About:

Hello all, I like Rubik's cubes. This is a biography of my Rubik's cube
solving career.

2015 - 2019

After my third competition, I lost interest in cubing and spent more
time gaming, twitch streaming, or studying for bible quizzing. I would
check the WCA records page every once in a while to see what the new
world records were, but other than that I did not participate in the
hobby at all.

February 7, 2015

By 2015 I was a little less interested in cubing, but another
competition came to Texas, so I signed up and prepared for it. I went
to SMA Winter 2015 to compete in 3x3, 2x2, one-handed, Pyraminx,
Megaminx, and Rubik's Clock. The Rubik's Clock is a sort of different
puzzle that doesn't twist, instead you have to orient eighteen clocks
to all face to 12 o'clock at the same time, using dials that turn them,
and pins that control which clocks move when a dial is turned. I was
able to beat my 3x3 PR average by 0.2, getting a new record of 19.36
seconds. I also got a new 2x2 average PR of 6.68 seconds, and a
Pyraminx average PR of 10.54 seconds. I was also able to make the three
minute Megaminx time limit this time, and got a solve of 2:30.81. And
I was able to make the one-handed cutoff as well, getting my first
ever one-handed results, an average of 45.45 with a best solve of
38.48 seconds. I owned the clock puzzle, but did not actually know how
to solve it. But someone at the venue showed me how to do it right
before the round started, and I was able to get a 22.73 average with
a 15.48 single. I actually got fourth place in the event, due to it
being quite unpopular at the time. As it should be. The puzzle is very
trivial and is solved the exact same way every time, I do not believe
it is appropriate to be groups with twisty puzzles and held as an event
at competitions.

July 19, 2014

Just a few months later, I went to my second competition. At this point
I was now focused on improving my speed on the official WCA events. My
mom took me to "Keep Austin Weird 2014". At this competition, I got to
compete in Megaminx (a dodecahedron, 12-sided puzzle) and 6x6x6 cube. I
spent some time practicing these, back then larger puzzles were very
poorly made and difficult to turn, so I struggled a lot with my
vcube 6x6. Vcube used to be the only brand to make puzzles larger than
5x5. They don't really exist anymore, vcubes are a novelty now. If you
ever get the chance to turn one, you will see why. It's grim. At this
competition, I met another kid who I hung out with the whole time. He
taught me a V perm when I told him I didn't know it yet. He used the ZZ
method, which I did not understand very well at the time. I got his
phone number, which is somewhere on my ancient forgotten flip phone.
Wish I could remember who he was, I wonder if he still competes ever.
A professional cuber Lucas Etter from Canada was at this competition,
he was touring across the United States going to comps. At the time he
was the 2nd fastest 3x3 solver in the world. At this comp he got a 0.96
second 2x2 solve, which was the North American record. It's not so rare
to see sub-1 second 2x2 solves these days, but this was a big deal. The
kid I was hanging out with was judging his station when he got the
solve. I had improved quite a bit in the two months since my previous
competition now that I had motivation to practice, so I improved my 
times by a lot. Unfortunately, I did not meet the cutoff for Megaminx,
and I got no results. But these are the PRs I did get:
3x3x3 (Round 1) - 16.55 single, 20.88 average
3x3x3 (Round 2) - 19.56 average
2x2x2 - 4.55 single, 7.00 average
6x6x6 - 5:03.05 single
Pyraminx - 5.61 single, 11.61 average
Skewb - 10.16 single, 14.51 average
I was so shocked and excited to get a sub-20 average in 3x3. Just a few
months ago, that had seemed impossible. But it was a little less
impressive since Lucas Etter was there, who won the competition with
an average of 8.29 seconds!

May 17, 2014

The day of my first competition. My mom drove me a few hours to San
Antonio to attend "Remember The Alamo 2014". Back then, you didn't
register online in advance. We had to get there and pay $10 cash at
the door, plus $2 for every event besides 3x3. I registered for 2x2,
3x3, 4x4, one-handed, Pyraminx, and Skewb (a new puzzle which had only
been added to competitions in 2014!). The atmosphere at competitions
in this era was a little different than it is today. Now cubing is much
more popular, so a wide variety of people do it. It is also popular
among young people, so 13 years old is a typical age of a competitor
at most competitions. This was not the case eleven years ago. I was
not the youngest, but definitely well below median age, there were
only a few other middle schoolers. It was also an abjectly nerdy vibe.
The average person in that venue was 19 and loooooooved Star Wars. They
probably watched The Big Bang Theory. They're 30 and making 200k as
software engineers now. Unfortunately, I found out that certain events
have time cutoffs. This is in order to keep the competition running on
time, unfortunately it's just too hard to run a competition that
accommodates people taking ten minutes to solve. Because I could not
solve a 4x4x4 in under two minutes, or solve 3x3 one handed in under
one minute, I was not able to get any result in those events. But I
did get results in my other events. This is what I achieved:
3x3x3 - Best Single: 23.50, Average of 5: 24.43
2x2x2 - Best Single: 5.06, Average of 5: 13.93
Pyraminx - Best Single: 9.97, Average of 5: 12.92
Skewb - Best Single: 14.06, Average of 5: 17.78
I was particularly pleased with the 5.06 second 2x2 solve, as it was
insanely lucky, and a five second solve felt so pro to me, even though
it was just 2x2. As a side note, let me explain how the average format
works for most cubing events. Your final score is based on the average
of five solves. The best single solve is only used to break ties,
although best single solve is still a statistic that is tracked for
each competitor, and of course there are still world records for single
solves, they just don't determine competition winners. You average is
not just a mean of all five solves, it is a mean of the middle three.
So, your best solve and worst solve do not count. We call the middle
three solves "counting solves". Non-counting solves are often depicted
with parenthesis. For example, at my first comp, my result was:
25.52, (23.50), 24.19, (26.66), 23.58 = 24.43
The 24.43 is the mean of the three solves without parenthesis.
If you ever watch a cubing tournament live stream, you will hear
the terms "BPA" and "WPA", which stand for best/worst possible average.
Because two solves are discarded, once a competitor has completed 4/5
of their solves, the best and worst possible averages they can get are
already set in stone. If the last solve is the worst solve, it doesn't
matter how bad it is, as long as it's slower than all the other solves
it is discarded. Same if it's better. If someone says they "clutched
BPA" that means they were under a lot of pressure but managed to get
their best time of the average on the final solve. If you look back at
the times from my first average, you can see that I was only 0.08 away
from getting BPA. Not too bad. The winner of the competition had a
13.24 second average. It's hard to believe that 13 seconds was enough
to win the competition.

Early 2014

I decided I wanted to go to a cubing competition. In this era, comps
were still few and far between if you couldn't travel far, so I had
been watching the upcoming competitions page on the WCA website for
a while. Finally, a comp came up that would work. I started to spend
some time actually practicing my 3x3 solving, which I didn't really do
very often. I was so excited for the comp day.

2012-2013

In this era, I started spending time on the internet on speedcubing
websites. I explored the World Cube Association website and learned
that there were competitions and official world records, and also that
there are a variety of different events, besides just the regular
3x3x3 Rubik's cube. Then I went to YouTube to watch videos of all the
world records and found all the fast cubers' channels. I also started
reading the Speedsolving.com forum. I was enamored by all the cool
different puzzles I saw, so I started collecting them. I spent my own
money on a 2x2x2 cube and then got a 4x4x4 for my birthday. One day my
dad took me to work with him, and I spent the whole day in his office
learning my 4x4. It took me 9 minutes my first timed solve. My 3x3
times dropped to sub-30 seconds, but after that I kinda stopped
improving. In my mind, sub-20 was sort of elite. I also did not
practice that much, I spent more time online looking at cubing websites
or else messing around with different types of puzzles. Later
I got and learned to solve a 5x5 and Megaminx, as well as a bunch of 
different puzzles that weren't used in official competitions.

December 24, 2011

Christmas eve I was doing a few solves. I remember the day, because of
what happened in the car on the way to the Christmas eve church
service. I was solving in the car, and my F2L was starting to make
more sense. Suddenly out of nowhere, I finished a solve and stopped my
stopwatch at 56 seconds! My first time to beat a minute! I did a few
more solves and was able to replicate this, averaging in the 50 seconds
range. This felt so fast to me, and breaking this barrier got me a lot
more interested in cubing again. I started practicing every day, and
in no time at all dropped my times to around 35 seconds. I started
studying the PLL algorithms again and soon learned most of the cases.
I knew 16/21 cases, I learned all of them except V perm and the
four G perms.

Mid 2011

After practicing a little bit, I quickly improved my times to 1-2
minutes. I was aware that I was using a beginner's method, which was
just the easiest way to solve the cube without having to learn very
much. I googled "fast Rubik's cube method" and read on wikipedia about
the Fridrich method, which had allowed early cuber Jessica Fridrich to
achieve times around 15 seconds. So, I searched again for instructions
to use the Fridrich method, and found myself on her speedcubing page:
http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/fridrich/cube.html
This page gives a description of the method, but not a full tutorial.
I kept looking, this time searching "OLL algorithms". This time I was
taken to Lars Vandenbergh's cube page:
https://www.cubezone.be/index.html
The three new steps I needed to learn to use this method were F2L, OLL,
and PLL. This page has a tab with algorithms for each. I only had 30
minutes of computer time, so I printed off those three pages and took
them around with me everywhere I went. The F2L page was actually
ZB F2L cases, which is much more advanced. I simply chose the easiest
case from each set to learn. I only learned a few OLL cases, because
learning all 57 felt like an insurmountable challenge. I spent most of
my time studying the PLL algorithms. First learning Y perm, H perm, and
Z perm so that I could do 2-look PLL. I lost a bit of interest after
learning a few cases, and didn't really improve much, especially since
using proper F2L instead of beginner's method slows you down at first
before you master it. I kept doing a few solves from time to time, but
wasn't super dedicated.

Early 2011

Sometime this year, encouraged by learning the Pyraminx, I decided to
try the Rubik's cube again. I also had computer access now. I got out
the cube, logged on the family computer and looked up "how to solve a
rubik's cube". Again, I quickly became frustrated, because every
tutorial I looked at would make sense at first, but shortly begin
talking about algorithms. Which was a fancy math word I did not
understand. I asked my mom for help again, and she came over and looked
at the screen and said "oh, algorithm is just the word they're using
for a sequence of moves". I continued to read this tutorial and
memorize the algorithms, and by the end of the day I could do it! My
first few solves took 3-5 minutes.

December 25, 2010

For Christmas, I was given a Pyraminx puzzle. The pyraminx is a
tetrahedron shaped puzzle, a variant on the same concept as a Rubik's
cube. My mom had owned one of these when she was a kid, and she had
developed a method to solve it. She taught me her method, and I learned
to do it. I would time myself, I recall taking 40-45 seconds at first.
I remember getting a sub-30 solve at my brothers' baseball game and
being really excited.

2009

My parents bought a new cube. This one came with a small booklet with
directions to solve it. I followed along until the last layer. At this
point I was too dumb to figure out the rest, even with the booklet.
It gave sequences to do stuff like swap two corners or cycle three
edges, so you could manipulate the last layer and solve it. But I
thought I could just do the moves it shows in the book and it would be
solved, and I was mad that it wasn't working. I didn't understand that
I had to figure out if I needed to swap two corners, align those two
corners to a certain position, and THEN do the moves written in the
book. My mom helped me finish it with the booklet, and I forgot about
it for a while.

Unknown years in the 2000s

My family had an old Rubik's cube. None of us could solve it. It came
with a little pamphlet that showed pictures of the cube in various
states, closer and closer to solved, and gave you a title based on how
far you could get it. You were a "Cube Master" if you could fully solve
it. None of us could get past the first layer, but I played with it
sometimes.

March 2001

Was born. Could not solve a Rubik's cube at this point.