It was a very exciting weekend for UK competitors as we saw the first ever sub-4 second 3x3 solves achieved by british speedcubers. The previous UK national record had stood at 4.59 by Chris Mills who is no longer competing for the UK but was at the time, James Alonso was narrowly behind with 4.60.
This all changed with one scramble at Weston Super Mare Autumn last weekend, Jake Brown was the first to execute the scramble with the fast solution, acheiving a time of 3.91, this was shortly beaten by Aidan Grainger with a time of 3.69, these times are 10th and 18th in the world right now.
The solution was nothing fancy, in fact, Feliks Zemdegs, Sebastian Weyer and Philip Weyer were at the same competition and didn't get anything special on that solve as he tried to do fancier stuff during F2L.
The scramble was the following:
| U L2 D2 B' R2 B' R2 D2 F2 U2 B L F2 L' U L' B' U' B2 |
Obviously there isn't anything initially special about this scramble but the two slightly different solutions done by Jake and Aidan both resulted in last layer skips.
both Aidan and Jake solved the cross with y2 L F2 R' L'
Jake then did D' L U L' D to pseudo-slot in the red-blue pair, while Aidan just did the simpler option of inserting the blue orange pair right away with y' U R' U2 R
Aidan then inserting the 2nd pair with R U' R' U2 R U' R, while Jake inserted the 2nd pair the same way Aidan inserted the first
Going into the 3rd pair, some really good cubers may be able to see what is coming but I don't think either of them would have seen it yet, Aidan did y' L' U2 L U' L' U L to insert the green-orange pair and then had a free pair to finish it off
Jake had a slightly different 3rd pair available due to the effect of pseudo-slotting the 1st pair in, he did y' U' L' U2 L U' L' U L and then had a slightly longer 4th pair of U2 R U R' U2 R U' R' but somehow this still resulted in a last layer skip.
I suspect the UK national record will remain at 3.69 for a very long time as last layer skips are very rare and there really isn't anyone who is likely to achieve that sort of time without one.
