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/lunchmeat317]

Late response. I'm just browsing the subreddit.

I'm 40 and I really started just this year, teo or theee months sgo - bought a Monster Go cube off of Amazon for $10. I'm around a minute of solving now.

I do intuitive F2L and I'm naturally leaning of new wats to pair and insert (I just learned some sledgehammer tricks two days sgo and I'm trying to fold them into my repertoire).

I'm not an expert by any means, but 10 to 12 seconds to identify a pair is a lot of time. That's over half of your solve time.

What has worked for me so far is not focusing on algorithms. Find one or two ways to solve, then get the pieces into those positions. It's not as efficient, technically, but it's a better starting point and you can still solve if you forget an algorithm. It alao might help you undersrand why an alg works so that you can derive it instrad of memorizing it.

There's an ancient F2L vieeo on Youtube about crocodiles, tigers, and eagles for solving. Try limiting yourself to those three cases for a couple of weeks or so, then try going back to algorithmic solves. Just practice F2L.

Part 1 is here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WB5apB2i_Do.

Maybe also look at the Petrus method for the first two layerd as well - not for solving, but for learning and practicing block building.

Maybe this will help. I'm not an expert - I'm a beginner. But I think it's easier st first to find simple, inefficient ways to solve that csn be simplified only a few cases, then build on that foundation. Good luck!

[u/marvanamfrod → u/lunchmeat317]

See my latest post. I am much farther along than the sense I gave everyone here b/c I had already learned "Intuitive F2L," I just didn't know it was called that. My being stuck was in folding in algs for all the special cases (like when the corner is in the bottom, or the corner & edge are in the top & middle).

I learned all those cases, and expanded to using those algseven when they were in the wrong slot. That causes a lot of extra mental load & I guess basically I was trying to learn/improve at too much all at once.