Competition confirmed!!

Hey guys! As you might have read in the title, it is confirmed! I am going to a competition in about a month! Now for sake of privacy, I won’t be sharing which competition I am going to, but I wanted to give some pointers on competing and what you might want to do before hand to improve your spot in competition.

          To start, trust your gear. This is the same advice that Noah Arthurs gave in one of his videos on a similar topic, but I want to reiterate some key ideas. No matter the cube you use, it’s important that you make sure you feel confident that it will perform the way you need it to. Trusting your cube is a big deal, and it’s one thing I have a huge problem with. Also, make sure your cubes are well tensioned, lubed, stickered, and otherwise prepped so you can make sure you know your cube is on its game. In addition to bringing your main speedcubes, also include a backup for big events like 2x2 and 3x3, because if your main breaks or fails on some level, you need to have something to solve on for the rest of the competition.

          Another great idea is to set goals for yourself a month or two before the competition, and practice and strive to reach the goal. Of course, the goal has to be reasonable, but if you find an appropriate level of difficulty, the goal can really push you to perform. For me, the goal I have set for the competition is a 20 second average, with an 18 second single. Now this is very attainable for me at home, but I want to make sure I can nail it in a competition. If you don’t like to time yourself at home, or just don’t think you will be able to perform well under the pressure of a competition, instead, set goals about your algorithm or method process. For instance, I might choose to set a goal of knowing all the PLL’s by this competition. Considering I only have 3 more to learn (4 if you count me wanting to switch on of my G-perms) my goal seems very easily reached. If you are not a great memorizer, your goals can be a bit more conservative, but one main idea to remember is that you should set goals that will challenge you. Don’t strive for the minimum, practice and put in some effort.

          Finally, on the day of the competition, I recommend a warm up strategy. Simply start with slow turns when you wake up. Don’t do really fast, complicated, or hard stuff, especially not at first, save that for later. As you continue through the day, make sure you keep your hands warm. A good way to do this is to always have a cube in hand, and be doing basic, slow solves. You want to be ready to go when the time to compete comes, but make sure you don’t wear out your hands in the process. Also, when the time comes, you will have to hand over your main cube for scrambling. This might take a bit, and is when your backup cube will be useful. At this stage, right before you compete, it is fine to do fast solves on you backup to not only keep your hands warm, but allow you to build up some speed for our solve. However, the rule of not wearing your fingers out still applies here.

          Take or leave these tips, but I think they are quite helpful and are very useful when a competition rolls around. I will be updating you guys with blogs about my cubing progress and how my goals are going, but this is it for now.