When the Rubik’s Cube made its debut in the 1980s, the brainpans—wannabe and otherwise—finally had a game that challenged their mental mettle. If you were the average person, fiddling with your cube to never align the designated colors was the norm. But if you were that rare combination of gifted problem solver and quick thinker, a career was born.
Speedcubing is as simple as it gets, concept-wise: solve the Rubik’s Cube as quickly as humanly possible. If you ask a speedcuber, they’ll be quick to tell you that what they do is a sport; a competition of mental toughness. One must think in a hurry and act without hesitation. The more speedcubing is explained, the more it starts to sound like other games around.
Don’t get carried away, though. Just because some use algorithms to break the Rubik’s, that doesn’t mean they’ll be able to shatter the algorithm of slot machines or guess the next number to hit on the roulette wheel. But while these games and the cube don’t share much in common, speedcubing is closely kin to another casino game in nature: poker.
Before you go off the deep end and are insulted by the analogy, think of it in terms of what it takes to play, not what the particular rules and tools are. In order to be the best poker player, you’re required to have a strong memory. You must also think in a hurry and act without hesitation – possessing no fear of your opponent’s current move. While they’re not exactly the same, similar principles do apply. The best poker players possess an uncanny ability use their brains as calculators, recalling moves past and predicting moves future. Speedcubers must employ the same technique to achieve victory.
In both respective sports, the world is filled to the brim with mediocre talent. There are a lot of people who can put a cube together quickly. Conversely, there are a lot of poker players who can make the right call 9 out of 10 times. It’s that extra bit of brilliance that separates the winners from the losers. In poker, that one wrong call will send you home. With the Rubik’s, one slipped second will cost you the competition.
Not only do these games require extreme knowledge; they also require intense focus on a singular goal at a time. It may be true that top poker pros cannot throw a Rubik’s Cube together in under a minute, and vice versa with the cubers winning a tournament, but mutual adoration for the craft should be given. The parallels are undeniable. And who knows; maybe it won’t take long for Rubik’s Cube competitions to receive the notoriety of their all-too-similar counterpart.
That would be a great moral victory for cubers everywhere. Who wouldn’t want to be on ESPN?