⚡ Advanced CFOP
For once you already know all of CFOP. Normal CFOP solves the last slot, then looks at the top and does OLL, then looks again and does PLL — three separate looks. These techniques read the last slot and the top together and solve some of it in one move, so there is less to look at and less to do.
The techniques
Stepping through
To set it up on a real cube, do:
The same case with the left hand:
Move—
The cases
How to Use It
- Why bother, when normal CFOP already works
- Full CFOP is Cross, first two layers, orient the top, permute the top — four looks at the cube. These techniques fold the last F2L pair and the top layer into one look: you glance at the last slot and the top corners at the same time, and one algorithm does both. Fewer pauses is most of how solvers get from thirty seconds to under fifteen.
- Learn full CFOP first
- None of this makes sense until F2L, OLL and PLL are second nature — every technique here is a shortcut around a normal OLL step, and you need to recognise a normal OLL to know when the shortcut does not apply. If that is not you yet, Learn CFOP is the place to start.
- They only cover some cases
- None of these techniques replace OLL and PLL outright — they catch the last slot in particular states and turn what would have been a separate OLL into nothing extra at all. The rest of the time, you just insert the pair normally and do OLL as usual. That is why each set here is smaller than the 57 of OLL: these are the situations worth a special answer, not a whole new system.
- Reading the pictures
- Same as everywhere else on this site: real sticker colours, worked out by running the algorithm backwards from a solved cube, so the picture and the algorithm can never disagree. Two rows are shown rather than one, because the last slot matters here as much as the top does.
- Where to start
- Winter Variation first — it is the smallest set and the most commonly taught next step after plain CFOP. The others are independent of each other, so learn them in whichever order suits what you keep running into.