Andrej Karpathy teaches fingertricks for the F2L stage of speedcubing, showing how to execute moves like U R U' R' with finger flicks instead of palm twists. He emphasizes that a well-lubricated cube and extensive practice are essential to master these techniques and increase solve speed.
Chapters
I received a few requests for making some fingertricks videos, so here's my attempt at it. Fingertricks are a very important part of getting faster. They're basically just ways of holding the cube so that performing certain algorithms becomes very efficient, very fast, and most of the time they also look very cool. In this video, I'll go over some fingertricks that I use for F2L. All of the fingertricks I'll show you are just tricks I derived myself. It is no rocket science, I always just simply try to find better ways of inserting F2L pairs while I practice. Sometimes I even prefer a faster way to handle an F2L pair as opposed to choosing the shortest way to insert that pair, just due to fingertricks. Thankfully though, most of the time the optimal ways are usually fast too, so that's good. Okay, so here we go, first example. White one's up, edge is already inserted. Now while I do the fingertrick, notice that I never let go of the cube with my hands. That is important. Also, I never use full palm twists because they are slow. Most of the time I use my fingers like this. If you can't turn your layers with just your fingers like this, then your cube is not properly lubricated and you're going to have to do that, otherwise you will not be able to perform finger tricks. Anyway, you're going to perform one sequence of moves 3 times to solve this case. So the sequence of moves is U U R U' R'. Second time, U R U' R' U R U' R'. And that solves the case. Let me set it up again. White one's up, I just already inserted it. U, okay, again. Now I'll do it fast. Well, that wasn't too fast, but anyway, you get the idea. Okay, let's see another case. White points to the left this time, edge is already inserted. Start with the corner here, and we do— okay, so I'll do it slower now. Notice that I use that double-click thing, and this is very difficult to master, and I mean, it took me some time, but you should start practicing the double-click because it helps a lot in F2L because you have to do a lot of U2 moves. Anyway, I'll do it fast now. Okay, this is another case. We've got the corner already inserted, the edge is here, these two colors are different, can be aligned here. We do— we start like this, holding the cube like this, Use this finger to slide it over. Go down and use this finger to slide it over. Then go up again. Use this finger to slide it in and use this to go down again. Okay, so I'll do it again. There we go. Okay. I'll do it fast now. We have another case where the white, instead of being here, is now here. That edge is in the same spot. We start like this, holding here. Okay, so let me set up again. We go this finger down, this finger here, here, here. Notice that I never let go with my fingers of this grip here. I never do that, and I always just use this finger here and this finger here. That's important. I'll do it again. Okay, I'll try to do it faster. Okay, I'll show you another one. We've got this case here. Start like this. Okay, let's set it up again. And there's different ways of doing it. I like to do this twice, and it's not as fast. Maybe some people prefer to let go of the grip briefly to do a double turn like that. Maybe some people can do double flick with the left hand. I can't do it. Anyway, so here I do double flick like this, and it's slow, but, uh, I mean, it works for me best. Okay, so I'll do it now faster. So that's one of the slower ones. Okay, I'll show you one more. We have this case. We work on them from this angle, and we start like this: down, right, up, left, down, left, up. Okay, this case, they both come here. Down, up. Okay, so now fast. Okay, that's just some of the examples of finger tricks. Again, you won't be able to do these effectively without a lot of practice and a very well lubricated cube. Also, store-bought cubes might not be good enough. You may have to get a DIY cube like I use. If you want to do fingertricks really fast. Also, I just started using this lubricant, it's called Jigaloo, it's pretty awesome, so you may want to get some of that stuff. I'll post links in the video description on how to get DIY cubes and that thing. And I hope you learned something, if you did, post about it in the comments, it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. Anyway, thanks for watching and bye-bye.
