How to Learn Cube Algorithms Faster: A Research-Based Guide

Sooner or later, every speedcuber hits the same wall. You supposedly know your PLLs, but at a competition your mind goes blank. Yesterday the alg came out perfectly; today you can't remember how it starts. A friend learned full OLL in a month, and after a week you only remember three cases. The good news is that the psychology of learning has been studying these problems for over a hundred years and has some very concrete answers. In this guide we've gathered what this research means for learning algorithms, training and blindfolded solving.

At the start you'll find a short cheat sheet if you just want to know what to do. After that comes a detailed discussion: why it works, how we know, and where science ends and guesswork begins.

1. The essentials in 2 minutes

1. Study for 10-20 minutes every day, not for two hours once a week. Spreading learning over time is one of the best-supported effects in all of psychology.
2. 1-2 new algorithms a day is enough. You can memorize ten at once until tomorrow, but not for a month from now.
3. Test yourself without a cheat sheet. Set up the case, perform the alg from memory and only then check. Just looking at the sheet gives you the illusion that you know it.
4. Come back to every new alg the next day, after 3-4 days, after a week and after 2-3 weeks.
5. Split the alg into 2-4 triggers (sexy move, sledgehammer, sune), not into 14 separate moves.
6. Watch the fingertricks in a video first, then practise. A few slow repetitions are enough to memorize the moves; after that, turn fast but correctly.
7. Don't learn similar algs on the same day (Ja and Jb, four T-shaped OLLs). For your hands, the mirror image of an alg is a completely new alg.
8. Practise recognition on random cases, ideally in an algorithm trainer.
9. Get enough sleep, but don't expect sleep alone to make an alg faster. Sleep protects what you've learned.
10. At 20-30 second times, you lose the most on pauses in F2L, not on missing algorithms. Do slow solves without stopping.
11. You don't need a "good memory" for blindfolded solving. Turning letter pairs into images is a technique anyone can learn.

2. What we know and what we don't

Before we get into the details, one honest remark. Nobody has yet scientifically studied the best way to learn cube algorithms. There are a few papers about speedcubers, but none of them compares methods of learning algs. Everything we write below is a transfer of findings from research on similar tasks: learning finger movement sequences (e.g. tapping sequences on a keyboard), memorizing vocabulary and facts, learning to play an instrument and training athletes.

Some of these findings are very strong: they have been confirmed by dozens of studies and meta-analyses, i.e. papers that pool the results of many experiments at once. Others come from a single lab or are disputed. Where the evidence is weaker, we say so directly. You'll find the sources in the references at the end.

3. "I know this alg" means three different skills

When you say "I know the T-perm", you mean three things at once, and each of them is learned a little differently:

• Memorization: you know which moves belong to this case. This kind of memory is similar to knowing foreign-language vocabulary.
• Execution: your fingers perform the alg smoothly without thinking about the next move. This is motor memory, like playing the piano.
• Recognition: one look at the cube and you instantly know which case it is. This is visual memory, like a chess player who knows thousands of positions.

Most typical learning mistakes come from confusing these three things. Someone performs an alg 200 times in a row (practising execution) and is surprised that a week later they can't remember it (because they didn't practise recall). Someone else knows all the algs from the sheet but loses two seconds recognizing the case during a solve. The following sections cover each of these skills separately.

4. Little, but every day

If you remember only one thing from this whole guide, let it be this: the same amount of study works much better when you spread it over many short sessions. Psychologists call this the spacing effect. A meta-analysis covering over 300 experiments showed that spaced learning beats learning "in one go", and the longer you want to remember something, the longer the gaps between reviews should be^[1]. The effect also works for motor skills, most strongly for relatively simple tasks^[2].

The most interesting part is that we don't feel it ourselves. In a flashcard study, spaced learning gave better results for 90% of participants, yet 72% of them believed that cramming everything at once had worked better^[3]. Cramming gives a great result by the end of the evening, so it feels effective. The problem is that a week later little of it remains.

For learning algorithms this means a simple rule: 1-2 new algs a day, not every day, plus a short review of old ones. This is exactly the advice J Perm has been giving for years for learning full PLL^[4]. The number "2" itself doesn't come from research, but the direction matches it perfectly.

If you use a flashcard app like Anki, don't worry too much about its settings. Research hasn't shown that increasingly longer gaps between reviews are better than equal ones^[5]. What matters most is that your reviews are spread over many days at all.

5. Test yourself instead of rereading

The second pillar of effective learning is recall (retrieval practice). Every attempt to pull something out of memory strengthens it more than another reading does. In a classic experiment, students learned word pairs. Those who kept testing themselves remembered about 80% after a week. Those who, after their first success, just kept rereading remembered about one third^[6]. Meta-analyses of dozens of studies confirm that this effect is large and replicable^[7], and in a ranking of learning techniques, self-testing and spacing received the highest ratings. Rereading and highlighting performed poorly^[8].

Important for cubing: the effect doesn't only work for vocabulary. On a resuscitation course, medical students who took a test instead of the last 30 minutes of practice performed the procedure noticeably better two weeks later^[9].

How does this translate to algorithms?

• Looking at a cheat sheet during a solve is "rereading". Performing the alg from memory when you see the case is a "test".
• The criterion is correct execution from memory, not the number of repetitions. In a large study, this schedule worked well: 3 correct recalls in the first session, then one in each of several following sessions spread over days. Extra recalls on the first day added little if you returned to the material in later sessions anyway^[10].
• Don't cross an alg off after your first success. Come back to it the next day, after 3-4 days, after a week and after 2-3 weeks. This schedule is our synthesis of vocabulary research, not a tested protocol, but it is consistent with the findings.

Also beware of the illusion of knowing. When the cheat sheet is in front of you, your judgement that "I know this now" is inflated^[11]. You can only judge it reliably after an attempt without the sheet and after some time has passed. For the same reason, measure your progress at the start of the next session, not at the end of the current one. How an alg goes during practice often says little about how much will really stay in your memory^[12]. A great result after 50 repetitions is temporary form, not lasting learning.

6. Triggers: split the alg into chunks

Working memory, i.e. what you can hold in your head at any given moment, holds about 4 "chunks" of information^[13]. Fourteen moves as fourteen separate letters is too much. The same alg as three familiar chunks fits with room to spare.

Interestingly, people do this on their own. In studies on learning long sequences, participants spontaneously split them into short chunks separated by pauses, and each person split them slightly differently^[14]. Speedcubers call these chunks triggers: sexy move (R U R' U'), sledgehammer (R' F R F'), sune. In another experiment, memorizing verbal names for movements helped with learning a motor sequence^[15]. So naming your chunks makes sense.

Two practical tips:

• Split the alg where the fingertricks change or where there's a regrip, not mechanically every three moves. Chunk boundaries become ingrained and may later become places for small pauses.
• At a higher level, the goal is to glue the chunks together. Once you've mastered the alg, practise it so there's no gap between triggers.

A simple test of whether an alg is automatic: perform it a few times while counting down from 100 in threes in your head. If you stumble or your time clearly increases, the alg still needs work. A second test: after a week without reviewing, you perform it straight away, without thinking.

7. Slow or fast?

You often hear the advice "always practise slowly, speed will come by itself". Research doesn't support it. In an experiment where participants practised short sequences on a keyboard, the group told to "work fast, don't worry about mistakes" developed a better ability to perform the whole sequence fluently. The group told to "work accurately" learned rather to respond to each element separately^[16]. This is a result from a single lab, but it's worth noting: fingertricks practised only very slowly may ingrain grips that don't work at speed.

A sensible combination looks like this:

1. Watch a fingertrick video, ideally filmed from the solver's perspective. A meta-analysis of research on observational learning showed that watching clearly improves how a movement is performed, and less so the outcome itself^[17]. Watch before practising, not after.
2. Do 5-10 slow repetitions to memorize the order of moves and the finger placement.
3. Then turn "as fast as you can, but correctly" and accept that you'll sometimes make mistakes.

And what about the popular "mistakes get ingrained, so never make one"? We found no research to back it up. A mistake you notice and correct right away is a normal part of learning.

8. Mirrored and similar algs

"Jb is just a mirror of Ja, so I get it for free." Unfortunately not. In studies on finger movement sequences, progress made on one sequence practically didn't transfer to the same sequence in a different order^[18]. In children and adolescents aged 9-17, a practised sequence partly transferred to the other hand, but very weakly to the reversed sequence^[19]. For your fingers, a mirrored alg is simply a new alg and needs its own repetitions. It does help with memorization, though: if you know Ja, try to work out Jb yourself before looking it up.

The second issue is the order in which you learn similar algs. A freshly practised sequence is vulnerable to interference for several hours. When participants learned a second, similar sequence 2 hours after the first, the first one didn't show the improvement normally seen the next day. With an 8-hour gap there was no problem^[20]. The research used simple finger sequences, so for cubing this is an inference, not a certainty, but the rule is simple: learn only one alg from a given "family" per day. Ja today, Jb tomorrow or next week. Spread the four T-shaped OLLs over several days.

9. Case recognition

Master-level chess players can reconstruct a position from a real game after looking at it for a few seconds far better than amateurs. But when the pieces are placed randomly, their advantage almost disappears^[21]. They don't have better memory, just thousands of memorized patterns. Recognizing OLL and PLL works the same way: it's a separate skill and needs to be practised separately.

This is where interleaving comes in. When you practise cases from one family in random order, you get better at telling them apart. A meta-analysis showed that this effect is strongest precisely when the things to be distinguished are similar to each other^[22]. In a study where participants learned to recognize painters' styles, interleaved paintings gave better results, yet most participants believed they learned better in blocks^[23]. So random cases will go worse during practice, and that's normal.

But note: for executing the moves themselves, things are less clear-cut. In a new meta-analysis of motor research, the benefit of random practice for transferring skills to new variants of a task was very small in younger participants^[24]. That's why it's best to combine both approaches:

• Practise a new alg in a block until you can do it without thinking about the next move.
• Practise recognition in a trainer on random cases, with a few similar cases in the pool, and pay attention to reaction time, not just whether you got it right. Research on so-called perceptual learning shows that many short trials with immediate feedback improve both the accuracy and speed of recognition^[25].
• Learn to recognize PLL from two sides, not four. The best-known system is Sarah Strong's^[26]. There's no research on its effectiveness, but it fits well with how experts recognize patterns.

10. Sleep and breaks

"Sleep on it and you'll be faster in the morning"

This advice has a specific source. In a well-known 2002 study, participants tapped a sequence on a keyboard about 20% faster after a night's sleep, while the same amount of time awake brought no such improvement^[27]. Later analyses, however, called this result into question. A large meta-analysis found that once fatigue at the end of training and time of day are taken into account, there is no convincing evidence that sleep speeds up the execution of a practised sequence^[28]. A reanalysis of the same studies also showed that mainly "successful" results had been published, and after correction the post-sleep gain disappears^[29]. The scientific debate continues, but the safe conclusion is: don't count on sleep as a source of speed; count on it to protect what you've learned.

It's different with memorization, i.e. which moves belong to which case. Vocabulary learned shortly before sleep was remembered better than vocabulary followed by a long day^[30]. That's why a good habit is learning new algs in the evening and doing the first review in the morning.

And then there's sleep itself: for 13-18-year-olds, 8-10 hours of sleep per day is recommended^[31]. Late-night sessions until 1 a.m. before school are a real cost to learning, not just tiredness.

Breaks during practice

A few years ago there was a lot of buzz about a study suggesting that the brain "learns during breaks": progress appeared mainly during short, 10-second rests between sets^[32]. A newer and much larger study challenged this conclusion. Groups practising with and without breaks ended up with the same result^[33]. Short breaks between sets are fine, because they rest your hands and help maintain movement quality. But what matters most is the number of good repetitions spread over many days.

11. Algorithms aren't everything: pauses

There's very little research on speedcubers themselves, but one study is particularly useful for training. The authors analysed 69 solves by 16 people from YouTube frame by frame and combined this with a large survey of the r/Cubers community^[34]. The results:

• a solver averaging around 20 seconds stands still for almost half of the solve (46%), while a solver averaging around 10 seconds does so for one third,
• F2L is the longest stage of the solve, and that's where most of the pauses are,
• the number of regrips was strongly linked to solve time,
• the number of moves in F2L had practically no link to solve time.

This is data from a small group, and it shows correlations, not causes, but the conclusion is clear: at 20-30 second times you'll gain more from fluency and look-ahead (looking at the next pair before you finish the current one) than from learning more algorithms. Feliks Zemdegs has recommended slow solves without a timer for this purpose for years: you turn more slowly, but without stopping. In his commentary on his record average, he also describes predicting the OLL while inserting the last pair, so there was no pause before OLL^[35].

12. What to learn and when (CFOP, Ortega)

3x3 with CFOP

Tutorial creators agree on the order^{[4, 35]}:

1. 2-look OLL and 2-look PLL (16 algs in total) right after the beginner's method.
2. Full PLL (21 algs) first, because there are few of them and they appear in every solve.
3. Full OLL (57 algs) later. J Perm advises learning them "one shape at a time", and we'd add: spread one shape over 2-3 consecutive days so that similar algs don't get in each other's way.
4. Further sets (COLL, ZBLL and others) only once your times are really fast.

A realistic pace in the community is 1-3 new algs a day and full OLL in 1-2 months. Promises like "full OLL in three weeks" come with no data on how much of it stays in memory a month later.

2x2 with Ortega

Ortega is 12 algorithms: 7 for orienting the last layer and 5 for permuting both layers (PBL). The first group are the same algs as in 2-look OLL on 3x3 (sune, antisune and the rest), so if you know them, you really only have 5 new algs to learn. A week is enough for that, and then it's worth putting all your energy into planning the solve during inspection. This isn't a research finding, just practitioners' experience. Nobody has studied learning Ortega.

How long does it take?

According to a large survey of active speedcubers, the typical best average of 12 was about 28 seconds after 3 months, about 20 seconds after a year and about 15 seconds after 3 years of cubing^[36]. This is data from people who stayed in the hobby and bothered to fill in the survey, so treat it as a rough guide. The spread is huge: some get under 20 seconds in a few months, others after several years. It most often depends on the number of solves per day, but not only. In the only longer study of people learning to solve the cube from scratch, how well people did was linked to general reasoning ability, not to perseverance or mindset^[37]. If your friend averages 15 seconds and you average 25, it doesn't mean you're not trying.

One more important thing: a new technique makes your times worse at first. When you switch from 2-look to full PLL or change your grip, you may be slower for 2-4 weeks. Don't go back to the old way after one bad Ao12. Even Tymon Kolasiński, after switching to the ZB method in autumn 2024, admitted several months later that he was still solving slower than before^[38].

13. Plan: full PLL in 3 weeks

The plan below is our conclusion from the research described above, not a method tested on speedcubers. We assume you already know 2-look PLL (6 algs) and have 15 new ones to learn. You'll need 15-25 minutes a day for algs, plus separate time for regular solves.

Learning one new alg (approx. 10 minutes)

1. Watch a fingertrick video.
2. Check on the cube what the alg does: which pieces it swaps.
3. Split it into 2-4 triggers and give them your own names.
4. Do 5-10 slow repetitions, then 2-3 minutes of "fast but correct".
5. Set up the case, turn the sheet over, perform it from memory. Repeat until you get it right 3 times, mixing in algs from previous days between attempts.
6. Done. Don't learn anything similar that day.

Week one

Weeks two and three

Week two brings the mirror pairs and "cousins" of the week-one algs: Jb, Rb on Monday, Ab, Ub on Tuesday, Gb, Nb on Thursday, Gc, Na on Friday. After a week's gap, the similarity starts helping you tell them apart instead of getting in the way. On Wednesday and Saturday you practise the whole set in the trainer and check the week-one algs from memory.

In week three the last ones remain: Gd, E, V. The other days are for reviewing week two and practising two-sided recognition, in random order and with reaction time measured. For the next 2 weeks, perform every PLL from memory once every few days. After that, regular solves will take care of the reviews.

You can practise full OLL using the same scheme: 1-3 new algs a day, 4 days a week, takes roughly 6-10 weeks.

14. Habit and motivation

"21 days and the habit is formed" is a myth. In a study where participants introduced a new daily habit, it took an average of 66 days for it to become "automatic", ranging from 18 to 254 days across individuals. A single missed day didn't spoil progress^[39]. So don't worry about one day off, but stay consistent.

The most effective way to stay consistent is an "if... then..." plan. Not "I'll practise more", but "if it's 7 p.m. and I've had dinner, then I sit down at my desk and do 15 minutes of PLL". A meta-analysis of almost a hundred such studies found that a specific plan clearly increases the chance that you'll do what you intend to^[40].

It's also worth knowing that the number of hours isn't everything. The famous "10,000 hours" is greatly exaggerated: in studies, deliberate practice explained roughly a quarter of the differences in performance in games, a fifth in music and slightly less in sports^[41]. The most effective practice has a specific goal, gives feedback and is slightly too hard. A hundred solves without thinking about what went wrong is just a lot of turning, not training.

A better weekly goal is a process goal ("I'll learn 4 new PLLs and do 50 slow solves") rather than an outcome goal ("I'll get under 20 seconds"), because the outcome also depends on scrambles and luck.

15. Competitions and stress

Choking under pressure has a well-described mechanism: under stress you start consciously monitoring movements you normally do automatically, and that's exactly what disrupts them. In a study with golfers, practising in front of a camera and observers protected against choking under pressure, while practising with just a distraction did not^[42]. For a speedcuber this means: before a competition, practise in front of people or record your solves.

What else helps:

• A fixed pre-solve routine. The same steps every time: a breath, hand position, a look at the cross. A meta-analysis of sports research found that pre-performance routines improve results regardless of age and level^[43].
• "I'm excited" instead of "calm down". When your heart is racing, it's easier to interpret it as excitement than to try to calm down. In experiments, people who told themselves "I'm excited" performed better than those who tried to calm down^[44].
• Think about a specific task ("look at the next pair"), not about the time.
• Remember the average format. Out of five solves, the worst and best are dropped, so one bad moment doesn't ruin your result.

You don't need to wait until you're sub-15 for your first competition. People of every level compete at WCA competitions, and you'll get more out of every competition than out of a week of practice at home.

16. Blindfolded and Multi-Blind: memory is a technique

In blindfolded solving the proportions are reversed. There are few algorithms, and the whole game is about memory. Here science has good news for you: exceptional memory is to a very large extent a practised technique, not an innate talent.

Memory champions don't have different brains

• A study of top memory competitors found no differences in brain structure or intelligence compared with other people. The difference lay in the method: almost all of them used a memory palace^[45].
• Ordinary people who practised the memory palace for 30 minutes a day over 6 weeks memorized more than twice as many words in 5 minutes as at the start of training, and the effect persisted after 4 months^[46]. A meta-analysis of research on this method confirms that it works^[47].
• A student who practised memorizing digits in a lab for over 230 hours improved from 7 to 79 digits. He didn't expand his short-term memory; he learned to convert groups of digits into running times he was familiar with^[48]. That's exactly the same trick as letter pairs in blindfolded solving.
• "Brain training" apps don't improve memory beyond the app exercises themselves^[49]. Practise on real material: letter pairs, images, routes.

Marcin Kowalczyk, a former Multi-Blind world record holder, says he doesn't consider his brain exceptional, and before training he scored well on memory tests, but nothing spectacular. Above all, he advises taking care of your sleep^[50].

How the best memorize

Practitioners consistently use the same scheme^[51]:

1. Each sticker has its own letter (the most popular scheme is Speffz).
2. You combine letters into pairs and turn each pair into an image or a word: KR becomes "kret" (mole), ST becomes "stół" (table).
3. You link the images into a short story. It's important that the elements do something to each other: the mole knocks over the table, not "a mole and a table".
4. Build your pair list in Polish. English lists from the internet won't work, because the words have to feel natural to you.
5. At first you can write the letters down on paper to learn the method itself without memory stress.

Do the images have to be bizarre? Less than people say. Bizarreness mainly helps when a few strange images stand out against ordinary ones. If they're all absurd, the advantage disappears^[52]. It's better to go for concrete, vivid objects that interact with each other.

For a single cube, many competitors memorize the edges as images or a story, and the corners (or the last part) as a rhythmic "chant" repeated in their head, which they execute first. This kind of audio memory is very short-lived, so don't talk or listen to anything between memorizing and executing. In our 3x3 blindfolded course you'll find a ready-made method with examples of letter pairs.

Multi-Blind

With many cubes, short audio memory is no longer enough, and everyone switches to the memory palace: one cube is one room, with 2-3 clearly distinct spots in it for images. Memory research gives three tips:

• You remember the middle worst. Items at the beginning and end of a list are remembered better than those in the middle^[53], so the middle cubes need an extra review.
• The spots must be clearly different. Similar images in similar places get mixed up.
• Review as you go, not just at the end. After each new cube, go back over the previous ones in your mind, and with more cubes, set a fixed review pattern.

What does it look like at the top? During an unofficial attempt in 2025, Graham Siggins solved 319 out of 350 cubes. Memorization alone took about 12 hours, and solving about two^[54]. Memorization takes up most of the time at every level, including at the start: first successful attempts usually take a few minutes, most of which is memo.

Competition stress makes recall harder, especially for things that were poorly memorized^[55]. So at competitions, review your memo one more time than at home, and practise in competition-like conditions: one attempt, someone watching. And after every DNF, check where the error was: in memorization or in execution. For most people, execution fails more often than memory.

If you want to get started, we also have courses on Multi-Blind, 4x4 blindfolded and 5x5 blindfolded.

17. Myths about learning algorithms

Finally: the best method is the one you'll actually stick to. Plan for months, not weeks, learn a little and regularly, test yourself instead of rereading, and enjoy every second you shave off your average. And if you practise with a timer, try our free online timer.

References

Most sources are scientific papers in English. The links lead to abstracts or full texts.

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