5+ Things To Know Before a Cubing Competition

cubing competitions are usually pretty straightforward your cube gets scrambled you look at it start the timer solve it as fast as you can and then stop the timer and hope you made it to the next round if you've competed before you probably just watched some competition videos and then figured you know i got this but let's be honest who here has actually read all the regulations what's in there that you never knew about here are more than 5 things you should definitely know to help you improve your competition results number one starting and stopping the timer in cubing competitions we use the stack matte timer which is very different from just pressing your spacebar one of the most common mistakes is not waiting for the green light to turn on before starting your attempt this will not start the timer and you will get a dnf when you are starting the timer you must have your fingers on the pads and not just the palms of your hands however when stopping the timer your hands just have to face down so you can use any part of your hand because the way that you stop the timer is more lenient don't think too much about it and once the cube is solved just go for the timer even if the cube is still in the air number two penalties a penalty is given to your solve if you didn't stay within the rules or if you didn't solve the cube there are two types of penalties to a solve plus 2 and dnf a dnf or did not finish means the solve is disqualified and can happen for a few reasons the main reason usually being that the cube is not solved and needs at least two more moves the other penalty is plus two seconds to your solve time the most common reason this happens is because you are one move away from solving the cube there are multiple ways to get a plus two penalty and they stack all the ways you can get a plus two are placing the cube outside of the mat taking between 15 and 17 seconds of inspection starting the timer incorrectly starting the timer while touching the cube stopping the timer incorrectly not releasing the puzzle before stopping touching the cube after the solve and of course having the cube be one move away from solved any of these will give you a plus two second penalty and you should definitely avoid all of them and not go for all of them at once for that legendary plus 16 penalty like actually don't do that number three extra solves in some circumstances you can get yourself to not count and you can retry on an extra scramble one way this can happen is a timer malfunction sometimes when you lift your hands off the timer the timer will stop on its own if the number displayed is strictly less than 0.06 seconds then you can get an extra scramble but if it is 0.06 or more then you don't get one and it's just a dnf another common reason for extras is because of a repeated scramble this happens if the person scrambling makes a mistake and gives you the same scramble on two different solves now there are some things that can make you feel like you deserve a resolve but you actually don't get one a common one is a timer reset when you stop the solve sometimes you've hit the timer reset button and sometimes it's not your fault you just got unlucky but you do not get an extra in this situation and of course obviously i don't know why people ever ask this but if you sneeze during your attempt you do not get an extra number four one-handed solving when solving one-handed you are allowed to use the table you are solving on to help you solve this can help you in a lot of situations for example aligning the cube helping you do cube rotations and to avoid dropping the cube and make sure you can fix a corner twist one-handed in case that ever comes up number five failing on purpose okay why would you ever do this actually i happen to know of two situations where it can help you to fail on purpose now there is a rule saying you cannot compete with the expectation to intentionally get a poor result but this rule does not apply to what i'm about to tell you this is where failing on purpose can actually help you get a better result now first of all if you're thinking about how this is possible in a normal 3x3 average there is no situation where getting a dnf is actually going to help you but where it can help you is in blindfolded because blindfolded solving can take a long time often there is a cumulative time limit and what this means is that all of your solves added together cannot go over this time and this is to help the competition run on time and the way that blindfolded works is they don't look at your average but they look at the best time you got in all of your attempts which means you can dnf one attempt if you think it means it would help you in another attempt so you might be able to see where i'm going here for example if the cumulative time limit is 10 minutes and you have taken 4 minutes on your first solve but it was a dnf that still counts towards the 10 minutes you only have 6 minutes remaining now imagine that what happens next is you somehow have the worst possible 3x3 scramble and you know you will never finish this in 6 minutes so the best thing to do here is just drop the timer take a 5 second dnf and hope for the best in your third attempt because then you might actually get a good result did you dnf on purpose yes but did you do it with the expectation of an intentionally poor result well no because what matters is the best solve in the average and you think you have a better chance by dnf'ing the second solve now keep in mind with other cumulative time limits like for big cubes this would not work because as soon as you dnf one solve you have dnf to the average the other situation where failing on purpose can actually help is in multi-blind before starting the attempt you submit as many cubes as you would like to try and solve blindfolded in a row now you are not allowed to submit one because that is not multiple cubes blindfolded so if you are not good at multi-blind then the best thing to do would be to try two cubes right well not necessarily if you fail one of them that is a dnf because you didn't solve multiple cubes blindfolded so you have to get both of them right and on top of that you have to do it in 20 minutes because you only get 10 minutes per cube attempted so if all you want is a success so you can have it on your wca profile then the easiest thing to do would be to attempt four cubes you still have to solve two of them but you get 40 minutes and you can just pick the two you think are easiest in multi-blind score is calculated as solved cubes minus unsolved cubes so you'd have a final score of zero which is still enough to count as a success but of course if you think 30 minutes is enough go for three cubes or if 20 minutes is enough of course go for two and with that i hope you are more confident going into your next competition but i guess none of this matters if you don't make it into the competition so my tip number six is make sure you sign up within the first minute [Music] and before you leave here are the winners for the giveaway from two weeks ago congrats to all of the winners who get a gift card to speedcubeshop.com and if you are one of the winners then scroll down in the description to see how to claim your prize if you did not win don't worry on any order even without the gift card you can use the discount code jperm for a discount on your order and it helps to support this channel which means more videos that may contain a giveaway that you might win aha can't argue with that logic can you [Music] you

Channel: J Perm

Views: 2,245,791

Keywords: rubik's cube, tutorial, advanced, j perm, jperm, tips, tricks, speedcube, cubing, best, 3x3, budget, fast, faster, easy, easiest, intuitive, unboxing, review

Id: 1t39SkeEZ5g

Length: 8min 19sec (499 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021