Learn to solve it — for life
This is the classic beginner's method: seven stages, four or five short algorithms, and a bit of looking. It's exactly the same method the solver uses, so every solution you watch doubles as a lesson.
00 Know your cube
The single biggest unlock: a cube isn't 54 stickers — it's 26 pieces, and the pieces never change. You solve pieces, not stickers.
Centres 6
One sticker each, and they never move relative to each other. White is always opposite yellow, green opposite blue, red opposite orange. The centre is the face's colour.
Edges 12
Two stickers each. The green-red edge belongs exactly between the green and red centres — nowhere else. An edge can sit in its slot correctly, or flipped.
Corners 8
Three stickers each. A corner can be in the right place but twisted — that's why the last two stages of the method treat "placing" and "twisting" separately.
01 Speak cube: the notation
Every move is named after a face: Up, Down, Left, Right, Front and Back. A letter on its own means turn that face clockwise (as if you were looking straight at it). An apostrophe (R', say "R prime") means anticlockwise, and a 2 (R2) means twice.
Try every button on this practice cube until each one feels obvious — it's the alphabet for everything below.
02 The seven stages
Each demo cube starts one algorithm away from solved — press Watch it to see the algorithm do its job, drag the cube to view it from any angle, and reset to watch again.
1 The white cross
Find the four edge pieces with a white sticker and steer them to the bottom so the white stickers form a plus sign — and each edge's other colour lines up with the centre beside it. This stage is best solved by looking and thinking rather than memorising: move each white edge up to the top layer, spin the top until it sits over its matching centre, then drop it in with a double turn. The demo shows that final drop.
F2the drop-in2 The white corners
Now fill in the four white corners. Put a white corner in the top layer directly above its home, then repeat the famous four-move trigger until it clicks into place — it can take up to five repeats, and that's fine. This one four-move sequence is the most useful thing your hands will ever learn on a cube.
R U R' U'the trigger — repeat as needed3 The middle layer
Two layers to go, and no white or yellow stickers involved: just the four middle edges. Spin the top until an edge's front colour matches the centre below it, making an upside-down T. If the piece then needs to go down-and-right, use the algorithm shown here; going left is the same idea mirrored. If an edge is stuck in the wrong slot, insert any piece into that slot first — it pops back to the top.
U R U' R' U' F' U Finsert to the right4 The yellow cross
Flip the cube in your mind: everything now happens on top. Ignore the corners and just get the four yellow edges pointing up. You'll see one of three pictures: a dot, an L-shape, or a line. Hold the L-shape in the top-left (or the line horizontal) and do this algorithm — each time you do it, the picture upgrades until the cross appears.
F R U R' U' F'dot → L → line → cross5 Match the yellow edges
The yellow cross is up, but the side colours of those four edges probably don't match their centres yet. Spin the top to line up as many as you can, then use the "Sune" to cycle the rest around until every edge matches. You might need it a couple of times — that's normal.
R U R' U R U2 R'the Sune6 Place the yellow corners
Get each yellow corner into its correct position, even if it's twisted — a corner between the red, green and yellow faces belongs between those three centres. Find one that's already in the right spot, hold it at the front-right, and run this algorithm to cycle the other three round. No corner right? Run it once anyway and one will be.
U R U' L' U R' U' Lcycles three corners7 Twist the corners home
The home straight. Hold a twisted corner at the front-right and repeat the four moves shown until its yellow sticker points up. Then — using only top turns, never turning the whole cube — bring the next twisted corner to the front-right and repeat. The bottom layers will look destroyed halfway through. Keep going. They snap back the instant the final corner twists into place.
R' D' R D R' D' R Dtwice per twist — trust the process03 Level up: CFOP
CFOP (Cross, F2L, OLL, PLL) is the method most speedcubers use — it's the beginner method with the middle steps fused together. Our solver has a CFOP mode, so you can watch it applied to your own cube.
1 F2L — pair up, drop in
The big idea: instead of solving all four white corners and then all four middle edges (eight separate insertions), you join each corner to its matching edge in the top layer and drop the pair in together with a single trigger. Same result, nearly half the moves. It's slower at first, then dramatically faster — every speedcuber's rite of passage.
R U R'a made pair dropping into its slot2 Two-look OLL & PLL
After F2L, the last layer takes four short looks: yellow cross, yellow corners (stages 4 and 7 you already know), then permuting corners and edges with two new friends — the T-perm below, which swaps two corners and two edges without twisting anything, and the U-perm for the final edges. Full CFOP eventually replaces these with 57 OLL + 21 PLL algorithms — but two-look solves the cube just fine while you get there.
R U R' U' R' F R2 U' R' U' R U R' F'the T-perm04 A different road: Roux
Roux (invented by Gilles Roux in 2003) skips the cross entirely. You build a 1×2×3 block on the left, another on the right, sort the remaining corners, and finish everything else using only the middle slice (M) and the top. Fewer moves than CFOP, very intuitive — and it looks like sorcery.
1 The M slice
Roux's signature move: M turns the middle layer between L and R (it follows the left face's direction). The whole endgame of a Roux solve — "LSE", the last six edges — is solved with nothing but M and U turns. The demo shows an H-perm built purely from slice moves.
M2 U M2 U2 M2 U M2an LSE-style finish — only M and U2 Blocks, not layers
A Roux solve: first block (1×2×3 on the bottom-left), second block (mirror it on the right), CMLL (fix the four top corners in one algorithm), then LSE. Because blocks are built by eye rather than by formula, Roux rewards lookahead and intuition over memorisation — many top solvers swear by it. Our solver doesn't speak Roux yet, but the notation playground above handles M moves, so you can start practising the slices today.