Puzzles

In December of 2005, my brother John came back during his Christmas holiday from college and showed me a video of a friend of his solving a Rubik’s Cube in around 90 seconds. This intrigued me, so I looked into it a bit, and put a Rubik’s Cube on my “to-get” list.  In late February of 2006, I heard about the world record for the Rubik’s Cube being broken with a time of 11.13 seconds.  About a week later, I bought a Rubik’s Cube on eBay, and since never looked back.  This sparked my interest in this type of twisty puzzle.

Fast forward to present day, and I now have nearly 70 different twisty puzzles, including 17 3×3’s.  I’ve become somewhat of a puzzle collector, but more important a puzzle “speedsolver”.  I now solve puzzles for the art of speed, called “speedcubing”. I guess you can say the hobby has changed my life.  Now only have I spent countless enjoying hours practicing and learning about puzzles,  I’ve traveled to 4 different US Nationals, 1 Worlds in Germany, several UK competitions, and have met many people that I would call friends.  I also have a competition official average of 12.41 seconds, with a single of 10.09 seconds for the standard 3×3 Rubik’s Cube.  If I had posted the times I post now back in 2006, I would hold the world record today.  The fact of the matter is that the hobby has become much more competitive, and times on all competitive twisty puzzles has declined rapidly over the past years.  Although I still practice and solve puzzles quite often, I am not in it so much for the competition anymore, but more for the travel and meeting with old friends and making new ones.

You can browse my puzzle-related pages using the menu at the top under the “Puzzles” section.  If you’re interested in purchasing any twisty related puzzles, you can buy the latest and greatest puzzles at the Speedsolving.com Puzzle Shop (shop.speedsolving.com).