Cross to first pair
What to plan in fifteen seconds beyond the cross, and how to come out of it already knowing which pair goes in first.
By the end you will be able to
- Plan a full cross and track one F2L pair through it during inspection
- Choose the first slot deliberately rather than taking whatever appears
- Say what to do in the quarter of solves where no pair is ready
- Start the solve without a pause between the cross and the first insertion
The pause between finishing the cross and starting the first pair is the most avoidable second in the solve. Everything you need to remove it happens before the timer starts, in a fifteen-second window where your hands are still and the cube is not changing.
The cross is smaller than it feels
Across five hundred random scrambles solved by this site's own cross solver, the shortest cross averaged 5.7 turns and never needed more than seven; over all possible scrambles the worst case is eight. Half of all scrambles have a six-turn cross, and about a third are five or fewer.
Six turns is two seconds of turning. If your inspection is spent entirely on the cross, you are spending fifteen seconds planning two seconds of solve, and arriving at the F2L with nothing.
What to look at next
With the cross planned, use the rest of inspection on one pair. Not two, not all four. One pair, tracked properly, is worth more than four pairs glanced at.
- Find a corner with white on it that is in the top layer. Corners are harder to find mid-solve than edges, which is why the corner is the piece to commit to memory.
- Find its edge. The two colours of the corner other than white tell you exactly which edge you want.
- Work out where the cross moves put them. This is the part that takes practice. You are not tracking pieces through a scramble — you chose the turns, so you know what each one does.
- Decide which slot they go into and where that slot will be when the cross finishes. Not "the front-right slot" but "the slot between green and red, which will be on my left".
One solve in four gives you nothing
It is worth knowing what a normal scramble actually offers. Taking the same five hundred scrambles and building the shortest cross on each, then counting the pairs whose corner and edge both finish in the top layer, free to be paired without disturbing anything:
| Pairs with both pieces free after the cross | Share of scrambles |
|---|---|
| None | 27% |
| One | 48% |
| Two | 23% |
| Three | 2% |
When nothing is free, the plan is different and you should have it ready rather than discovering it with the timer running. Find a corner that is stuck in a slot it does not belong in and plan the three turns that lift it out. The extraction is not a wasted move — it puts the corner in the top layer where you can use it, and it usually brings its edge up too.
Rotations
Count them for a few solves. Most people at thirty seconds make five or six cube rotations; a sub-twenty solve has one or two. They are expensive twice over: the turn itself, and the fact that you come out of it looking at a cube from a new angle with your tracking lost.
- Filling the two right-hand slots first, then rotating once, is a good default and costs nothing to adopt.
yrotations during F2L are worth it when they turn an awkward back-left insertion into a routine front-right one. Rotating to look at something is not.- The rotation to avoid entirely is the one at the end of the cross. If your cross plan finishes with the cube facing the wrong way, plan the cross edges in a different order.
X-cross, honestly
An X-cross is a cross that solves one F2L pair along the way, so you come out of it with the cross and a quarter of the F2L done. It saves two or three seconds when it works.
It is worth attempting only when the pair is nearly free already — the corner and edge joined, or a single turn from joined, and sitting where a cross edge is going anyway. Hunting for one on every scramble costs more inspection time than it returns, and a failed X-cross leaves you with a solved cross, no plan, and eight seconds gone.
Drills
- Cross with your eyes shut. Inspect for fifteen seconds, close your eyes, do the cross. If you cannot, you had not planned it — you were reading it as you went.
- Cross plus one pair, then stop. Twenty of these takes ten minutes. Count how often the pair you planned actually went in as planned; at the start it will be about half.
- Say the plan out loud before you start: "cross is F, R prime, D two, L; the corner is the green-orange-white one, it is at the back-right and it ends up at the front-left." Saying it is what shows you whether you had it.
- Count your rotations for ten solves and write the number down. That single number moves more than most drills do.