Cubing
Solving, organising, teaching, and — for the last few years — trying to get cubing into schools.
I co-founded the World Cube Association, which still governs competitive cubing worldwide: it writes the regulations, sanctions the competitions, and keeps the records. I served on its board, and ran the US National Championship through 2013.
My own event was blindfolded solving — study the cube, put on a blindfold, then solve it without looking at it again. I set two world records for 3×3×3 blindfolded in 2005. Sixty-four competitions and six hundred-odd solves later I am considerably slower than the people winning now, which is the correct outcome for a sport that has been around long enough to have generations in it.
Somewhere in there I studied astrophysics at Caltech, and wrote a beginner's method that went out as an eight-part video series. Teaching the cube turned out to be the part that stuck.
There is more detail than anyone needs on Wikipedia.
Personal records
| Event | Single | Average |
|---|---|---|
| 3×3×3 | 12.43 | 15.22 |
| 3×3×3 blindfolded | 1:22.56 | 1:55.99 |
| 2×2×2 | 5.58 | 9.89 |
| 3×3×3 one-handed | 29.96 | 52.30 |
| 4×4×4 | 1:29.52 | 1:53.55 |
As of September 2026. The live version is on my WCA profile.
Learning to solve
Almost nobody works out the Rubik's Cube alone. What people need is not cleverness but a method — a fixed order to put the pieces in, and a handful of sequences that move some pieces while leaving the rest where they are. Once you have that, the cube stops being a puzzle and becomes a procedure you get faster at.
I have taught this method for about twenty years, and it is the thing I get asked for most often, so it has a page of its own.
Scholastic Cube League
The biggest thing I am working on in cubing right now.
Cubing is an individual sport with individual results, which makes it a hard fit for schools — a school can field a chess team or a debate team, but a cuber mostly competes against their own previous best. The Scholastic Cube League exists to change that: students compete in teams of three, for their school, over a season, the way every other scholastic activity works.
There are three ways in:
- DailyOnline contests anyone can enter, school or no school, with results compared against everyone else who entered that day.
- SeasonSchool leagues, where students join their school's roster and meet other schools across a season.
- FinalsA national championship — the first one is at the Westgate in Las Vegas, May 15–16, 2027.
The daily online contest is the part I would point a curious student at first. It asks nothing of their school and takes about a minute.