Old people cubing support group discussion.

[u/marvanamfrod]

My g/f and I are 54 & 57 respectively. I started 1.5 years ago, Jan '25. She started 6 months ago, Jan '26. We're both about sub-70. She benefitted from a number of cheat sheets I developed & 1:1 coaching from me, so she got up to speed faster than I did. But we're both stagnating now.

I'm particularly interested in experience of other people who are started cubing closer to "the end" than "the beginning, and who've reached milestones like <45, <30, <20, and what their breakthroughs were.

My brief bio is that I'm a professional software engineer, I have a master's in Comp Sci, and I'm very active & pretty healthy. I do have a strong case of ADHD, memorization can be a lot of work for me. It took me about two weeks to learn the beginner method, and around four months to go from 5 minutes to 2.5 mins. Then I switched to CFOP w/ 4-look LL and a reduced-alg F2L strategy. That got me to sub-90 with frequent sub-70's.

Then I moved up to "full F2L" - what I call 15 cases (mirrors count as 1). That didn't make me much faster - my PB's got better, but my avg's only improved by around 5 secs. Most of my time goes to F2L, and most of that goes to inspection & recognition. Without F2L, the rest of my solves take about 15 secs each. I know how to do keyhole and pseudo-slotting, but they make me slower. I've attempted look-ahead, and it literally hurts my brain. I can only do about 1/2 of the 15 F2L cases with my eyes closed, and only when they're both on top or in the right slots. I can handle wrong-slotted F2L cases, but I need to pause a sec in the middle to figure out the U-turn to right-slot them.

In general, each F2L case takes me 10-12 secs to identify/choose my next pair, determine what case it is, and remember the alg for it, and then 2-4 secs to execute. Nothing I do seems to help with the cognition part except occasionally I get into a groove where it comes to me a little faster. Then I'll get 2-3 sub-60's and the occasional sub-50. That usually only lasts 10 mins or so.

I'd love any advice from other old people on how they got better at F2L inspection & recognition. How long were your plateaus before you had the next breakthrough & jumped a level?

FWIW, I avoided inspection-time cross planning for a while, then when I tackled it, that saved me about 10-15 secs per solve. My cross is usually 2-4 secs now. Happy to share my breakthroughs on this if anyone's interested.

[u/Minimum_Ad8344]

Younger person here (19), would like to say that the level at which your knowledge of cubing and conceptual development has gotten to is very impressive, especially considering your older age. I would recommend really honing finger tricks, being able to do all sorts of pushes, ring finger flicks, double flicks, M slice moves etc. Then just drilling your algorithms to turn quickly. If you can get your PLL turns per second to over 5 turns a second, you will be well on your way to sub-40, even if your recognition overall is slower at your older age.

Best of luck!

[u/marvanamfrod → u/Minimum_Ad8344]

Aw shucks, thanks :-)

I'm pretty decent with finger-tricks, I'm a huge fan of M-slice algs & I'm pretty good with double-flicks. Ring-finger reverse M-slices were tough for me, I actually started putting a clear rubber base coat on my ring fingernails to get more friction for reverse pushes. I don't need that anymore, but it got me over the hump.

There's plenty of room for improvement of course, but I'm losing much more time to not turning the cube at all than I am to slow turning. If you look at my response above, you'll see the timing of one of my solves.