I started by learning the beginner's method. While I was learning it, at some point I decided it would be a good idea to straight up learn CFOP, because less steps=easier and less algorithms, riiiight? Alright, I hadn't thought very much about it, but in the end I decided I'd just start with beginner's then see about CFOP later.
When I finally started CFOP, I learnt intuitive F2L using Z3Cubing's tutorial. It was great, I mastered F2L in less then an hour. My times were around 1 minute and thirty seconds. I kept practising with that (cross, F2L, beginner LL). I might want to add here that when I first learnt to do the cross and the corners, I pretty much figured it out on my own and used a more straightforward method instead of the "daisy" method they suggested and spamming sexy moves for corners.
This is about when I found out about roux. I liked the way that you solved it in less moves with less algorithms. What's not to love? I found a
beginner's document based on waffo's site and learnt it from there. I was solving very inefficiently, (my blocks were basically CFOP F2L with some extra M-slice edge hiding, my CMLL was 2-looked with outdated algorithms from 2013. I guess my LSE was ok though) but I managed to get down to an average of about 35 seconds. This is also around the time that I joined the forum.
Then I found out about waterman. I "switched" to it, but basically all I was doing was only solving with roux and procrastinating about learning its algorithms. I had to make a decision: either I learnt the algs, sticked to roux, or switched to another method. To make a decision, I counted moves in my own example solves with roux, waterman, cfop and zz (which I had also learnt, just for fun). ZZ had the lowest movecount, so I decided to stick to that.
(There were also some other barely mentionable times where I switched to some other methods like petrus for one or two days, but this post would never end if I talked about those)
My progress with ZZ was tremendous. I got sub-30 in only a couple of weeks of using it, and sub-20 came very soon as well. After practising for about half a year I was sub-15 at some point. These days, since I practise a lot less, I only average about 16-17, but I'm happy, it's still pretty fast. I'm currently working with
@BlobinatiCentral on developping waterman, I don't main the method but I find it very interesting and underrated nonetheless.
