Santo Domingo Summer 2025 (Day 2/2)

Read Part 1 here!

Today was the second day of SD Summer 2025, and what I considered the main day. Usually here cubing competitions last 2 days, the first day has most of the events, but the second one has the events most people compete in. In this case there were just three: 3x3, 2x2, and 4x4.

The first event of the day was the first round of the standard 3x3 Rubik's cube! Naturally the most popular event. I immediately started off with a heavily discouraging 30, we don't talk about that. I did return to my standard times, though, with a 15 for my second solve and then three 16s in a row to cap off the average! In the end it was a 16.55 average, which beat my previous PR of 17.76 by over a second! And although no singular solve was particularly amazing, they were all consistently good!

After that was 2x2, which is the shortest/fastest event for most people but not really with me, Skewb probably beats it. It is one of those events where I get rusty with during competitions, and it showed, as my average was slightly worse than what I do at home but still pretty decent. I got two 5s and three 7s, and ended up with an average of 6.56.

Then there was 4x4, which was the event I was the most uncertain about coming into the competition, since its cutoff was a minute but I average 1:07. I didn't really come with the expectations to make the cutoff, and I was correct, as I got a 1:06 and 1:08 and didn't proceed, but that was fine! No picture of it though.

After that, though, was the second round of 3x3! And I knew that I wasn't gonna make it to the finals since I am not of that skill level yet, so I just went in with the hopes of just getting another good average for my profile. Now, although I didn't get a super amazing solve, this average does hold a very impressive record, that funnily enough is the complete opposite from my first average of the competition in Square-1 yesterday.

This was my most consistent average ever. I got an 18 to start, but after that every single solve was a 16! The average ended up being of 16.68 seconds, which wasn't as good as my first one but still over a second faster than my previous PR. The standard deviation of all the solves was just 0.87, and that is very much carried by the lone 18, discarding it its of 0.25, which is insanely consistent. (For reference, yesterday's Square-1 average had a standard deviation of 15.82)

And yes, that meant that 7/10 of my 3x3 solves in this competition were 16s, which is insane.

That was it for my competition run, however I stayed for the whole thing for the awards and also help clean up the stage and stuff. However, due to a particularly good performance in a certain event yesterday, I had an additional reason I wanted to stay…

After 10 competitions, I won my first award! A bronze medal for Skewb!!!

It was an amazing moment, and even though my prime objective isn't to really win awards at these competitions, it is just extremely nice to have this attached to me now! Not to mention how I also got the second best Skewb single ever from my country along with it!

Also, unrelated to the competition results, but I also got a nice piece of art! My name written out on Copper wire, which was made by Ruddy!

I already talked about this a lot yesterday so I won't repeat it too much, but I'm super happy to have the opportunity to spend time in a competition of a hobby I love with people who share the same passion for it, and it was just an extremely positive experience.

Yes, the awards are very nice, but what I loved doing the most was being able to interact with others who also love this hobby! Sharing techniques, passing cubes around just to try them out, joking about stuff, and also just helping around with things! I helped judge, set up the stand for PuzzleMania (our local cube store), and generally help others who either needed help with techniques, or just people passing buy who wanted to learn more about the hobby or even buy stuff!

I am extremely happy to be part of a community that is so open and inviting, and I hope I can be as positive of an influence in it as I can! The community helped me get past some tough times previously in my life, and I love being able to partake and give back to it in any way that I can! :)