Santo Domingo Autumn 2025 (Day 2/2)

Read Part 1 here!

First of all, I do wanna get it over with real quick. Yes, today is my birthday! And this is also my 50th post on this blog!! Hooray!!! Now onto the actual competition.

Even just outside of it being my birthday, today was a very good day. Competitions always allow me to spend time with friends, which I adore, but this time for some reason felt especially fun, and I interacted with a lot of people!

As for the result, like usual, the second day of competitions feature 3x3, 2x2, and 4x4, the most popular events.

The first event was 4x4, which just like last time I did not make the 1 minute cut-off. My second solve was a mediocre 1:08.17, however my first solve was an absolutely crushing 1:35.09, where I forgot to pair two edges until last layer, and as a result got both OLL and PLL parity.

I can only describe how I was feeling with this Dropout clip. /lh

The rest of the competition went better though! In the first round of 3x3 I got a decent 19.18 average! My times were a (20.35), 19.11, 20.15, 18.27, and (16.58)! Not much to say about any particular solves really, but they were fine, I didn't mess up anything.

It was enough to just barely make it to Round 2, by literally the last spot (22nd)! Also I wanna point out my friend Nestor, who runs our local cube shop, got 23rd lol

Then there was 2x2! Where I broke my personal best average by 0.03 seconds, to 5.57! The only PR I broke this competition. My times were 4.40, (4.10), (7.53), 5.37, and 6.94.

I am quite proud of this one, especially the two 4s! Which are my third and fourth best official 2x2 solves, only beaten by some extremely flukey 3s in the past.

And lastly, 3x3 Round 2! Where I got a 19.35 ao5! Technically not as good as the first one, but I am quite proud of it as I got a 15 and only a single 20! Although I wish I would've gotten them all sub-20, I don't think all of the tiredness from yesterday has went away, so that's alright.

The specific times were 19.66, (20.59), 19.77, 18.63, and (15.25).

And that's it! Once again, although it wasn't as good as the previous competition in terms of performance, this has probably been my favourite competition to date (though admittedly it is incredibly hard to decide, last year was fantastic as well).

As I said, today was just an amazing day. I not only spent more time cubing with my friends, but I also played some other games with them, got into a few shenanigans trying to find my lost 4x4 (which I luckily found! It was switcheroo-d with somebody else's), saw my sister and her husband who came to visit despite being quite far away, talked a bit to a news team which came to visit, and helped with taking down the set for the comp when it was over!

Today was a fantastic day no matter which way I look at it, I wouldn't change a single thing about it, and more than anything I am so glad that I was able to spend it doing something I love with people I love.

Thank you! 💚