UK Championships 2016

If the surprise of UKC 2015 was that Alexander Lau didn't win, then the surprise of this year's championship was that he did win.

After last year's shock defeat (finishing 5th) Alex had only competed once, winning the Macclesfield Open in July. Some said that he had stopped cubing!

 Even though Alex's name was on the list of competitors, I got the impression that few people expected him to turn up... and on Saturday there was no sign of him.

But on Sunday he appeared. Hurray :-)

It didn't look like he was taking the competition too seriously. In round 1 of the one-handed (which he did win last year) he was 13th fastest and just good enough to make the final. He also didn't seem to be practising at all. I was sitting quite near him all morning and hardly saw him touch a cube away from the solving desks.

In round 1 he was 8th fastest, averaging 10.21 seconds. The first time he hadn't gone sub-10 in any round since the UK Open in 2012.

So that was it then. He was here to defend his title even though he was way off form? Very sporting to show up like that, I thought.

But the afternoon was different. Just before round 2 he started practising a bit. And I heard him tell a friend "I need to go a bit faster now".

In round 2 he was 2nd fastest, averaging 8.87 seconds. Very impressive, 3 eights in a row and then a low nine. So he was back! He took it easy in round 1 to take the pressure off. Game on.

And to prove that was no fluke he won the final in 7.85 seconds, with 3 sevens and a low eight.

Lots of other great things happened at this Championship, check out the results on the WCA site, but Alex's win was the stand-out moment for me. Winning is one thing; winning several times is another; but coming back from a set-back and winning again is probably the hardest thing to do. Well done!

Even Older : New Cubes

It was my birthday 2 weeks ago... so I am now 45.

I got some nice presents:

So now I have to learn how to solve the 4x4x4 and the 5x5x5. Blog posts to follow as I go. Since I have met Robert Yau a few times at competitions I know where to start with the 4x4x4.

Euro 2016 Prague

When I was asked if I wanted to tag along with some UK cubers at the European Championships in Prague, I jumped at the chance.

It was a huge event with 525 solvers registering and the venue was a smart sports hall in Radotin on the outskirts of Prague in the Czech Republic.

As you can see from the flags there were many countries represented, 43 in fact, from all over the world - alphabetically from Australia to Vietnam.

Usually at cubing comps there are 8-12 people solving at once in the early rounds. At the UK nationals last year there were a few more, but here there were 28 solves going on at the same time (in 3 zones - blue, red, white) for most of the 3 days.

And the organisation was fantastic. Other than a small glitch on the first day when a side-room for the multi-blinders was locked, the whole event ran bang on schedule. Very, very impressive. Huge congratulations to the organisers.

The staff at the sports hall were great too. And there was a BBQ outside for lunch every day! Plus the little pizza shop up the road saw a 50-fold increase in business over the weekend :)

As I mentioned, not all the solvers were European. Feliks Zemdegs was there!

He is a really nice guy and just mixes in with all the other solvers. And he is very generous with his time - lots of people were coming up to him and asking for photos and autographs - and he just said "yeah, sure" every single time.

Obviously he's had a lot of experience dealing with star-struck fans! Here's what it was like in the early rounds when he was solving... you had to get there early or climb up on the tables to see...

And what an awesome solver he is. He broke 5 world records over the 3 days - 7x7 average, 7x7 single, 6x6 average, 5x5 average and one-handed average.

Here's a sub-10 one-handed that I was lucky enough to film from the front row. Note the gasps from the crowd (and the judge) at the end.

Unfortunately I only heard the fastest 3x3 solve of the weekend. It was Mats Valk's 5.13 second European Record. I was at the other end of the hall at the time when the huge cheer went up.

And it was great to see all the cubers congratulating each other on good times. They are competing, but all seem like good friends too.

The UK guys had some good performances too. In the 5x5 Robert Yau took the silver medal behind France's Alexandre Carlier and just 5/100 ahead of Breandan Vallance in bronze (those two have been having close contests all year).

Callum Hales-Jepp made the top 10 for several events and managed to win bronze in the 5x5 blindfold.

And all the less experienced solvers had a great competition. Well done to them for holding their nerve in such a big event. Some of them looked very nervous for the first few solves, but all of them came through with some good times.

I could probably go on typing all day, there was so much to see at this brilliant event. But I'll finish with one of the stand-out moments for me, which was the 3x3 blindfold final.

The organisers had asked for silence in the hall, as they usually do for blind events, but it was going to be tough with 1000 people all wanting to cheer good performances. And it was remarkably quiet... there were a few mini-cheers which were quickly stifled... the biggest of which was for Berta Garcia Parra.

Before these championships her best was 40s. In the first round she did a 35s solve and in the final she produced a 30.40 solve. Ten seconds off her PB in one comp. And she was delighted. The look on her face when she removed her blindfold was fantastic. And of course she wanted to jump up and down for joy... but couldn't because everyone had to be quiet.

And it was no fluke. Of the European solvers, she was fastest on average too, in this best-of-three event.

What a brilliant competition. Apparently it was the biggest Rubik's Cube competition to date. Well organised, great performances and a great atmosphere.

UK Champs 2015

I was lucky enough to be invited to watch the 2015 UK Championships at The Forum in Stevenage on November 7th and 8th.

With 194 entrants this was the biggest cubing event ever held in the UK. The Forum is a lovely venue with lots of natural light behind the cubers. Great for solving, not so good for taking photos on my compact camera.

All 18 official events were held, although I didn't manage to watch all of them!

The biggest surprise was that Alex Lau didn't win the main Rubik's Cube event. After breezing through the first 2 rounds with averages of 8.87 and 8.73 where his worst time was 9.93 seconds. Somehow Alex only managed 9.57 in the final (including 2 solves over 11 seconds) for 5th place.

Top of the table was Ciaran Beahan of Ireland with a new National Record average of 8.45 seconds.

Top 3 UK solvers were Robert Yau (9.38), Sameer Mahmood (9.41) and Breandan Vallance (9.52).

All the results for the competition are on the WCA results page.

Some notable performances that I saw:

Breandan Vallance won the 5x5 with new European Records for single 52.21 and average 59.51 in the first round.

Sanzar Haiwad set new national records for Afghanistan in the 2x2 of 4.75 (single) and 6.64 (average).

Oliver Frost won the 3x3 Blindfold (again) in 32.75 which was significantly less time than everyone else spent memorising...

Callum Hales-Jepp won Feet with a new NR average of 42.89 and still insisted to me that he hadn't practised in ages. He also won the 4-blind and the multi-blind (which I missed most of).

With over 200 people in the main room the serious multi-blinders were shipped off to a quieter side room for their attempts.

At lunch on Sunday there was a panel session where Alex Lau, Robert Yau and Oliver Frost answered questions.

The answers that stuck in my mind were:

Alex Lau - to avoid plateaus be careful not to develop bad habits. You can do that by practising in a very deliberate way and analysing what you are doing. Don't just practise when and how you feel like.

Robert Yau - he invented the 4x4 method by extending the work of others and working through ideas with other people. His name was given to it by other people and other people made the method popular by using it. Robert also got a laugh by saying that 4x4 and 5x5 were his favourite events because 30-60 seconds was a decent time for a solve ... I think he meant that it's not over too quickly like some events (for him) :)

Oliver Frost - this had never occurred to me, but remembering previous blindfold attempts is a real problem when doing multiple attempts in a short time. Oliver said that using audio-based rather than image-based techniques helps because audio sticks in the mind for a shorter time. Oliver also described what it was like to break a world record!

All 3 were very diplomatic when asked what they thought of Rubik's Brand cubes. Speaking of which, here are about 1000 cubes used to make a mosaic of a famous character. Can you see who?

This was a great competition. Tiring, as it was a long weekend with lots of events. But great fun. I really enjoyed it; and I'm sure all the competitors did too.

Practise and Get Faster

Having learned the ZZ speedcubing method, 7 OLL algorithms and 6 PLL algorithms I found that I could consistently solve in under 90 seconds.

But my goal was 60 seconds! So I started practising more. Probably for about 20 minutes a day. And I did get faster. Down to about 70 seconds...

Then I got a tip that just trying to solve fast all the time doesn't always help. My OLL and PLL steps were getting better, because I knew what I was doing there, but the intuitive parts at the beginning weren't improving at all.

What was happening was that against the clock I just went for the first EOLine moves that I spotted. And in F2L I always just went with the first pair I could see. Mainly that was because I found myself pausing a lot to look for pairs anyway... so when I did find one I just felt I had to go with that.

So instead of solving fast all the time I spent about 2 weeks looking for the best EOLine and the best F2L pairs. Or at least looking for several and choosing the least bad ones. That seemed to help me spotting pairs and I got more confident with those stages. When I did try and solve fast then I was panicking less and solving better.

Also at this stage I learned the 3 algorithms for the badly-connected pair cases which previously had flustered me and caused me to waste time or go wrong (see this post for details).

Remember that F2L takes up the biggest part of the solve time, so it is worth concentrating on getting good at that.

One other thing that helped me with EOLine was changing how I did the 6-bad-edge case, which is the one that happens the most often. The tutorials say that fixing 3 edges (adding 1) then fixing the remaining 4 is most efficient. But I found that often between planning the moves and executing them I would lose track of the last 4 bad edges. Instead I tried fixing 4 edges and then doing the last 2 - which takes slightly more turns but I find that I am much less likely to lose track of the last 2 edges... and also more likely to be able to put the 2 line pieces into a good position.

After the slow-solve practise I found that I could regularly solve in under 60 seconds and sometimes solve in under 50 seconds. My current PB at time of posting is 47.10 seconds.

Learn Some Algorithms - part 4

OK, nearly done. All you have to do now is permute the last layer (PLL). Or in other words, put the top pieces in the right places.

After OLL there are only 21 possible permutations for the last layer. That sounds like quite a lot. But like OLL you don't have to learn them all at once, or indeed at all, because you can get a long way with just a few of them.

The list of PLL algorithms on Bob Burton's site looks a bit daunting. But lets break down what we have into two stages. We have corners to position and edges to position. If we learn one algorithm for moving corners and another for moving edges then we can finish the solve with just those.

1) Corners - I found the T-perm really easy to learn because it flows so nicely. This swaps two corners next to each other and two opposite edges. We don't care about the edge swapping though because we are just trying to fix the corners.

It turns out that if the corners are not already in the right places, then the only possibilities are two corners swapped next to each other, or two corners swapped diagonally. For the first case you do the T-perm once, and for the second case you do the T-perm twice. If you want to go faster then you can learn the Y-perm and swap the diagonal corners in one go.

2) Edges - once the corners are placed then there are only 4 edge cases. The U-perm, the opposite U-perm, the H-perm and the Z-perm. Learn one of the U-perms first because all the other cases can be solved by doing two U-perms. Then if you want to go faster you can learn the others... which I think are all quite easy.

So, you can finish the PLL with just T-perm and U-perm. And you can finish it very fast with only T, Y, Ua, Ub, H and Z ... which is only 6 algorithms.

Later you might want to throw in some other PLLs that are easy to recognise and/or execute. I have also learned the two A-perms and will probably learn the J-perms next.

Learn Some Algorithms - part 3

Well done, you've solved your first 2 layers with ZZ so now you have a cross on the top of your cube for free!

This cuts down the number of cases for solving the last layer dramatically. Go to any competition and you will hear some CFOP solvers asking people if they "know full OLL" ... because they have to learn 57 cases ... so not many people do. As a ZZ solver you only need to know 7 cases and one of those is just one of the others repeated twice.

OLL - orienting the last layer - just means getting the top face to have all the same colour. In my case that's yellow because I solve with white on the bottom and green (or blue) at the front.

I think it's worth learning all 7 of these algorithms (cases 21-27 on Bob Burton's OLL page) because they aren't very hard to pick up. The cool thing about OLL is that you don't have to learn them all in one go - because each OLL algorithm doesn't affect the first 2 layers - if you do the wrong OLL then you just get to another OLL case. So you can try again. Just keep trying OLL algorithms until you get the thing done :)

Here's how I recognise the different cases:

There are the only 2 cases with one yellow corner pointing up.

This one is probably worth learning first. It actually has a name - Sune - because it is so commonly used. I recognise it as one yellow corner up with its neighbour on the right pointing yellow towards you.

After you learn the Sune then you pretty much know the Anti-Sune too. As the name suggests it is the same as the Sune but the moves are in reverse. I recognise it as one yellow corner up with its opposite corner on the left pointing yellow towards you.

There are the only 2 cases with zero yellow corners pointing up.

This is like a free algorithm, because you can do it as either two Sunes or as two Anti-Sunes. Because they both start with R and end in R' you can cancel those two moves out. I recognise it as two yellows pointing towards me (like headlights) and two pointing away from me.

The algorithm for this is nice and smooth if you do the R2 moves in opposite directions, rocking backwards and forwards. I recognise it as headlights towards me but the other corners pointing outwards.

The last 3 cases all have two yellow corners pointing up.

This is probably my favourite OLL because it runs so smoothly. I recognise it as two diagonal yellows up with the other two pointing towards me and to the right.

This might be my second favourite, even though it has wide moves in. I recognise it as two yellows up side by side with the other two pointing away from each other.

This is my least favourite OLL, because I can never do it very smoothly and still mess it up sometimes. I recognise it as two yellows up side by side with the other two pointing towards me like headlights.

Remember. Don't Panic if you can't remember which OLL to do, or which way round to hold the cube at the start ... do the headlights go at the front or on the left? ... because as long as you do the moves from one of the algorithms then you wont mess up the first 2 layers. If you do the wrong algorithm, or if you do the right algorithm but with the cube rotated wrongly, then at worst you will end up in one of the other OLL cases.

So don't be afraid. Learn a few OLL algorithms and go for it. It wont take you long to learn the 7 that you need for Full OLL as a ZZ solver :)