Step 1 of 8
Letters on the cube
The goal
To give every sticker a short name. Remembering "the red and white edge at the top right" takes too long, one letter does not.
Letters
How to do it
- On each face the letters run clockwise, starting from the face's top left.
- The faces go in this order: top, left, front, right, back, bottom. 4 letters a face, 24 in all.
- Corners and edges are labelled separately, in the same order. There is a letter A on a corner and on an edge: it causes no confusion, since edges and corners are memorised as separate lists.
- A letter names a sticker, not a piece. An edge has two stickers and two letters, a corner has three.
This is the Speffz scheme, the one most guides use. Russian cubers use their own alphabets, and the Russian set here puts 24 Russian letters on the same places. If you already use another scheme, keep it: the method does not depend on the letters.
Finding a sticker's place from its colours
- The sticker's colour says which face is its home: a blue sticker lives on the blue face.
- The colour of the piece's other side says which edge of that face: if the other side is white, it is the edge of the blue face that borders white.
- That sticker is Q. Corners work the same way with two other sides: blue with red and white is the corner of the blue face between red and white, the letter Q among the corners.
Trainer
Tap the sticker. The first mode teaches the letters, the second teaches the main skill of the memo: finding a sticker's place from its colours. Hide the labels once you are used to them.
Where isC?
In a row: 0
If it does not work
›Do not learn it all at once. Take the top and the front, the rest comes along.
›Label an old cube with a marker: it speeds up the first few days a lot.
›The diagram is the cube unfolded on a table: the front in the middle, the right face next to it, then the back. Fold it in your head while looking at a real cube.