yau, but Hoya and K4 are good too. just less popular compared to yau.
Yeah, if the goal is just to meet the minimum requirements to get in the competition (and not be a WR champion), those methods will definitely suffice.
Although I
love K4, I'm
not a speedsolver.
So to be completely honest, the biggest
speed disadvantage of K4 is
inner slice move count. (Unless he's a fan of Roux, it's just not going to be his cup of tea.)
But if he's having problems with the edge pairing phase (taking a long time to find which dedge contains an individual wing edge to pair), K4 is advantageous in that way. That is, the extra time it takes from doing a bunch of inner slice turns is made up for by the fact that you're solving the edges
directly (rather than pairing dedges and then having to later insert them later during the 3x3x3 phase).
______________
By the way, for the last two dedges of reduction, does anyone use "edge-pairing" algs like
B2 r2 F U' R F' U r2 to handle the "bad"/criss-cross cases like:
that are pretty much
dismissed on tutorial pages
like this?
That alg (which is the first half of a K4 3-cycle alg... all "edge pairing" algs are!) is just
one move longer than the "good case" algs.
Just curious!
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P.S., to the OP,
Perhaps you may get something out of
my human optimized reduction method. (That is, you can pair edges and solve centers
at the same time.) And I mean, the WR solvers don't need to do that, but it
may be something that can help you on your cubing goals right now. Basically, you can pair at least 2 dedges at a time with
just 3 moves. But in order to be able to "get away with that", you need to not have completed two adjacent centers (yet). Etc.
