In this tutorial segment, the instructor walks through the third F2L (first two layers) case of the Fridrich method, detailing how to hide the edge instead of the corner, align it with its center, turn it away, and then pair it with the corner using the sequence U R U' R'. The video then covers the symmetrical version of this case, highlighting the problem of corner orientation change and introducing a general piece‑separation technique that applies to all three F2L cases. The presenter demonstrates multiple example solves that illustrate each case, discusses how to hide corners or edges without disturbing already‑solved slots, and shows how to handle joined pairs, mis‑oriented edges, and tricky situations. Throughout, the speaker emphasizes patience, practice, and the expected learning curve—initially slowing solves by about a minute, then yielding significant speed gains. The tutorial concludes with a reminder that faster algorithms exist online and provides links for further study.
Chapters
Okay, so I'm now going to discuss the third case that you can run into. I've set up the cross. Let's say you wanted to fill in this slot. The corner is here, the edge is here. This case— in this case, the white points to the top on your corner, so like here. What you want to do in this case is again form a pair like we did in case number 2, and then insert that F2L pair into its position. Position here. Instead of hiding the corner in this case though, we're going to be hiding the edge. So what you wanna do is you wanna align that edge first with the center piece that— of its color. So like this, blue with blue. Then, since we wanna insert them both into here, into this slot here, we want to turn the edge away from it like so. Then, move your corner on top of that edge. They should be paired up. Now you can unhide the edge, and as you unhide it, it's gonna pick up the corner, and you're gonna form the F2L pair that way. So we've got the pair, U R U' R'. Okay, so I'm now going to discuss the symmetrical case of case #3. Before, let's say you want to insert this green red edge and corner into this slot. Before, we had the edge aligned with the center here, and we turned it away like so, but this time we have to turn it away from the slot in this direction. The problem— I'm going to introduce another problem or difficulty here— is that when you turn it away, you're going to modify this corner's orientation. It's not going to be pointing up anymore, and that's a problem. Okay, so what we have to do is we have to separate these two pieces, and this is a general technique that you might have to apply in case #1 and case #2 as well. Separating pieces is important. How you're going to do it is that you're just simply going to hide the corner and move the edge away. So we do not care about these two yet because this slot is not filled, so we're okay just hiding the corner like so. So now we can move the edge away, and now we bring the corner back to the top layer. We just separated the two pieces. Okay, so now you can align the edge with its center, turn it away from the slot you want to put it into, move the corner above it, and I unhide that edge. It should pick up your corner, and you can just do the insertion. U' F' U F, and you're done. Using those 3 cases that I just showed you, you should be able to do the entire F2L by yourself. Please be patient though, because F2L is a pretty hard technique, and I do not expect you to be able to solve it right away. In fact, I don't even expect you to really understand it after watching this video just once. I'm now going to give you some example solves that will use most of the ideas that I discussed, and hopefully that will help you as well. Use of this method will most likely increase your times by about a minute at first, but then over the next few weeks you should start getting much more comfortable with it, and it will improve your times significantly, without a doubt. So just keep practicing, because this method is going to be your major source of success as a speedcuber. Okay, so I'm not going to bother with the explanation of cross, you should be able to do that by yourself. We're going to find the first slot that we want to solve in this top layer. For example, this blue-red slot would be pretty easy because we already have the corner in the top layer and the edge in the top layer. So the top layer is our working space, that's where we like them. The two colors on top are different, okay, so we need to first bring this edge to this position so that we can do the R U R' insertion. So I need to hide the corner, move the edge there. So hide, move the edge across the cube there, bring back the corner, and now we can do R U R'. That was case number 1. Let's see here, we have this case here. This is the slot we want to fill. The colors on top are different, so this is case number 1. The edge is already across from the corner, so this is easy. R U R'. Let's see here, we have case number 3 here, white points to the top. Take the edge, align it with its center, turn it away from the slot that you want to place it into, move the corner on top of it, and unhide that edge. Now you have a pair which you can just insert like so. We have a corner here, edge here. We need both the edge and the corner in the top because that's our working space. So first, we need to bring this edge to the top. It can be done, for example, like so. So now both the corner and the edge are in the top, so we can work with them. This is case number 2. Because the colors on top are the same. So we need to bring edge behind the corner here. We have to be very careful on how we hide this corner because we already have all the other slots filled in, so I cannot just hide it like so because I would be moving pairs that are already solved into the top layer. So I can only hide it in two ways in this case: I can hide it on the right, or I can hide it on the left. That's the only two ways I can hide this corner by bringing these two pairs to the top. Any other way would screw up something. So in this case, I need to hide it on the right because if I were to hide this on the left, then there is no easy way to place this edge behind the corner here. We want this edge to replace this edge right here, but if I hide it like so, then it comes along with it, so that's not good. We need to hide it on the right. Move it to the right, hide it, and now we need to swap these two edges in effect, so move that to its position, and now when you unhide the corner, you're gonna join them. We have an F2L pair, it can be placed easily like so, and that's it. Okay, so I'm going to do one more. I've made the cross, so let's see here. I'm trying to find a pair on the top. This corner and this edge, its corresponding edge, are both in the working area already, so I'm going to work with these two. They both need to be inserted to this position. So this is case number 2, but the problem is that they're joined, so we first have to to separate the two. So I'm going to hide the corner, move the edge away, and bring the corner back. That separated the two, and now we can work with them. This is case number 2, so I need to bring this edge behind the corner in here to replace this edge. So hide the corner away, rotate twice, and bring the corner back. I formed a pair, so I can just insert it to its correct position. So let's see here. We have another case 2 here, this corner and its edge. So we need to be careful in how we hide it now because we already have one pair already solved. So this would be an incorrect way to hide it because I'm moving them to the top. So I'm going to— I need to move this edge in place of this one. So I'm going to hide this way, bring that edge there, bring back, and this is an F2L pair which can be inserted easily. Uh, okay, so now we have these two, they are joined, so first, as always, we have to separate them. Make sure you are not messing up anything, we have to hide in a clever way. We have to hide, for example, this would be a wrong way to hide it here, because even though I'm not moving anything to the top, In process of hiding the corner, I would also be hiding the edge, so I need to have at least one of them remain on the top layer. So I'll hide it on the left, move the edge away, bring the corner back. So this is the third case because the white one's top. Align the edge with its center, turn it away, bring the corner above it, and unhide, and we have them together, and insert them both. So here we have a pretty bad case here. The edge is misoriented. First we're going to have to take them both out to our working area. Now we have to separate them because they are joined. So to separate them, for example, like this, I'm going to conveniently move it twice and I'm going to explain why. It's because this is the first case and I know that if I put I'm gonna have an easy time doing case #1 now, because I only have to do F' U F. Anyway, you'll find small tricks like that by yourself. The first 2 layers is complete. As you may have noticed in the example solves, some cases take a lot of moves. This is only due to the fact that I was trying to show you a foolproof intuitive way of doing F2L, but it is by no means the fastest way to do F2L. In fact, there are algorithms for each F2L case on the internet. I provide you with the links in the video description. So if some cases take you too many steps, you may want to look up its solution and understand the trick behind doing it faster. Many times it's something like separating two pairs in some clever way or things like that. So just be aware of that. Anyways, that's all for now. Thank you for watching and bye-bye.
