This week we has a speedcubing competition in Spalding, Lincolnshire, this was the first time at the Springfields venue and it is definitely an excellent venue and I suspect we will have many more competitions there in the future. The competition also had 4 rounds of Pyraminx, essentially because Daniel Partridge was a main organiser and wanted to improve his own 2.00 NR pyraminx average! Unfortunately for him, he failed to improve his own single or average but Edward Burgess got a pyraminx NR single of 1.17
Scramble: U' R' L' R' U' B' R' L R L' B u' l r'
Other notable results at the competition include Jacob Chamber's 3.65 clock average, which does not break his previous world record but is still a better average than anyone else in the world has ever achieved.
Around the world we saw some controversy surrounding Yiheng Wang (王艺衡), he achieved a 4.75 world record 3x3x3 average but it was later discovered that one of the solves was a miscramble that only affected the AUF, meaning the actual difference was irrelevant. He was given a provisional extra but got a 6 on it which lost him the world record average, it is now up to the World Cube Association to determine whether the world record can count, previously world records have been accepted when they have been miscrambles (such as Feliks Zemdegs 6.88 OH world record) but other times they have been DNFed.
Ruihang Xu achieved a 3.86 single at Singapore Championships last weekend which was DNFed recently as it was a miscramble which was actually helpful to the solve as it set up an x-cross edge, this allowed him to beat Yiheng Wang who achieved a 3.95 on the correct scramble.
Nicholas Naing got a 29.06 North American Record megaminx average at Pretzel Mania 2023 which places him 2nd in the world
Tymon Kolasinski equalled his own European Record 3x3x3 single of 3.97 at Flatasen Open 2023, this makes him the first person to get 2 official sub-4 second 3x3x3 singles.
Michael Tripodi got the 4x4x4 blindfolded Oceanic record average of 1:54.92 at Brilliant Ballarat 2023
Tymon Kolasinski also achieved the 6x6x6 European Record average of 1:13.85 at Flatasen Open 2023
In other news, the new MoYu HuaMeng YS3M 3x3x3 is now available on speedcubing.org, this cube comes in 3 versions, a standard version, a maglev version and a ball core version. This cube is designed in some part by YuSheng Du who still holds the 3x3x3 world record single of 3.47. It is probably going to go down as MoYu's 2023 flagship despite its lower than expected price tag, it is only slightly more than the RS3M 2022 cubes which are considered to be budget cubes, they have also not included a magnet adjustment system this time which is surprising but I suppose they have concluded that most people don't care about that and would rather the cube be a bit cheaper without one.
Gan have released the Gan Halo Timer which will soon be available on speedcubing.org, they have also released a mat to go with it and will be releasing a new smartcube, the Gan 12 UI, however, this is likely to be very expensive so may only be for those willing to pay a lot, Gan have suggested that this product will come out for a while but it seems likely that it will soon finally be released.
SengSo have also released a few new interesting puzzles which should be available on speedcubing.org soon, including the mirror square-1 and square-0.
YuXin have released a corner helicopter cube which looks pretty challenging to solve, it appears to basically be a 2x2x2 with rotatable corners and rotatable sections around the edges, I will have to wait and see what this actually looks like in practice.
