Rubik’s contest draws solvers old and new
Aidan Masterson makes it look easy. One-handed, he zips through the Rubik’s cube in front of him and tosses it down on the table — in just over 30 seconds.
It’s been a long journey for The Woodlands 13-year-old, who was diagnosed with Asperger’s and Tourette syndrome seven years ago. He’s struggled to fit in, had difficulty staying organized and had a hard time socializing.
But on Saturday, he was just one of the boys when he squared off with other so-called speedcubers from across the country who gathered at the Westin Galleria for the state’s biggest competition of the year, dubbed “Don’t Mess With Texas.”
“I don’t come here just to solve, I come here to talk to people about cubes — and that’s the most fun part of cubing to me,” Aidan said after competing.
The McCullough Junior High student found his passion two years when he dragged his mom’s old Rubik’s cube out of the closet.
His mother Donica couldn’t offer him any guidance on how to tackle the colorful cube.
“When I was his age I couldn’t solve them — so I used to just move the stickers around,” she said with a laugh. But with Aidan it was a different story.
“He solved it in a matter of seconds,” Masterson said.
Three decades after its heyday as an ’80s toy, the Rubik’s cube is enjoying a revival in the Lone Star state, where competitions are regularly drawing twice as many speedcubers as they did just a few years ago.
“It is growing nationally, but the boom in Texas is probably due to the availability of competitions,” said 24-year-old Shonathon Collins, one of the Saturday event’s organizers.
Internet-driven craze
Thanks to a few dedicated speedcubers — people like Collins and 23-year-old cubing champ Anthony Brooks — Texas is now home to multiple sanctioned competitions every year.
Just 10 years ago, there were none.
“A lot of people have connections to the cube,” Brooks said. “They remember it from the ’80s.”
That may be an attraction for older cubers, but it’s not nostalgia that’s drawing today’s kids to the activity. It’s the internet.
“Younger kids, they go on YouTube and learn how to solve it themselves,” Brooks said. “And that makes it so accessible.”
But for the uninitiated, cube-solving lingo doesn’t sound particularly accessible.
“I use something called CFOP,” Aidan explained. “That’s cross-first two layers-orient last layerpermute last layer.” He demonstrated at a rapidfire pace, explaining how many algorithms work at each step of the process.
“There’s 57 algorithms for this, and then there’s 21 for this, and then you’re done,” he concluded.
Though he’s outgoing and garrulous on the topic of cubing, Aidan hasn’t always had the large circle of friends he enjoys now.
But then one day, not long after he’d dug up his mother’s old cube, his family stopped for dinner at the David Wayne Hooks Airport restaurant in Spring.
“He was kind of socially awkward from the time he was diagnosed at the age of 4,” his mother said.
Aidan sat down at the table with his cube — just like his future best friend at the table next to him.
“We ended up staying four or five hours so the boys could keep talking,” Masterson said. “They’re like long-lost brothers. They speak the same language.”
Not discouraged yet
When he’s not talking shop with his friends, Aidan’s favorite competitive event is the standard three-by-three cube. There’s also oversize sixby-six and seven-by-seven, which Aidan can solve but doesn’t compete in. This weekend he competed in a one-handed event, but said the later blindfolded competition was not his thing.
“I just don’t see the point of it,” he said.
There are no age or skill divisions in the competition, but on Saturday he made it to the second of four rounds in the standard three-by-three event. It was only his fourth competition, and he has higher hopes for the future.
“Right now I have a lot of free time, so I’m hoping to hit sub-15 by eighth grade,” he said, meaning he hopes to break the 15-second mark on a two-handed solve. “I’ll keep doing this for a while.”