timed and included as part of the solution time. So somebody who is faster at inspection but slightly slower at actually solving would be rewarded versus someone who always uses the full 15 seconds for inspection but is faster actually solving. Put another way - by combing inspection and solving, a competitor's time will more accurately reflect the time used to solve the cube. If you have 11 seconds of inspection time and 7.4 seconds of solving, it took you 18.4 seconds to solve - not 7.4.

2) Consider this analogy: Inspection is akin to giving somebody a running start in a sprint running race. Except we don't do that. Runners start from a dead stop. Starting from "a dead stop" in cubing would be including inspection time as part of the solve.

I get that people are used to separating out inspection time and I'm not really advocating for a change. I just personally have always thought that it made sense to combine inspection and solving into one complete time.