How to Solve a Rubik's Cuber for Beginners

You don't have to be a genius or know any math in order to solve a Rubik's cube. It's something an ordinary person can learn. And it is about learning. You will have to do a little thinking. You also don't have to memorize a bunch of moves to solve a cube. There is no single sequence of moves you can memorize that will just solve the cube for you without thinking^*. The most popular beginner's method is called Layer-By-Layer (LBL). It does what it says — it solves the cube one layer at a time. I don't like this method because once you solve a single layer of the cube, there is only one face you can turn without destroying what you have built so far. (This is why so many people trying for the first time get stuck after finishing one side.) Because your moves are so restricted, LBL relies on teaching you about 8 memorized move sequences (called algorithms or algs) for how to solve different cases. Because it is mostly about case recognition, I don't think LBL is very good at teaching you how the cube works. If you don't solve a cube very often, you even might forget some of those cases and not be able to solve it anymore! This page will present a different method, one that will help you understand better what you are doing. Understanding sticks much better than memorization. If you just want to learn to solve, I will leave little shortcuts for you throughout the tutorial so you can skip things that are just there to help you understand better.

I will teach you the Super Method, which has almost no memorization (1 move sequence of only 4 moves is all you need). There are many, many variants of this method going by different names. From what I can tell it is impossible to say who invented it because it seems to have been invented and reinvented so many times. The Super Method has 3 main steps which we will breakdown into substeps. The first step Thick-V solves almost 2 full layers of the cube, leaving out just a corner and an edge. The second step Last 5 Edges solves all of the edge pieces left on the cube. The third and final step Last 5 Corners solves all of the corner pieces left on the cube.

Let's get the tutorial started with Cube Notation

^* There is a theoretical move sequence that if applied to an arbitrary cube over and over will eventually solve it. Such a move sequence is called a Devil's algorithm. The Devil's number is the length of the shortest Devil's algorithm. The exact Devil's number for the cube is not known, but it is somewhere between 34,326,986,725,785,600 and 43,251,683,287,486,463,996 so unless you can memorize that many moves, what I said is true.