Funny bumping into darrenkhu & teezackwhy here, although not surprising.

How are you guys doing? Practising hard for August?

Why in the world would you get stickers from China? Get them from cubesmith.com. They're worth it. Better yet, get tiles.

That's normal, bro. Just practice your Fridrich, it'll get faster.

I should think so.





Welcome, SHOfrE3zE!

You might wanna checkout the Eastsheen cubes for those 4x4x4 & 5x5x5. They're sold online. However, I've heard that ToyCity sells them too (1Utama branch?).

As for blindfold solving, I think this site might be useful:-
http://www.cubefreak.net/blindfoldcubing.html

uh oh..........here comes franklooi96.

Apparently not anymore, now that you're here.

I got a Yj cube and a stickered DianSheng at the Summit a few months back. I've also heard rumors about some DIYs being sold somewhere in MidValley.

Work on your look-aheads (try to reduce pauses and cube rotations).
Going slow will help tremendously. Have you tried working out with a metronome?

I got my Stackmat timer for RM150 from NZ.
With a mini-mat though.

Get your average down to 50s, then we talk F2L.

Learning intuitive F2L is easy. There's only 3 basic cases to know. Of course you dont need to memorize any algorithms and totally rely on logic and common sense to execute F2L. But how fast can you do it? On average, slotting CE pairs on intuitive F2L will take around 12 to 13 turns. Optimized algorithms on the other hand can cut that down to half. And if you take the time to master other advanced F2L concepts like the empty slots, your execution time will be a lot faster. So, if you're looking for speed, do not overlook the importance of algorithms.

As I said, learning F2L is easy. Mastering it is an entirely different story. The key to a fast F2L is not your TPS. You can have a high turn-per-second but if you pause in between pairs, your F2L wont be very impressive (unless you're Nakajima). A good F2L requires a good lookahead. This is where learning F2L algorithms pay its dividends, especially when you have it in your muscle memory. Instead of thinking how to slot the pair, you can just concentrate on looking for the next pair. In contrast to the intuitive method, where you need to reason on how you would actually slot the working pair, leaving a quite limited time to do a lookahead. And to get a good lookahead, you simply need to practice, practice, practice.

Practice.
May I ask how long have you been using intuitive F2L? And what was your average before you use F2L?
Without a clear breakdown of your time (cross, F2L, LL), I would speculate that your total F2L execution is roughly around 28-35s. This would imply that you are pausing too much when looking for CE pairs. So, you might need to work on that. If you havent done so, do the metronome technique for 2-weeks straight. That would help your flow tremendously.

Yup, that's the metronome method. Your X-cross around 10s is pretty good and the LL is you can do it 10s using beginner's method is quite impressive. Now we need to focus on your F2L to bring your time down.

Common pitfalls for F2L lag are these:-

1) Cube rotation - This is where you turn the whole cube looking for pairs or positioning the cube for slotting.
2) Pausing - This is where you pause to plan for your intuitive setup and slotting. This is the bane of intuitive F2L. Algorithm users wont suffer from this much as they usually can muscle memory the algorithms much faster than an intuitive users.

To minimize point #1, you need to learn how to slot from different angles. Dont do x, y, z rotations unnecessarily. It's ok to have one or two of those, but dont make it a habit. For point #2, the metronome method comes in handy. Set it to 60 BPM first which would translate to 1 turn per second. The trick is to train yourself to turn at a constant pace. If you miss a beat, scramble, do the cross and start over with F2L. At 1 tps would allow you to do an ample lookahead. You need to force yourself to look for next pair while slotting the current one. Once you're comfortable with 60BPM, you can gradually increase it to 75BPM, 90BPM and 120BPM. At 120BPM, you'll be turning 2tps. Let's say your intuitive would take 10 turns at average per pair. That would be like 40 turns for 4 slots. If you're turning at 2tps, it'll be around 20s for your F2L to complete. Your average solves should be around at sub-40s. For a sub-20s average, you'll need to cut down your F2L to 11s at most.

Getting sub-20s using intuitive F2L is very achievable. The question is how much practice are you willing to put in.

@-kytz-

r, u, b, l, d, f are 'wide turns'. Instead of turning a single layer like in R (L, F, B, D or U), you turn two layers. Sometimes, 'wide turns' are also written with capital letters followed by a 'w' (e.g Rw, Lw etc). You'll get to see a lot of algorithms with these type of turns once you learn higher degree cubes (4x4 and onwards). Wide turns are also known as 'double layer' turns.

The brackets are usually used to denote triggers. Triggers are combinations of algorithms that can be executed with finger tricks. People tend to optimize algorithms based on triggers so that it can be executed very quickly and it aids memorization. The second algorithm you listed is for solving an OLL using (L' U' L U) triggers which is normally for left-handed cubers. For right handed cubers, they tend to prefer a y F (R U R' U') (R U R' U') (R U R' U') F' to solve the same OLL.

y, x and z are cube rotations. This is where your turn the whole cube according to the respective Cartesian axis. Imagine the 3D axis of x, y and z going through your cube (y-axis goes from top to bottom, x-axis going from right to left and z-axis is the axis that's coming towards you). a y would mean to turn the cube clockwise along the y axis. Yeah, it's a bit hard to explain in words and I'm too lazy to google for a good image.
Anyways, the current record holder for the Asian 4x4 and 5x5 blindfold once gave me this quote:-That helped me a lot to figure out which way a cube rotation goes.

@eXPeri3nc3
Dont go for color neutrality. In my opinion, that is only for the most gifted cubers (like the Australian kid who holds the current sub-10 world average. holy crap, he's fast). I know a lot of people that get disheartened and gave up cubing when they tried to be color neutral.

haiz...franklooi96 is here
I forgot to lock the cage again.

yeah, if he doesnt waste his time spamming around forums or googling korean pop groups, he would be one of the fastest.


I'm his kindergarten teacher.