Geek out challenge!
How To Get Into Speed Cubing
Hello everybody, James here with a guide on how to get into speed cubing, and a brief history of the sport. (Or whatever you would call speed cubing) Let’s get into it!
Steps for starting.
Have a cube:
- Find a tutorial, I suggest either https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ron6MN45LY this video by Jperm or this tutorial by Rubik’s https://media.s-bol.com/mYqz5L1EON6E/original.pdf both are very good sites.
- Use these tutorials to solve the cube, this may take hours, or even days but you can and will get there, and when you solve it, it’s going to feel amazing.
- From here keep solving and start trying to do some of the algorithms without looking at the tutorials, eventually you won’t need the tutorial at all.
- But that is just cubing, you still need the speed. Now you start timing yourself, you could buy a cubing timer, or download this great free app, CubeTime. It times you, shows you stats and gives you scrambles.
- Now you need a actual speed cube, I expect that you will have been using the actual Rubik’s cube, if you have been using a speed cube, skip this step. You may have noticed that while the Rubik’s cube is stable and sturdy, it isn’t very fast. I personally suggest this cube. The MoYu Super RS3 M 2022 3×3. I would get the magnetic version as it is cheaper and still amazing for the price, you could get something else, but this is my suggestion. Just look up cube shop, and search this cube.
- Keep practicing, the more you practice the faster that you will get.
- Try to learn some new algorithms, here’s a good video on beginner F2L which is part of a faster method called CFOP (Cross, F2L, OLL, PLL): https://youtu.be/Ar_Zit1VLG0
- Speed cubing is not just about the 3×3. Some other great puzzles to try speed cubing on are 2×2, Pyraminx, and skewb, among other WCA (World Cubing Association, yes it’s a thing) events, the other events are (as of March 2022) 3×3, 2×2, 4×4, 5×5, 6×6, 7×7, 3×3 blindfolded, 3×3 fewest moves, 3×3 one-handed, 4×4 blindfolded, 5×5 blindfolded, and 3×3 multi-blind, clock, megaminx, pyraminx, skewb, and square-1. Use this guide’s format to learn to speed cube on those cubes and you’ll be set to try for world record (which is 3.47 seconds by the way)
- Have fun!
Don’t have a cube:
1. If you are interested in speed cubing look at step 5, then follow the previous set of instructions
A Brief History Of Speed Cubing
A brief timeline of speed cubing.
1944 – Erno Rubik is born in a Budapest hospital on July 13th
1974 – The designer Erno Rubik assembled his first cube
1977 – The “Magic Cube” was introduced to shops in Hungary
1980 – The Rubik’s cube is introduced into stores
1982 – At this point, one hundred million of the now iconic Rubik’s cube had been sold, and it was named the most popular puzzle in history
1982 – First cubing world championship held in Budapest on June 5th
2003 – Second world championship was held, and it was decided to hold one every two years
2004 – WCA (world cubing association was founded on October 18, 2004 by Ron van Bruchem of the Netherland and Tyson Mao of the U.S.A.
2007 – First under 10 second time by Erik Akkersdijk
2015 – First under 5 second solve by Lucas Etter
The current world record is 3.47 by Yusheng Du. There are faster solves than this, but none are official/at competitions. Thanks for reading!
Reflection
I really enjoyed creating this page. It was fun and quite different from most other things that we do in this program. It was nice to be able to write about something that I really was interested and knew about. I learned that sometimes, work doesn’t have to be uninteresting, sure we get some very interesting projects, but this was on a whole new level. I think the hardest part to create was the timeline. I didn’t know to much about the history of cubing yet, so I had to look at some resources to learn about it. The easiest part for me to write was the first steps of getting into cubing, as some were steps I had used, and other were ones I wish I knew at the time. I have been tinkering in making YouTube videos, and what better topic than cubing? My first video will hopefully be coming out soon, and if I ever make another video, I could post my progress & process here. That actually sounds fun. I might do that. But for now, Bye. The sources I used for the timeline are below.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/books/erno-rubik-rubiks-cube-inventor-cubed.html
https://www.museumofplay.org/toys/rubiks-cube/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Cube_Association#History
https://ruwix.com/the-rubiks-cube/history-of-the-world-record-evolution/