Your major cause of a DNF in 3BLD

What is the major cause of a DNF for you in 3BLD?

  • Forgetting what you memorized

    Votes: 61 46.2%
  • messing up with your algorithms or moves

    Votes: 55 41.7%
  • any other (please specify)

    Votes: 16 12.1%

  • Total voters
    132

ilikecubing

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Every 2 out of 10 solves,i miss a short edge cycle for the sake of fast memo and its ends in a DNF obviously

In a lot of solves,I forget the last single letter which I have to shoot to(only in case of edges).it happens only when there are odd number of targets to shoot to(obviously)

Very rarely now,i mess up the the algorithms(this happened a lot when i was a beginner to BLD)
 
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I think it's fairly safe to say I don't have one. It's all kinds of different things. Probably the greatest percentage (although I'm sure it's significantly less than 50%) would be that I memorize the wrong sticker - I look at the place where the next piece needs to go, point to the right place, but then call it the wrong letter when memorizing. Other things that get me often are: not seeing a flipped edge, twisting corners the wrong way or not memorizing them correctly, messing up parity fix, recalling images out of order, or performing a 3-cycle backwards.

I usually make it a point to try to understand what I did wrong for BLD solves, and I suspect that's why there's not one overwhelming problem for me; doing "post-mortems" on your solves very quickly shows you if you have a common problem, and then you work to fix it, so you make that mistake less often. I'm really careful about doing this for big cubes BLD, but I admit sometimes I don't bother to figure out what went wrong on 3x3x3 BLD solves.
 
Either memorizing a flipped an edge and then I don't flip it. Or failing at setup moves.
 
Remembering what I memo is no problem. The problem is just that what I memorize is not always complete or correct...probably the biggest cause of DNFs for me is failing to notice a flipped edge or twisted
 
I have to be honest that I don't post mortem my 3x3x3 DNFs very much. If it's something obvious like forgetting to twist permuted but disoriented pieces then those are pretty obvious. I find that I tend to get completely scrambled, or mostly so, DNFs on 3x3x3 much more than on any other puzzle BLD. I think I still view my 3x3x3 attempts as "disposable", meaning that if I DNF I just scramble again and try again. I probably should do post mortems on my 3x3x3. I always do them on bigger cubes BLD, and it is a tremendous help. I guess I'm just lazy with my 3x3x3 practice when I shouldn't be.

I voted messing up my solving phase. I rarely don't recall the memo at all (I'll sit there until I remember it, no matter how long it takes). However I do make mistakes sometimes like not catching a 2 cycle in edges, so I'll have memorized parity in corners but not in edges, or silly things like that. More often than not my memo is solid on a DNF, but I still open my eyes to a scrambled cube.
 
More often than not my memo is solid on a DNF, but I still open my eyes to a scrambled cube.

I also always try to recall it, no matter how long it takes, which is why sometimes my best solve on a weekly competition has been 5 minutes. I do occasionally have scrambled cubes, but it's very rare - certainly less than 10% of the time. I'm almost always off by just 2 or 3 pieces.

Chris, it seems like your having scrambled cubes often would indicate that you must misorient the cube during the solve, don't you think? If you make it a practice to set down the cube carefully when you practice (so you can see what your final orientation is), you could easily check to see if this is the case. It might cost you half a second or so to put down the cube carefully instead of dropping it, but might it be worth it if it will spot a problem?

I kind of have a death grip on my cube when I'm solving BLD. It probably slows me down a little, but I'm just so paranoid of DNFs. So I almost never misorient the cube during a solve.
 
I often need to count through the pieces to determine which letter = which sticker, but I still label pieces wrong, I'd say this is my biggest, next biggest is doing the wrong letter, on similar sounding letter pairs/triplets.
 
Mostly execution mistakes, from trying to execute fast. Could be wrongly cycling pieces, rotating the cube wrongly during execution, or simply messing up an alg.

Other times it would be wrong memo from rushing.

I rarely forget memo unless I've done too many BLD or practising at a bad time (late at night, right after dinner, etc)
 
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