“The Speed Cubers” is a documentary on Netflix that follows the lives of speedcubers, Feliks Zemdegs and Max Park. The documentary was filmed in July 2020 and directed by Sue Kim. Who are Feliks Zemdegs and Max Park? They are two of, if not the best cubers in the entire world.

Feliks Zemdegs is an Australian, raised in Melbourne. He first started cubing when he was a kid, and his parents thought it was just another one of his hobbies that he would eventually drop.

However, he became “addicted” to cubing. He brought his cube everywhere around the house, started to compete in championships, started to gain records left and right, and he was getting asked for interviews many times. That’s when his parents knew that this was something different.

Max Park is an American, born and raised in Cerrito, California. He was diagnosed with autism when he was 2 years old and struggled with social and fine motor skills.

Then, he started to speed cube, which would change his life and help him develop his social and fine motor skills. He became hyper on improving each day and getting a better time.

Max began going to competitions when he was 10 years old, and he started to excel at the hobby and gain attention worldwide. These two speed cubers would eventually become friends, as Feliks was always Max’s speed cubing idol.

In fact, Feliks was the first person that Max got an autograph from and took a picture with. They push each other to do their best while speed cubing, as they both hold many former and current world records in many speedcubing events.

This new documentary beautifully captures the life of the two and how they got there.

How does speed cubing work? There are many methods to speedcubing, but most of them rely on a technique of recognizing a pattern and doing moves that correspond to that pattern, called an algorithm, to solve that pattern.

There are only going to be a set number of patterns that one can encounter in a stage of solving a cube, and depending on one’s experience with cubing, the method could use very few algorithms and stages, or many algorithms and stages.

As a beginner, one would usually start off by using a slow method that uses very few algorithms and some stages, but as one becomes more advanced, he might switch to another method that requires more algorithms to be memorized.

It’s really not as hard as it looks. In fact, one could search it up on YouTube and learn from there.

Nico Navarro ’24, said, “My friend taught me the basics, but I learned mostly from videos on YouTube.”