for you fast petrus users, how long did it take you to get a fast ( <20 or 10 seconds) f2l? How long does it take you now

20 sec f2l takes about 3 months. 10 sec f2l takes 8 months,

I am 8-12 sec F2L

dang, this could take a while, but what did i expect.

10 sec F2L takes 8 months, you say? That seems awfully fast. Well, I'll keep working on Petrus, and if I get sub-16 (say 2+4 seconds for LL) by January '08 I'll let you guys know.

yeah i did petrus for almost a year and a half (speedsolving anyway, i knew the solution longer) and got stuck at around 22-24 second (total time) and just couldn't get past it. it seems to take a really sharp mind, being very versatile, and being good at flying by the seat of your pants. kyle and johannes are the best petrus solvers, and i believe johannes is actually color neutral as a strict petrus solver should be, he uses some weird stuff besides petrus at the end though, he had one crazy solve in the yahoo group that spun my head.

Anthony Hsu? He won a comp the other week....

How many petrus solvers are there out there? I know that there aren't too many sub 20 users...

i hope to get sub 20 by july. at least sub 30 by then. That way i can slightly impress dan harris

I thought you were at times of 1-2minutes now. Sub-20 by July would be quite difficult.

I double that... I've been speedcubing since October, and my first sub 20 solve was in February, and was very lucky... I'm not even sub 20 now. Becoming sub 20 average takes a little more time then that, although getting a lucky sub 20 solve takes a little less time.

i know thats why i said hope. i could also hope that elvis didnt die, i ace every class and that pink dwarf elephants fall on taiwan but thats not going to happen is it

Don't listen to anyone. You progress as fast as you'd like. Practice hard and seewhat happens.

very well said

I wasn't trying to put anyone down, I was just saying it is probably quite a difficult target. If you put the practice in, and the learning. Getting there is possible.

Matyas Kuti was at around 15 in 7 months

Matyas Kuti is insane though.

That's why he was locked in a cupboard at the Belgian Open, anyway, let's get back with the thread.

Getting fast at anything will take as long as it does. There is no point comparing to other people, although it is good to have a rough skeleton of how long other people took.

Yeah, I too wasn't try to put anyone down. I guess the concept of getting that fast seems impossible in such a short amount of time, as least by my standards.

But like Pembo said, you can't compare yourself to others.

well i was at 22 seconds in about 3 and a half months. it just depends how much you are willing to learn and practice i guess

it took me a long time to get sub 20. I've been using this method for 3 years now with a few long breaks. right now the F2L takes me 10 to 12 seconds. then the last layer is 6-8 seconds. I'm just learning to be color neutral as long as yellow or white are my last layer. it almost feels like cheatting because you can just use the easy cases. my problem now I should work on is identifying the bad edges when doing yellow as my last layer.

What i like to do is to set my goal lower, then when I reach it, i feel good about myself and it gives me confidence to set another goal (that is quite easy to reach)...it just moves on from there

It took me about 3-4 months to in the 30s, another like 2-2.5 months to get sub-30s, and now, i can guarentee sub-30s and 1/3 of solves are sub-20.

Just keep at it.

One goal i have not been able to keep though is one for OH cubing. I think my hands are too small.

Well, it took me about three months to get from about a 35-40 second average (and knowing less than 10 algs) to full Fridrich and a best average of under 25 seconds. I had a lot of random cubing experience before that, though.

I've noticed that a lot of the speed in speedcubing (especially 3x3x3, and a lot less so for bigcubes) comes from raw finger, wrist, and cube speed. If you played a lot of piano or video games, were very good at typing, or have very long fingers (so you need a smaller angle of movement to turn the cube), you'll have a definite advantage over other people when you start speedcubing, and if you start, at the beginning, with a very good cube (the kind that a sub-15 cuber would be very happy with), you'll have a huge advantage from the start. I don't know what makes Matyas and Gungz so insane, but something like this would contribute to fast learning, and I'm sure it would have been significantly faster for me if I'd had advantages like this.

you don't need to kung-fu into a solved state to get a good time. with petrus it's all about planning and doing all of the intuitive steps in a few moves as possible.

but I'm sure if someone started with a good cube the they would learn faster. my friend has been cubing for a few months and using the LBL method he can average under a minute.

It took me 3-4 months (I think...) to get my average sub-30, and F2L was probably around 20 seconds back then. I don't know what my F2L avg would be at the moment, probably 10-11.

But you do need to move fast to get good times, no matter how many moves you take. Suppose a particular solve takes you 50 moves. Well, if you can move your cube no faster than 2 moves/sec, it can't possibly be faster than 25 seconds. If, on the other hand, you can make turns at 3 moves/sec, you can get as fast as 16.77 seconds with no recognition.

Although you shouldn't go too fast when you're learning, you can't get a global sub-15 average if you take an average of 50 moves to solve the cube and move at an average of 3 moves/sec. It's mathematically impossible. If you write it out as a formula, the time a solve takes is approximately (total moves) / (moves per second) + (total recognition time). If you assume that total moves remains constant for your method, then once you get total recognition time down to almost nothing, the only way for you to improve is to increase your moves per second - that is, move the cube faster. It's the most important part of the equation.

That is why methods such as Fridrich suck for speed: You need fast fingers/cube in order to go fast, rather than a good knowledge of how to get as few moves as possible.

If my solves are generally between 60-65 moves, and I get about 25 seconds that means I'm turning the cube decently fast...

going slow enough to count I can solve in about 50-60 moves. I'm sure I waste moves when I actually go fast though. you still shouldn't try to rush throught the cube though because then your cube is much more likely to jam.

It probably takes me an average of 55 moves to solve when I'm counting out the moves (and maybe 60 moves if I'm not paying attention), and from what I've heard Petrus uses a somewhat similar number. I think Roux uses a bit less and Heise uses a lot less.

I don't think it's fair to say that "methods such as Fridrich suck for speed", really. Even though Fridrich generally uses more moves than other methods, it's based on algorithms, so you can practice the sets of moves. Anyway, even if you have a "good knowledge of how to get as few moves as possible", you're not guaranteed to get fast. A method that requires 40 moves still requires an average of 2 moves/sec to get a sub-20 second average, and you can't say that you don't need fast fingers/cube to do that. You could even argue that, to get good times, you need to move quickly for any method, but in Fridrich you don't need to know how to do things in a small number of moves, so it's a better method. I wouldn't make that argument, personally, but it is valid.

I average sub 40 moves alot with fridrich when i mess around. Petrus takes 40-50 usually no matter what for me.

For fridrich that such a small amount of moves, how do you manage that?

double pairing?super easy?

At speed?

definately not. mainly because i am not use to the concept of preservation and Y moves to the extreme.

LL takes ~20 moves I think, so you have a sub-20 moves F2L. That would be awesome with any method, but with Fridrich, that's really impressive! I can't figure out how you do it!


That's very good as well, especially because you aren't color neutral. I suck, got to practise more...

good thing i love typing and video games, that could explain how i can get 3 tps in like 1 month, probibliy less actually

Matyas' fingers are longer than your arms...

I have a friend with crazily long fingers. He isn't a speedcuber, but he's really fast at typing and he'd probably be excellent at cubing if he gave it a chance.

My hands are quite small.
One of my friends is a guitar player, and he has massive hands. His little finger is bigger than my middle finger!!

I have large hands and fingers so one handed has never been that hard for me.

I think Bernett Orlando has proven that you can get good times with small hands. He's really good at big cubes and not bad at OH.

big hands help when your learning but after that it's all technique