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.