The BEST Speedcubing Method? [CFOP/ROUX/ZZ] Comparison

cfop root and ZZ are the big three methods of speed solving the big three used to be a big four with the Petrus method as well but we don't talk about that anymore Keepers starting out are often confused on which method they should go for especially because there's conflicting things such as ZZ has no rotation so it's the best method or Roo is the best because it has the lowest move count or c-fop is the best because it has a more algorithm based approach which is faster than thinking hopefully by the end of this video you'll be able to make a more informed decision on which one is the best for you so first I'll give an overview of each of these methods and if you already know how the methods work then just skip to this time in the video cfop is similar to layer by layer or the beginner method where we start by making a cross and then we insert corner and Edge pairs together like this and just do that four times around the cube after the first two layers we do one algorithm to solve the top and then one more algorithm to solve the rest of it with the room method we start by making a square here and extending it to a bigger block with these pieces and then once you've made that you do the same thing on the other side because some pieces are unsolved here compared to cpop you have access to much more tricks such as that next we solve all the top layer corners and then Orient all the edges which means getting all the white and yellow to the top and then we solve the left and right edges that go here and then we solve the rest just intuitively which I'm not going to be teaching here with the ZZ method you do something that if you don't know how it works looks a little bit like magic but it's called eoline and that's when you do some moves that don't solve anything but turn all of the edges into good edges and that means you'll never have to do a key rotation again there's a full tutorial on that here if you want to know how that works but that's beyond what this video is going to teach then you also solve the front and back edges from here it's similar to cfop except you can do intuitive block building as well so here I'm just going to insert this one in here and there's more freedom than with cfop for example this cross Edge is not done so to pair up these two I can just do something like this and set them up and insert once you get to last layer your edges will be oriented already and that means you can use a lot more tricks such as zbll or colll and the last layer besides that is the same as cfop so let's look at some of the facts about each of these methods cfop takes about 55 to 60 moves Roo takes under 50 moves and ZZ takes 45 to 55 depending on how many algorithms you're willing to learn trust me you have to learn a lot to lower that move count so from this alone it looks like Roo and ZZ are clearly better than c-pop but let's look at the next thing ergonomics in cubing ergonomics describes how efficiently you are doing the moves for example a sequence such as M2 U2 M2 is three moves but it is not very efficient because it takes a long time to do it compared to another sequence like R Prime u r Prime which can be done like this so even though they're both three moves they take different amounts of time so clearly it really matters what moves you're doing in the room method we have a lot more mu moves and in the cfop method we have a lot of Ru and LU sequences of moves so the question is are mu moves slower than Lu and Ru moves and the answer is yes I could give you a very simple example which is my jperm takes about 0.6 seconds and so does my u-perm but the u-perm is with mu moves and actually uses about half as many moves as the jperm the reason mu moves are slower is because every single move is some sort of finger flick so for example M Prime M2 and M they all just use your fingertips and same thing for U Prime U2 or U this means you are repeatedly flicking your fingers and that means when you do for example M Prime if you have another M Prime coming it's coming two moves later which means you have the time of one move to reset your finger and once you're turning really fast that really starts to hinder your turn speed when you keep having to reset your fingers and that is a finger movement that is not being used for turning but if you're doing for example Ru and FM moves then when you do an R move then that gives your index finger time to set up and then afterwards you can come back down and you're then your other hand might do a move and then now this hand might go again so very often you'll be alternating which fingers are actually working and in between those finger movements you will always have a wrist turn involved and your finger turns May alternate so that your right index finger only gets used once every four moves instead of every two moves then that's clearly faster as you have more time to reset your finger for the next time it will be used and plus wrist turns don't require any resets as you can just keep going like that so now that we've gotten out of the way that mu turns are actually slower that brings us to the next aspect of ergonomics which is when you are not doing turns or when you're doing Cube rotations with cfop in f2l you have to do Cube rotations and well like you don't have to but there are times when it really doesn't make sense not to for example if I'm doing this f2l pair and then I'm going to do red green afterwards there is no way of doing this that isn't faster than just doing a cube rotation and inserting and every time you do a cube rotation that's like regripping both of your hands at once it is quite fast but it's not as as fast as continuing to turn now if you run into a similar situation if you're doing Rue where this needs to use a rotation if you were doing a c-fop to insert it into here pair it up like that and then insert with Rue you don't have to do that because you have the M slice available and you can take advantage of that two pair of pieces like this and then even when it seems like you have to rotate you can do more tricks in Roux like that and so root doesn't use any Cube rotations and lastly for ZZ after you do the magic eel line step you will not have to rotate anymore because Ru and L moves are all you need for the rest of the solve so quick review move count has Roo and ZZ winning but then we added in mu moves and Rue got nerfed but then we looked at saving rotations and now it definitely looks like Roo and ZZ are better maybe ZZ could even be the best and I've thought this way before where I thought hey root and ZZ are clearly better in a lot of ways but the thing we're overlooking for why cfop is so good as well is because of re-grips and look ahead so first let's talk about look ahead so move count and ergonomics are important but none of that matters if you solve like this okay you get the point unless you pause the more of the potential you hit with this method so if we're in an instance like this right now I can already see all the pieces I have left to solve so then I can go through the rest of it without pausing there are two things that make lookahead easier number one the more pieces you have solved the easier it is to look ahead now that's kind of obvious because you don't have to look at any pieces you've already solved but in ZZ because of the EO line step you spend a lot of moves right at the start of the solve barely solving anything and therefore you have more places that you have to look at so immediately that's a huge blow to zz's prospects the next important aspect of look ahead is which blind spots have you solved so for example in cfop often how good solvers will begin their solves is with a cross as well as a planned back f2l pair and once you have done this then I talk about this a lot but when you look at a corner and you find it then you only need to find its Edge and that edge can be anywhere in the top or one of these two or here so chances are just by looking from one side you can see everything you need to see and that that's because all of the bottom edges are covered we don't have to look there anymore and we also have this back slot covered which means we don't have to look there anymore so we've covered most of our blind spots and really all we have left is the three slots we can mostly see as well as everything on top which is moving a lot during f2l now with Roo it's similar it's better than ZZ but not quite the same as cfop because when you solve your first block here then you still have these bottom edges you have to look out for so with Roo it's still more manageable than ZZ but you have more blind spots than you do with cfop so look ahead on Roo is also a little bit worse so again look ahead is important because you can't hit the ergonomic limit with your fingers unless you can somehow know everything you're going to do which ultimately comes down to look ahead and that's why at the higher levels of cubing not so much when you're lower level but at the higher levels look ahead is the most important thing no matter what method you're using alright next is regrips and this is the thing that I feel like nobody ever talks about for these three methods the most important grip is home grip where both of your thumbs are on front you have access to any umove you want and R and R prime or L Prime and L are both pretty easy to do from this grip with cfop in general you stay in this grip and the reason for that is because anytime you move one of your hands up then the cross Edge moves up and if you have to solve an f2l pair that involves putting the cross Edge back down at some point and that ultimately restores you back to homegrip and so the important aspect of this is the cross edges on the left and right are already solved and that is not true for Roo or ZZ for Roo one of them is done in the first step so not so bad but in ZZ both of these are not solved for a while so here for example in cfop these two I'm going to pair them like this and then insert into the back so far no regrips and then I have this pair and a cube rotation that's one regrip and then I have uh these two and and then lastly these two so I stayed in home grip for most of that I had a couple Cube rotations and just one regroup at the end and that was all of f2l and because of that the maximum turn speed of cfop f2l is higher than with ZZ f2l or roof or two blocks okay so since I don't actually use my method I don't know what are the most common things to happen but here's just one example I came up with if you're trying to solve this and this into the right block then you would have to do something like this and okay I probably didn't do that the best way possible but I'm sure no matter how I did that there would be at least two rewraps now once this is pointed out to you and you try to do ZZ solves you will find that the ergonomics are worse than C fob yeah there are no Cube rotations but the regrips and the r2s and the l2s and the switching hands and having to regrip all over the place is just insane the faster you get the more ZZ doesn't feel like it's built for Speed solving so if we take these ergonomics into account c-fop is still looking great Roo is a little bit worse now and ZZ just takes a huge blow again so by now I've pretty much covered all of the important facts and what conclusions you want to draw from this is totally up to you but then from here using this information I will tell you what I conclude I think that with how similar cfop and ZZ are just as methods in the order that you do everything a lot of the more important things at high level which is not quite the move count but more on the ergonomics and look ahead side ZZ absolutely loses in this I draw the conclusion that cfop is much better than ZZ but just looking at the facts here I cannot conclude that Rue or C fob is bad better than the other one I feel like with how different these two methods are you'd have to start using empirical evidence from what good solvers are capable of doing and what you can project for the future with better cubes or better finger tricks better algorithms and so on which is not something I think I'll be able to do accurately and things change in the future new things are discovered so who knows in other words in the future I wouldn't be surprised if Rue ended up being the best method or if cfop ended up being the best method now as for which method you should pick I've been talking a lot about theoretical stuff and if you have some reason to believe that your fingers just because of like medical reasons or something you actually cannot turn faster than some other people can then that is a justification for using Rue as your fingers actually do not need to move quite as fast and since root is more intuitive if you don't feel like figuring out stuff and you just want to turn really fast then cfop would suit you better but what I think is more important is which events each of these methods suits better if you ever plan on practicing big cubes M moves are simply not as good on big cubes now in 4x4 it's kind of fine because if you just hit the middle of the two layers you are guaranteed to move the two layers so it's not a big deal but on 5 by five it is a lot harder to make sure that you have hit all the layers and on 6x6 and 7x7 just forget it and on megaminx it does kind of follow like you make a star kind of like a cross followed by f2l Pairs and the whole solve is pretty much as F12 over and over so I imagine that c-fop solvers would be better than Roo solvers on megaminx but where a lot of people think Rue really shines is in one-handed because most of Roo uses R wide r and u moves then it's actually pretty good for one-handed as that means you don't have to rotate for example L moves when ended requires you to rotate and F moves require you to regrip a little and also it seems like M moves may be a problem but if you use a table then you actually not not me I can't do it but people can do this so really I think it comes down what you're going to Value more do you want to get better at one-handed or do you want to be good at Big cubes and yeah there's really no place where ZZ is best some people have said it's really good for Feats but it's feet so this is all stuff I really would have liked to know when I was switching to root because back when I averaged about 18 seconds I actually switched to brew for a while thinking it was the better method I just wanted to be unique for the sake of it but now I'm really at peace with cfop I personally think that at least for me it is better on 3x3 or at least I will always be better with cfop than I will be with Rue I don't know if that is a different statement or not but even if I've just made this more confusing for you I hope this video was at least interesting oh yeah and some of you guys are going to mention EO cross for ZZ and how it might be better for two-handed and while it does remove the ergonomic problem it does suffer from a lot of the other problems DZ still has and I've tried using it before doing inspection is an absolute nightmare feel free to yell at me in the comments alright thanks for watching I hope this was helpful for you and I'll see you guys all next time

Channel: J Perm

Views: 3,670,427

Keywords: rubik's cube, tutorial, advanced, j perm, jperm, tips, tricks, fast, fastest, cfop, roux, zz, speedsolving, best speedsolving method, petrus, snyder, heise, waterman, method, eoline, f2l, algorithm, easy, easiest, cubing

Id: QKK8J3JKWi4

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 28 2019