How to get started with the Square-1

The Square-1 was designed by  Karel Hršel and  Vojtěch Kopský around the year 1990. Since then, it has grown in popularity and is now an official event in WCA competitions.

• Hardware, whats the best Square-1 currently on the market?                                

• Algorithms & Methods, What's best?                                

• How to set up a Square-1 and what lube is best to use?

Hardware

Currently, the best Square-1 in many cubers opinion is the  QiYi X-man Volt  , this Square-1 is stable, fast and second to none. Okay, so what about Lube? If you haven't already, grab a bottle of  DNM-37  and  Lubicle Silk  to lube the puzzle with. When you first get it, take the screw out and put a very thin piece of paper next to the screw. This is hard to do, but is worth it! Then, put the screw back in and tension to your liking.

How to lube a Square-1

Methods & Algs

Once you're happy with your Square-1, then you can start learning cube shape on the square-one. Andrew Nelsons site is excellent for this, but instead of learning all of the monotonous numbers, I would consider it better to write the descriptions of where you line up the cases, and then what slices you need to do to get to scallop kite - the most common cube shape that a lot of the others go through. You could do a lot of cube-shape only solves, until you get to the point where, when you see a cube-shape, you can go "this is easy - just 2 slices into scallop kite", or "one slice into shield square ( a fast cube-shape where you have a square shape on the bottom, and three adjacent corners on the top as well as two groups of two edges, separated by a corner.”

After cube-shape, then it should be easy to learn the next few stages - CO is 7 very short intuitive algorithms that put the corners of the same colour on the same side that you can easily work out on your own, EO is a similar amount of algorithms that puts all of white on top and yellow on bottom (or the other way round), and CO is 7 algorithms that are quick and finger tricky.

Finally, EP is when you permute all of the edges. It contains 99 algorithms - 50 of which have parity, where, due to the way cube shape works, an odd number of saps can occur. This is annoying to fix, but some of the nicer cases are not nearly as bad as expected. To get sub-12, you only need to learn 15 EP's - 7/8 without parity (including things such as H perm, Z perm and opposite-opposite swap (M2 U2 M2)) and 7/8 with parity (including swapping 2 adjacent pieces, 2 opposite pieces and doing a U perm on the top and an adjacent swap on the bottom.

(View our full range of Square-1 puzzles)

Resources