4.88 World Record Square-1 Average | Dylan Baumbach

(4.48) 4.82 (deleted 5.21) (7.90) 4.84 4.97

I started developing OBL Prediction (OBLP) during a snow week in college in January 2023, knowing that it could just be the leg up I need to make me a real WR contender. I soon started posting crazy unofficial averages on my alt channel with huge amounts of overinspection, with neither I nor anyone else knowing if it would ever be a viable method in competition. Nevertheless, I continued to practice it. However, it would not be until a full year and 34 rounds later in February 2024 that I got my first PR average with it: 5.26. A long, agonizing year had passed by, wasting round after round and feeling my doubt in the method increasing each time; but finally, I had something to show for it.

This average marked a turning point in my competition performance: the era of ‘almost’. Two rounds later I got my first ever sub-WR best possible average (BPA), 4.60. But the thing that killed this average was actually OBLP; I mispredicted OBL on the crucial last solve and missed a super easy solution that I could have gotten world record on even if I had just not tried to predict it at all. This was a crushing moment, especially because I knew that opportunities like that would not come very often.

But over the next 15 rounds, I got not one more chance, not two, but six more chances at the world record, and missed it every time. I tried to focus on just getting sub-6 averages and not world record averages, but nevertheless it hurt a bit more each round. With other top solvers starting to learn and use OBLP officially, I knew I was running out of time to ever get any kind of record; I couldn’t keep almost doing it. I had already stumbled through a year and a half with no records to show for my hard work, and it started to feel like the most I would ever get is my collection of BPAs and championship titles.

But finally, I didn’t almost do it, I did it. Even if it’s only by three hundredths of a second, I could not be more happy with this average; after seeming to lose all composure on the fourth solve and possibly losing my sub-5 average from the misscramble, I clutched out a sub-5 on a terrible CS/OBL, and with a cubeshape that I just learned how to predict OBL from two weeks ago. I really had to push myself in inspection on that last solve, and this time it paid off.

Here’s a list of every time I had a sub-WR best possible average (BPA):

02/17/24: 5.54 average with 4.60 BPA
04/28/24: 5.04 average with 4.45 BPA
06/09/24: 5.24 average with 4.91 BPA
06/09/24: 5.63 average with 4.73 BPA
06/09/24: 5.18 average with 4.34 BPA
07/18/24: 5.01 average with 4.71 BPA
07/19/24: 5.10 average with 4.72 BPA

Honorable mentions include my double DNF out of 5.85 average in April 2022 and my 4.92 BPA on 1/15/24.

Thank you to everyone who has supported me and followed my Square-1 journey up until this point for the past several years. Thanks to my parents and to all my friends and peers who have given me a reason to keep going after many failures. And thanks to Hassan for not Keatoning me.

Once again, thanks to Ivan Vanek for this great Square-1 that I now have gotten so many great official results on. You can order custom MGCs from him here: https://www.speedsolving.com/threads/...

Reconstructions courtesy of ‪@BlueAcidball‬:

1: https://www.cubedb.net/solve/17307
2: https://www.cubedb.net/solve/17308
3 (Misscramble): https://cubedb.net/solve/17315
4: https://www.cubedb.net/solve/17311
5: https://www.cubedb.net/solve/17312
6 (E1): https://www.cubedb.net/solve/17309