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Beginner's method · one hour

How to Solve a Rubik's Cube

You solve a Rubik’s cube one layer at a time: white cross, white corners, middle layer, yellow cross, yellow face, then position the last layer’s corners and edges. That is seven stages and eight algorithms, and it works on any scramble. Expect about an hour to your first solve and around a hundred moves each time after that.

Before you start: how to hold it

Hold the cube with white on top and green facing you. On a standard cube that puts yellow underneath, blue behind, red on the right and orange on the left. Those six centres are attached to the core, so they never move relative to each other — they are the map. When an instruction says “the front-right slot”, it means the slot between the green centre and the red one, wherever the cube happens to be pointing.

The six letters name the faces from where you are standing: U up, D down, R right, L left, F front, B back. A plain letter turns that face a quarter turn clockwise as you look at it, an apostrophe turns it anticlockwise, and a 2 turns it halfway. The full reference is on the notation page.

The seven stages

  1. Understand what actually moves

    A Rubik's cube is 20 moving pieces, not 54 stickers: eight three-coloured corners and twelve two-coloured edges. The six centres are bolted to a cross in the middle and never move relative to each other, which is why the white centre defines the white face no matter how scrambled the cube looks. Every method starts from that fact, because it means you always know where a piece belongs.

  2. Make the white cross

    Get the four white edges around the white centre so that each one's second colour matches the centre of the face it touches. There is no algorithm here — look at where a piece is, work out where it needs to go, and move it there. Getting the side colours right is the whole point; a white plus sign with mismatched sides will fail two steps later.

  3. Finish the white layer

    Put the four white corners in. Find one in the top layer, turn U until it sits directly above its slot, then repeat the right-hand insert until it drops in with white facing down. It takes one, three or five repetitions depending on how the corner is twisted, and repeating it is always correct — you can never make it worse.
    U R U' R'

  4. Fill the middle layer

    Turn the cube over so white is on the bottom. Look for a top-layer edge with no yellow on it, turn U until its front sticker matches the front centre, then send it left or right depending on which slot it belongs in. If a middle-layer slot has the wrong edge in it, insert any other edge to kick the wrong one out and deal with it next.
    U R U' R' U' F' U F (right) U' L' U L U F U' F' (left)

  5. Make the yellow cross

    Only the edges matter now — ignore the corners completely. You will see one of four patterns: a dot, an L, a line, or the cross. Run the algorithm once from the dot and you get a line or an L; run it again and you get the cross. Hold an L so the arms point up and to the left; hold a line so it runs left to right.
    F U R U' R' F'

  6. Make the whole top face yellow

    Now orient the corners. Hold the cube so a yellow corner sits at the front-left, run Sune, look again, repeat. One to three repetitions always finishes it. The cube will look wrecked partway through each run — that is normal and unavoidable, because the algorithm has to break the first two layers to reach the corners.
    R U R' U R U2 R'

  7. Put the last layer where it belongs

    Two steps left. First position the corners: find one that is already home — all three of its colours match the faces it touches — hold it at the back right, and run the corner cycle until the rest land. Then position the edges with the U-perm, holding the one correct edge at the back. When that finishes, the cube is solved.
    U R U' L' U R' U' L then R U' R U R U R U' R' U' R2

What to expect at each stage

Typical ranges for a random scramble, half-turn metric. Total around 100 moves.
StageMovesNew algorithmsDifficulty
White cross8–120Easy once you look for side colours
White corners20–301Easy — repeat until it drops in
Middle layer24–321 plus its mirrorThe first real hurdle
Yellow cross6–181Easy, but hold the shape correctly
Yellow face7–211Nerve-wracking the first few times
Corner positions8–241Spotting the solved corner is the skill
Last edges11–221Easy

Where to go next

Once you can solve unaided, the biggest single improvement is F2L: instead of placing a corner and then its edge separately, you pair them in the top layer and insert both together. It removes roughly 30 moves from every solve and it is intuitive rather than memorised — you can work out most cases yourself.

After that comes two-look OLL and two-look PLL, which cut the last layer from four algorithms to two. Everything you need is on the algorithms page, and the timer will tell you honestly whether the change helped.

One warning about Sune: R U R' U R U2 R' looks like the right-hand insert with extra moves, and it is easy to run R U R' U R U R' by accident. The U2 is the whole point of the algorithm.

Check your work

Solve as far as you can, then enter the cube below exactly as it stands. The solver finishes from any position, so you can see how few moves the rest actually needed — and if your cube is genuinely impossible, it will say which piece is wrong.

Move 1 of 20 — Front face clockwise

Solution

20 moves

The first 9 moves put every corner and edge the right way up and the middle-slice edges back in the middle slice. The last 11 finish the cube using only U, D and half turns.

Pick a colour, then click the squares

Up
U
Right
R
Front
F
Down
D
Left
L
Back
B

Tab to any square and press 1–6 to paint it. Hold the mouse down to drag across several at once.

Applies the moves to a solved cube. Useful if you already have a competition scramble and want to see how it is meant to come apart.

Common questions

How long does it take to learn to solve a Rubik's cube?
About an hour to get through a first solve with a guide open, and a few days of practice before you can do it unaided. The bottleneck is not the algorithms — there are only eight — it is learning to recognise which case you are looking at, and that comes from repetition rather than study.
Do I have to be good at maths?
No. The beginner's method is pattern recognition and muscle memory. The mathematics behind why it works is genuinely interesting — the cube is a group of order 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 — but you never need to think about it to solve one.
Why does the cube get worse in the middle of an algorithm?
Because every last-layer algorithm has to disturb the finished layers to move pieces around, then put them back. That is the price of working one layer at a time, and it is why the beginner's method takes about 100 moves when 20 would do. Finish the sequence and the damage undoes itself.
What is the fastest method after the beginner's one?
CFOP. It keeps the cross, then solves each corner and its neighbouring edge together as a pair (F2L), then orients the last layer in one algorithm (OLL) and permutes it in one more (PLL). Full CFOP is 78 algorithms and averages about 55 moves. Most people learn F2L first and stay on the beginner's last layer for months, which is a perfectly good plan.
Should I use a solver while learning?
As a check, yes. Solve as far as you can, then enter the half-finished cube here and step through the answer on the 3D cube to see what you missed. What does not help is using a solver instead of learning — you end up able to follow 20 moves and unable to solve anything.

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