Ruihang Xu's 2.68

Xu Ruihang has quickly emerged as one of the world's fastest speedcubers, achieving several sub-6 averages including some Asian records in his most recent WCA competitions, but today we'll be taking a look at one of his brilliant unofficial solves, which is now the fastest ever done on camera. Starting with a white cross, you'll notice that this red cross piece is already solved and the blue, green, and orange pieces are ready to be inserted while pairing up this red blue. He's going to look ahead to this orange and green pair during inspection, inserting this into the back right after completing the cross. And you could look further into inspection, but I'm just going to start the solution now. So solving the cross pieces like this, and now a very nice placement, ready to go right into inserting this orange and green pair into the back, which very conveniently sets up this pair into a three mover and solves both of these pairs. And now you might be starting to get an impression of why this was such a fast solve. And, well, Ruihang has some of the world's fastest rotations, perfectly rotating into this second pair, rotating back, and notice this block. Track the pieces as we insert this next pair. At this point, an astute observer may have noticed that we can now cancel into OLL, but Ruihang didn't do that, inserting the pair and then doing the OLL that we could have cancelled into. But just in case you're curious, this case, not too hard to recognize, just have to insert it like this and finish. But let's not overlook that he likely planned that fourth pair during this short pause between second and third pair, allowing him blistering turn speed to finish off those last two F2L pairs. Often simple solutions are better on average, especially when you have the incredible turn speed that Ruihang has. And you'll see this in a lot of his solves, choosing simple solutions, maybe not noticing some more efficient cases, but unless he's seeing this stuff ahead of time during inspection, his simple strategy will work really well on average and his consistent results certainly demonstrate this. So starting off with the start here, you'll notice that he has a very, very fast pickup, placing the cube very close to his hands and doing that first turn as he picks up the cube. He does this on almost all of the solves, inserting that first pair very quickly after doing the cross. And now he likely saw this second pair during inspection. I don't see how else he would have rotated this quickly, but he certainly does rotate quickly, ready to insert this pair. And now for those last two pairs. Well, at this point, he could have recognized that last layer skip, but you know, even without recognizing it, simple solution, incredible speed, and that's how you get a 2.68.