Throw and catch

Throw and catch was a two-step F2L method proposed by John Conway, David Benson, and David Seal in 1979.

The method was mentioned by David Singmaster in his Notes on Rubik's Magic Cube in 1980. He stated that John Conway and Dave Benson at the University of Cambridge had a layer-by-layer method which involved completing "bottom corners and middle edges together" (page 32) and that a draft article was being prepared for the Journal of Recreational Mathematics (not published). He later stated that a draft article for the method was prepared by "Dave Benson, John Conway, and David Seal" (page 40).

In 1981 the book Rubik's Cubic Compendium was published in Hungarian. An English translation of this book did not appear until 1987. Pages 105–110 describe a method "worked out by a Cambridge group" called "throw-and-catch".

The throw-and-catch method is a two-step process. It involves positioning the corner piece in a bottom corner (any corner and in any orientation), and positioning the edge piece at the upper front in either orientation, and then performing one of 24 algorithms to correctly get the two cubies in the F2L slot in the correct orientation.

The only aspect of this method which is like later F2L are the five cases when the two cubies are in the same slot but incorrectly oriented (F2L cases 38–42). Five one-step algorithms were presented for these "five exceptional cases".