The main thing I worked on this week is getting better at the beginning part of my solves. This part of solving is the most important part of the solve in my opinion because it is more intuitive then the last part, which mostly just memorized algorithms. This part of the solve requires lots of thinking and look ahead, which I started working on last week. This week I wanted to find more efficient ways to solve the pieces during this beginning step. I use a fairly simple method that requires a lot of rotating the cube. This is something you want to avoid as you get faster as it wastes time since you aren’t turning the cube during rotations. I used the following video to learn better ways to solve pieces.

Now there are a lot of different cases that can occur so it isn’t reasonable to learn the best way to solve every case in just a week. I am going to just focus on learning a few throughout the rest of the semester. I think the video is well done and I was able to learn some good techniques I implemented into my solves this week.

My best average this week was as follows: (18.90), 19.93, 19.00, 21.52, (23.23) = 20.15 seconds. The solves can be found in the video below.

This average while being slower than my best one last week is much more consistent and that makes me more proud of this average. I also realized I’m wearing the same shirt as I did for my best average last week so I am now convinced that the shirt is the reason for my success. But really the reason I feel I’m gaining more success is because of my look ahead, algorithms and learning more efficient ways to solve pieces. Putting it all together in solves is still difficult and I still have struggles while solving, but I am pretty consistently getting averages of 25 seconds and below. There is still work to be done to hit my goal and that will continue in the coming weeks.