Former Rubik's Cube record holder to compete at Charlottetown's first 'speedcubing' event

He's no longer a record holder, but Labrador resident Rhivu Rashid can still solve a Rubik's Cube in far less time than most less than 10 seconds.

Rashid,a former five-time national champion in his native country of Bangladesh,is coming to Charlottetown for P.E.I.'s first speedcubing competition on Sunday.

"If I make it to the final in Charlottetown, I'd be more than happy," Rashid told Island Morning host Mitch Cormier.

The competitive sport known as "speedcubing" involve solving twisty puzzles, such as the Rubik's Cube, as quickly as possible.

Rashidwho lives in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador, where he hosts the CBC radio show Labrador Morningstarted solving Rubik's Cubes when he was in Grade 10 in Bangladesh.

He quickly worked his way up to being crowned national champion there.

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In 2017, he moved to Newfoundland to study at Memorial University, and gave up speedcubing competitions to focus on his studies.

The Charlottetown event will be his first speedcubing competition in seven years.

"Nowadays when I'm trying to practice, I feel like my fingers are not that fast anymore," Rashid said.

Although anyone can be good at speedcubing, he explained, the fastest cubers in the world right now are between four and six years old.

'Can't just recognize patterns'

This year's competition coincides with the 50th anniversary of the invention of the Rubik's Cubeby its namesake, Hungarian architecture professorErn Rubik in 1974.

One element to being a successful speedcuber is patience, Rashid said, since you need to practice a lot.

"Sometimes people don't understand how much practice goes into this," he said."If you want to solve [it] within or under 10 seconds, you need to do something intuitively, and you need to use your brain for that.

"You can't just recognize patterns."

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In competition, cubers are given 15 seconds of preparation time to inspect the cube before they start to solve it.

"During that inspection time the goal is to plan ahead as much as we can," Rashid said.

Rashid said he uses that time to planhis first step, which in the most popular solving method is called a "cross" making a cross shape on the bottom of the cube with one colour, usually white.

First event of its kind on P.E.I.

Sunday's event, called the Charlottetown Mini, is P.E.I.'s first official World Cube Association competition, according to organizer Speedcubing Canada.

The organization told CBC News that27 people have registered for the event, which will include two separate competitions one for the classic cube featuring nine coloured squares per side, and one for a smaller cube with four blocks.

The current world records for those two cube types are 3.13 secondsand 0.43 seconds, respectively, according to theWorld Cube Association. Both records were set last year.

The first round of P.E.I.'s competition starts at 1:15 pm at the Charlottetown Library Learning Centre.

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Growing community

During the seven years Rashid has been away from the cubing community, he said the activity has grown a lot.

"When I started the community support was not there," he recalled. "But now the whole community is coming together to learn from each other."

Though cubing is not the type of contest where competitors will earn much money, Rashid said it has brought him more than just bragging rights.

"I have some amazing friendships and relationships that I've got through cubing," he said. "And those relations have helped me get through my Canadian life too.

"Whenever I was stuck, I could go back to those people who are not connected through bloodbut through this hobby."