Learn six face names, a reversal mark, and a half turn before learning sequences.
By the end: perform a written move without changing the grip by accident.
U is the upper face, D the lower face, F the front, B the back, R the right, and L the left. These names depend on how you hold the cube. R means your current right face, not always red. Keep your grip unchanged while executing a sequence unless it explicitly says to regrip.
A bare letter means a clockwise quarter turn when you look straight at that face from outside the cube. R is clockwise from the right side. D is clockwise from below. Do not judge every turn as if you were staring at the front.
A move describes an action relative to your current grip. Establish that grip before reading the move. Keep yellow on top and white underneath, then choose a front center. With the teaching cube's initial grip, green is front and red is right. The uppercase letter R names the face at your right, regardless of its center color. A red sticker printed with R is a color label inside a diagram. Context distinguishes the two uses. A move list contains position letters, while the colored grid contains sticker-color initials.
A quarter turn rotates one outer layer through ninety degrees. Imagine looking directly at the face named by the move, from outside the cube. Clockwise means the direction the hands of a clock travel in that view. On that face's grid, the upper-left square moves to the upper-right, the upper-right to the lower-right, and so on. The center square stays in the middle. This describes a geometric direction, not a preferred hand motion. A push that feels natural from the front can be the wrong direction for another face.
For R, keep the cube's grip and imagine your eye at the right side. The front-right column moves upward toward the top. Follow the white-green-red corner that begins at bottom-front-right on a solved cube. After R it is at top-front-right. White now faces front, green faces up, and red still faces right. The red face alone remains uniformly red on this prepared example, so it cannot show the direction clearly. The neighboring top and front faces expose the movement. Tracking a specific corner makes the definition observable without relying on your hand.
The same outside-view rule applies to L and B even though their faces point away from the usual viewing position. Do not rename a move because you imagine looking at its face. Your imagined viewpoint changes; the cube's grip stays fixed. For a front clockwise turn, the upper front-right corner moves to the lower front-right. For a back clockwise turn, judged from behind, an upper back-right corner moves to upper back-left. These different-looking paths are consistent because the two outside viewpoints face opposite directions. Front-view clockwise does not define every layer.
The bottom turn D needs particular care. View the bottom directly from below, with the front border at the top of that outside view. A clockwise D carries the bottom-front edge toward bottom-right. On the solved teaching cube, the white-green edge therefore ends between the white and red centers, with green now facing right. The white sticker still faces down. If you instead judge clockwise looking downward through the cube, you send it toward bottom-left, the opposite move. Inspect a side sticker to distinguish the outcomes.
Before a turn, name the face in words, identify its layer, and predict one piece's destination. Then complete the turn and compare the destination. An inverse check alone cannot prove that you used the intended direction, because an incorrect clockwise convention followed consistently in reverse can still return to the start. Use the concrete right-corner or bottom-edge path as an additional check. Once the viewpoint is established, you can keep your head in a comfortable position and imagine that outside view rather than physically moving around the cube for every instruction.
An apostrophe reverses the quarter turn. R' means right counterclockwise. R2 means a right half turn, two quarter turns in either direction. Read sequences left to right. One move turns the entire outer layer, not an individual row of stickers on a single face.
Our regrip symbol y rotates the whole cube like U, so the old right face becomes front. y' brings the old left face to the front. The top and bottom centers stay on top and bottom. A regrip moves all layers together; U moves only the top layer.
An apostrophe after a face letter reverses its quarter turn. Read R' as right counterclockwise, still judged directly from the right side. It names the opposite direction on the same layer, not a left-face move. From a solved cube, R takes the white-green-red corner upward to top-front-right. R' instead carries that corner to bottom-back-right. Both keep its stickers attached. If you lose the distinction, compare one known piece's path rather than the uniform red face. Both of the diagrammed paths begin from the solved state.
A 2 after a face letter means a half turn through one hundred and eighty degrees. R2 has the same result as R followed by R, and also as R' followed by R'. It moves a corner to the opposite corner of that face. The white-green-red corner starts at bottom-front-right and ends at top-back-right. Half-turn direction does not affect the completed state, although your fingers can travel either way. Read R2 as one written move. Do not confuse the number with a request to turn two layers.
A sequence is an ordered list of moves. Read it from left to right and finish each move before starting the next. Spaces separate the instructions. In R U F2, first turn the right layer, then the upper layer, then the front layer halfway. The named positions remain tied to your unchanged grip throughout. You do not turn the whole cube to bring each named face toward you. That regrip changes which physical layer later letters name, so accurate turns can produce the wrong state.
The lowercase y used here is explicitly a whole-cube regrip. It turns every layer together in the direction of U, bringing the old right face to the front. On the solved teaching cube, y changes the front center from green to red and the right center from red to blue. Yellow stays up and white stays down. Every edge remains beside the same two centers as before, and every solved corner still matches. The position words changed, but the relationships that made the cube solved did not.
Compare y with U on two copies of the solved state. After U, the centers are still green at front and red at right. The yellow-green top-front edge has traveled to top-left, leaving green above the orange center. After y, green is now at the left center too, so that same edge still matches. Use the centers to distinguish the actions, not merely the moving top stickers. The reverse regrip y' brings the old left face forward. It changes the viewpoint without acting as an upper-layer alignment turn.
Practice supports these face turns and regrips, not every symbol in other tutorials. Wide turns and middle-slice moves are outside this lesson's vocabulary. You do not need them for this beginner method. Keep the distinction between uppercase face letters and lowercase y when reading the controls. A later sequence may require a fixed grip even when other stages permit regripping between tasks. Permission to regrip for inspection does not mean permission to rotate the whole cube in the middle of any algorithm you are trying to learn.
R followed by R' restores the starting state. Four R turns do too. R2 twice restores it. These checks work from a scramble as well as from a solved cube. They are useful for practicing notation without needing a solution method.
Autoplay is for observation. To follow a demonstration on your physical cube, pause and use Next step. First match its starting state and grip. The practice cube below has independent controls and an Undo button; it does not mirror the cube in your hands.
An inverse is an action that restores what an earlier action changed. R' is the inverse of R. From any legal starting state, R followed immediately by R' returns every sticker to that starting state. Four R turns also restore it because four quarter turns make a full revolution. Two R2 moves do the same through two half turns. These statements do not depend on starting solved. They describe the turn itself, which is why you can practice and check notation on a scramble before knowing how to solve it.
Undoing several moves requires reversing their order as well as their directions. Consider R U starting from solved. After R, the white-green-red corner is at top-front-right. After U, it moves to top-front-left. You must first undo U to bring it back to top-front-right, then undo R to bring it down to its original home. The inverse is therefore U' R'. Trying R' first acts on the right layer while the tracked corner is currently on the left, so it cannot reverse that corner's most recent movement now.
Extend the example to R U F2. After its first two moves, the tracked corner is at top-front-left with white facing left, green up, and red front. F2 carries it to bottom-front-right with white right, green down, and red front. Undo F2 first. The corner returns to top-front-left. Undo U next, returning it to top-front-right. Finally undo R and recover its original home and sticker directions. Thus F2 U' R' undoes the whole sequence. The half turn keeps its written form because a half turn is its own inverse.
The incorrect list R' U' F2 reverses directions without reversing order. It does not generally undo R U F2. Different moves can act on different pieces after earlier turns displace them. The worked corner trace gives a way to diagnose the mistake before judging the final cube. Ask where the piece is immediately before each attempted undo. If the move acts on a layer that no longer contains that piece, it cannot reverse its previous trip. Then rebuild the inverse by starting with the final original instruction.
Keep an inverse test separate from a solving algorithm. R U R' U' is a four-move group used later, but following each individual move with its inverse would cancel the experiment instead of performing that group. To undo the complete group, use U R U' R'. U first undoes the final U'. R' last undoes the first R. The original group changes a solved cube; it cannot solve an arbitrary scramble merely because it has a memorable repeated pattern. Its later use requires specific preparation.
| Forward stop | Corner location | Next undo | Recovered stop |
|---|---|---|---|
| R U F2 | Bottom-front-right | F2 | R U: top-front-left |
| R U | Top-front-left | U' | R: top-front-right |
| R | Top-front-right | R' | Start: bottom-front-right |
| Wrong inverse order | R' U' F2 | Does not retrace | Not the starting state |
Inspect the entire state when testing restoration. On the solved teaching cube, a right turn leaves all nine right-face stickers red, and a bottom turn leaves all nine downward stickers white. Checking only those faces would accept many incorrect results. Compare side rows and hidden faces in the net as well. On a scrambled starting state, compare the arrangement with the selected preset rather than demanding six uniform faces. The stopping condition for an undo experiment is equality with its own starting state, which may itself be far from solved.
Begin with the Right clockwise demonstration below. Pause playback and use Reset to establish its starting state, then Next step to observe its single R. Before stepping, identify the lower front-right white-green-red corner and predict its destination. After stepping, compare the top and front stickers with the right-turn diagram above. Back returns the demonstration to its previous completed step. Use this example to check clockwise, not to solve your own scramble. The current and starting panels stay available together so you can inspect the difference.
Select Bottom clockwise and repeat the prediction with the white-green bottom-front edge. Look at the right face's bottom-middle sticker after D; it should now be green. Then compare the unchanged white bottom grid. This deliberately separates a useful direction check from an uninformative uniform face. The demonstration's net records completed positions while the solid view can show motion in progress. Wait for completion before reading its destination. In reduced motion, steps show their results immediately, but the destination and outside-view rule remain exactly the same.
Use the independent practice cube for your own inverse test. Choose its Solved cube equivalent here, the Right clockwise preset, which begins solved before any practice moves. Perform R, wait for completion, then R'. Check my progress should report the starting state reached. Restart this attempt and test D followed by D'. Now repeat while predicting the tracked pieces' intermediate destinations. Returning alone tests cancellation; predicting the intermediate state tests the meaning of the symbols. The demonstration ignores practice buttons. Neither screen cube follows your physical cube.
For an order test, restart and perform R U F2 one button at a time. Use the corner trace to locate white-green-red after each completed move. Before pressing anything else, work out which move must undo the half turn, which must undo the top turn, and which must undo the right turn. Enter F2 U' R' and inspect the whole net before asking for progress. After a wrong inverse, Undo last turn can retrace known actions. Restart is appropriate when you no longer know which experiment produced the current state.
To test regrip recognition, restart and press Regrip: right becomes front. Inspect the front and right centers before doing another move. Now R refers to the blue-centered right face, not the red-centered face that moved to the front. Undo the regrip before comparing with an example prepared in the original grip. If an algorithm expects green front but your front center is red after regripping, restore the grip first rather than replacing every move letter with a guessed color. Centers reveal the mismatch before the algorithm starts.
The lesson is ready to use when you can identify the named face, state its outside viewpoint, predict a representative piece's path, and undo a short sequence in reverse order. Use the closed recall cue only if a symbol is unclear, then try another sequence without it. Check my progress confirms return to this preset, not accurate finger technique or lasting recall. The practice limit is five hundred moves per attempt, so undo or restart if you reach it. These experiments prepare you to read algorithms; they do not provide a general solution method.
Prepared states isolate one task. Some examples happen to finish the whole cube; on a general scramble, stop at the stated checkpoint and continue with the next unfinished step.
Watch the right layer turn while the left stays still.
Next: R. right face: clockwise quarter turn, viewed directly from outside that face. Completed 0 of 1 moves.
R
Sticker letters are colors: W white, Y yellow, G green, B blue, R red, O orange. Face names are positions: U top, D bottom, F front, B back, R right, L left. Read B and R in context.
The net shows the last completed turn; the solid view shows the turn in progress. Presets replace the starting state and reset playback. Reset keeps the selected example. Do not copy an autoplay demonstration onto your cube unless your starting state and grip match. Use manual steps for following along.
Start from a prepared state. These controls change this practice cube only. They do not control the demonstration above or your physical cube. Goal: Explore, then undo your moves to return to this preset’s starting state.
0 moves in this attempt. Limit 500; undo or restart if reached.
A bare face letter is clockwise looking directly at that face. Apostrophe reverses it; 2 means half a turn.
A cue is help, not a failure. After using it, restart the prepared state and attempt the same task without reopening it.
Sticker letters are colors: W white, Y yellow, G green, B blue, R red, O orange. Face names are positions: U top, D bottom, F front, B back, R right, L left. Read B and R in context.
Face turns and whole-cube regrips animate in the solid view; the net updates when the turn finishes. Reduced motion shows the result immediately. Wait for a turn to finish before starting another. Undo can cancel the current turn. A new preset or Restart cancels motion, replaces the entire attempt and clears its history. Undo reverses only the last practice turn. Check does not move pieces or reveal an automatic solution. State is local to this page and is not saved after reload.
How do you undo R U F2?
Undo the last action first. A half turn is its own inverse.
Use F2 U' R'. Reversing only the directions but keeping the order would not generally restore the cube. You must undo the moves in reverse order.
Does D mean clockwise as seen looking down from above?
Clockwise is defined from outside the named face.
No. Imagine looking directly up at the bottom face from below. Clockwise from below appears reversed when you imagine watching it through the cube from above. Keep the grip and use the bottom-face viewpoint.
The explanations, simulator, and diagrams are original. These references support standard notation and beginner procedures. The course keeps white down, including the final twisting stage. Do not mix its final sequence with a tutorial that flips the cube over.
These examples use states produced by legal turns. The simulator has no sticker-painting input and does not diagnose physically twisted, reassembled, or damaged cubes. Successful model checks do not establish physical-device usability or long-term recall.