3BLD · Beginner

The idea

In a blind solve you inspect the scrambled cube, memorise a plan, put on a blindfold and execute it without looking. The plan is a list of 3-cycles of pieces, built from the cube's own cycle structure.

Every piece is either in place or part of a cycle. You choose one piece as a buffer and trace the cycle from it: the buffer piece belongs somewhere, whichever piece is there belongs somewhere else, and so on until you return to the buffer. Each step of the trace is a target you will 'shoot' to later.

Lettering the pieces

To memorise the trace you give every sticker a letter. The Speffz scheme (A to X, four letters on each face) is the usual standard. Any consistent scheme works. What matters is that you always read the same letter for the same sticker.

Corners and edges are traced separately, with a buffer for each. The common choices are the front-right-up corner and the front-up edge.

Executing the cycles

Each 3-cycle uses one fixed algorithm plus setup moves that bring the target piece into the algorithm's position, and the same setup moves in reverse afterwards. Here are two pure 3-cycles: one for edges, one for corners. Neither disturbs any other piece.

Parity

If you end with one leftover swap in the edges and one in the corners, you have parity. Fix it with a single move sequence that swaps two edges and two corners, then continue as normal. The J-perm swaps two top-layer edges (front and right) and two top-layer corners (front-right and back-right), so you pick your targets around it.

Practising

Practise the memorisation and the execution separately. Execute with your eyes open at first, then closed. Memorise by making each letter pair into a short image so that a long string becomes a short story.