Blog - January 2019

Future blog entries will be for the $1+ tiers.

I don't know if anyone noticed, but the $1 tier had a certain reward that I created some months ago and then I just totally forgot about it.

There was going to be a casual video where I talk about whatever is on my mind, but as it turns out I am too lazy to make it happen, so here I am writing it instead. Hopefully I get the hang of this.

In the last few months, because of doing poorly in competitions for 3x3 (this isn't a new thing, I've always been really bad at 3x3 in comp) I decided to take whatever measures I could to improve that. I started to practice on stackmat timer only, and this is when I realized that I wasn't only bad in comp, but I was just bad at stackmat timer in general.

I got so many +2s on timer stops and I was unable to look ahead because I started the solve weirdly. It's not like the solve is physically any different, but mentally there are a lot of little things to overcome.

1. I'm breaking a habit ingrained for many years

When timing on keyboard, I always tried to be realistic and didn't start with my hands on the cube. But even then, my hands are nearly wrapping the cube, while on stackmat I need to move my hands forward, followed by backward, which is uncomfortable. My solving session flow was broken and it felt like I was stressing solve after solve rather than flowing through a whole session casually. Lastly, stopping the timer was also very different and this takes so much practice.

2. My hands feel different

Before competition solves my hands always get slightly sweatier than usual. Not enough to really be considered sweaty, but enough that cubes feel different. So before my official solves I just wash my hands with soap and that pretty much fixes it. But I don't really have a solution for my hands feeling slightly different from touching the cold stackmat versus touching the warm keyboard before starting. Again, physically there's not much of a difference but it really throws everything off. Kind of like when I did the 4-look LL average of 12, and I messed up on F2L constantly due to my usual flow being broken every solve, even though it had nothing to do with F2L.

3. I'm slow again and it feels bad

Averaging mid to high 9 isn't slow by any means, but when you're bordering on sub-9 and then immediately get thrown back to almost 0.7 seconds slower, it's super annoying. The worst part is not that when looking at my Avg100 I see a higher time, but it's the constant amount of 10s and 11s I was getting. For example, if you average 8.9 you'll probably get around 55% sub-9. If you average 9.6 you'll probably get around 25% sub-9. Sub-9s feel good to me and everything else feels bad, so I was feeling good less than half of the time compared to before.

How did I overcome this? Well I hadn't yet, and I went to a competition with the mindset that I could definitely perform better after getting used to stackmats.

In 15 official 3x3 solves, 2 were sub-10. My first 2 averages were 11 seconds. Part of me was really disappointed. I had spent months practicing, and it didn't pay off at all. I was worse at home, and I was worse in competition.

But another part of me knew to trust the process, since how could practicing stackmat possibly be harmful? So I kept going.

In 2017 I planned on transitioning to stackmat only, and I knew that discipline was all I needed. But I didn't do it. I was filming a review and needed solves, and I justified to myself that computer-timed solves are more visually appealing and switched my cstimer to keyboard entry. I didn't switch back until late 2018.

But today I got my 4th or 5th stackmat sub-9 avg50, and 2nd stackmat sub-9 ao100. I expected that it would take months to get used to stackmat, and it did take months. Yet I was still surprised by how long it took, since cubing is part of my comfort zone and this took me so far out of it for so long. It's not like practicing a new cubing skill or algorithm set. Those are also uncomfortable, but in a different way. This change to my cubing routine made cubing as an activity less fun and more exhausting for quite a long period of time. But it was worth it.

I value doing well in competition where things really matter, because I'm a super competitive person. Some people won't care, and some people will disagree with the opinion that only official solves matter, and that's fine. But they are what matter to me, and making cubing less fun temporarily was not just beneficial, but it was a necessity.

Confidence and mindset tend to get overlooked in cubing. One thing that makes me do poorly in competition, is doing poorly in competition. One or two bad solves to start an average makes me feel like "this average is over", even though it's not. "Bad solves" is only relative to how good I think I am. If I know I can perform well on the timer, and if I know that how fast I think I am truly reflects what I'll likely get, then that's a big boost to my confidence.

If I was sub-20 or something, maybe I wouldn't care about this because I could just practice cubing until I'm faster. But I'm at the point where the amount of improvement I experience between competitions is small enough that it would really help my confidence to just get better at stackmat timers to address all the problems I was having.

At the last comp I forgot my GTS3 at home so I'll give a pass to that one, but at the 2 competitions before that I managed to get really close to beating my 8.90 official average multiple times. And now I'm at the point where I don't think about the stackmat timer anymore. All the adjustments I planned to make and the habits I had to get used to are mostly there already. In the past week I've managed to think more about how to improve and less about how to work this stupid timer, which is why I'm almost reaching sub-9 again. It was worth it.