SAC Cubing XI Recap ||| First place in Skewb!

Two days ago, 3/27/22, I headed to Sacramento for my first cubing competition in 2.5+ years. During those 2.5 years, I got super into the Skewb event. It kind of started when I saw that you had to get 6 seconds to podium in competitions back in the day, and I thought that I could do that.

I know full Sarah's advanced, and 70% of NS algorithms to the point where any last-layer case is at most a 3-look in terms of combinations of sledge/hedges. Usually, I average around sub-4.1 at home, aiming to get a global mean of sub-4 for the past couple of months. My PB ao100 is sub 3.9 which is encouraging.

SO anyway, I signed up for 2x2 and Skewb. I didn't sign up for 3x3 because that event was at like 8 in the morning which meant I have to wake up at like 6:00 since it's a 2-hour commute. 

The venue was at a community center in Sacramento. It was pretty much just a super big and spacious room with round tables in the back and lots of chairs in the middle. In the front was all the competing, scrambling stations, etc. 

There were quite a lot of little kids, of which was a surprising ratio of girls in my opinion. Max Park, Paul Mahvi, and Cary Huang(500k+ subscribers!!!) were all there and I got Cary's autograph at the end, he was super nice and just seemed like a chill dude.

So yea, after warming up, it was time for 2x2. 

Goals and mains: http://cavs4tw.blogspot.com/2022/03/goals-and-mains-for-sac-cubing-xi-first.html

I had a goal of sub-5 single and sub-8 average...

AND I DID BOTH OF IT.

I full-on NEVER practice 2x2, and yet I did it!!! This was all because of luck. The first two solves were both PLL skips... you can see my surprised reaction to my 4.75 second-solve single in the footage that I recorded. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reCNbLW6x0w&

Fun fact, I cropped out a portion of the 4.7 solve because after the solve I was super surprised so my face went inside the frame lol.

So yea, that's so cool. I got a 7.87 average which has lots of potential to be lower if I just learn ortega or put any amount of effort into it. 

After 2x2 meant that I was free until 3:00. It was like 12:30 at the time, so we went to downtown Sacramento and ate lunch at this random place and visited the state Capitol.

There was a really nice rose garden and orange trees that we weren't allowed to pick(i picked an orange off the groudn anyway >:) )

After lunch was Skewb event. I was super nervous, but I had tons of time to warm up which helped a lot. When I was warming up I was literally excuting god-like TPS and doing my worse NS algorithms at a peak. I was feeling super good.

So when they called my name up, I put my Angstrom skewb in the container and waited...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reCNbLW6x0w&

Overall, all five of the solves were good. None of them were "choked" where I aligned the wrong F2L or messed up an NS algorithm. However, the best time out of the five was 4.2 seconds, which is super weird for me. 

All of the scrambles were literally sledge + U-perm which is the most basic Sarah's intermediate cases. I had one NS case that I crushed and that felt super good, but they kept on giving me U-perms which was super unsatisfying.

Anyway, I ended up with an ao5 of 4.68.... which was pretty bad, but I've practiced so much to the point where I have room to do poorly. Second place (yupeng) came in at just above 5 seconds...which gave me 1st place.

It's been like 3 days since this competition and it just feels so surreal to me. To see some number other than 0 in my medal collection on my profile page just feels wrong to me. It's been so long and that was the exact moment I waited for. Although I did bad, I was still jumping with excitement when I saw the live update showing my 1st. 

man

So what can I say. I've gone over what this means to me in the goals and mains post. I'm going to keep grinding until consistent sub-4, which means more NS and maybe looking into one-look theory.

Additionally, I've always wanted to pick-up 3x3 BLD again. The idea of having an official BLD time is so intruiging. It's possible for me, and I'm aiming to get it by the end of 2022.

Other than that, I'll try to improve my 3x3, 4x4, 2x2, 3x3 OH times as usual. I don't even know full PLL on 3x3 yet T_T

Lyric(s) of the Post:

 In someways it's a lot like your car, you don't have to know how every single part works to drive to some wonderful places. All you need to use the computer are- A computer and a network connection.

Network - Convexity, Inktome