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SALT LAKE CITY — Eric Pesci’s fingers are in constant motion, twisting and spinning a plastic puzzle under the table to stay warm and agile, right until the moment he takes a few nervous deep breaths and lays his hands on the StackMat timer.
The 12-year-old tunes out everything around him — the noisy crowd, his mom and her cellphone camera — and for a few seconds hyper-focuses on what’s in front of him — a Rubik’s cube.
Welcome to the world of speedcubing.
Ernő Rubik, a Hungarian professor of architecture, invented his puzzle in 1974, and it became an icon of the ’80s, but it wasn’t until the rise of the internet, a 2003 competition in Toronto and the founding of the World Cubing Association a year later that speedcubing became what it is today — a worldwide “thing.”
It caught on in the Pesci household when 10-year-old Claire Pesci brought one home from school. Her brother, Eric, picked it up and never put it down. He devoted hours to something tens of thousands of speedcubers do — solving the cube as fast as possible. Pretty soon his sister was speedcubing, too, and life was filled with the soft clacking of plastic cubes.
“I’m used to it,” mom Jennifer Pesci says. “They take them everywhere we go. We will be in a restaurant, and we’ll be waiting for food, and they're just spinning them.
“We are out somewhere, and we’ll be crossing the street, and he's (Eric’s) looking down like this, and I'm like ‘You can’t do that. You gotta watch where you're crossing the street.’”
Today, Eric and his sister are two of more than 100 speedcubers who, along with parents and siblings, are packed inside a small west-side event space for Megacomp, the annual state speedcubing competition.
Cubing has changed a lot since the toy hit the market 37 years ago. No longer just Rubik’s three by three, competition puzzles include cubes from two to seven pieces across, as well as cubes that are not cubes — brainteasers called Pyraminx and Megaminx. At WCA events, contestants solve them blindfolded. They solve them with one hand. They solve them with their feet.
Speedcubers tend to be males 18 or younger who watch other speedcubers on YouTube. No doubt, the most watched is 21-year-old Australian Felix Zemdegs, the Usain Bolt of speedcubing, who’s solved a 3x3 cube in an astonishing 4.73 seconds.
This is one of the draws of speedcubing — that even a Salt Lake high school student like Calvin Nielson, Megacomp organizer and a competitor who excels at an odd puzzle called Skewb, can cube his way into the record books.
At the time we interviewed Nielsen, he was in ninth place in Skewb in the U.S. and was tied for 20th in the world with 15-year-old Lakshay Modi of India.
In Utah, Eric Pesci has earned a name for himself, his mom says, as “the 2x2 guy.”
He’s solved one in 1.6 seconds. (The fastest solve on official record is about a half-second.)
Eric explains, contrary to popular misperception, you don’t have to be a genius to solve a cube. It just takes time — lots of it — memorizing algorithms and sets of rules.
Claire Pesci says she’s committed about 15 algorithms to memory. Nielsen admits, after a little hesitation, that he’s memorized 300 to 400.
“If you have enough time and I guess enough determination to do something, you can learn how to solve a Rubik’s cube,” Nielsen says. “Speed-solving requires sticking to it.”
Eric Pesci’s efforts paid off. He came in first place in the 2x2 event.
“You don't really need to be a genius,” Eric says. “You just need to be persevering and a hard worker and not afraid to fail.”
These are qualities, he agrees, that could serve him well later in life.
Perhaps they could help him do more than solve a cube.
