Vanderbilt Cube Club hosted a speed cubing competition for the second year in a row on Jan. 18, 2025. The competition took place at the Student Life Center in the Commodore Ballroom. Its 150 competitors included students, staff and the local community.
The competition was approved by the World Cube Association, the governing body for “twisty puzzle” competitions. The WCA is responsible for sending delegates to attend cubing competitions and ensure the competition is run in accordance with WCA regulations. The event was also sponsored by The Cubicle, a store for Rubik’s cubes and other puzzles, which provided gift card codes as prizes for the top finishers of the competition.
The competition featured five different events: pyraminx, 3x3x3 cube, 2x2x2 cube, 6x6x6 cube and blindfolded 3x3x3 cube. For the first round of each event — excluding the 3x3x3 cube competition where the top 75% of players moved on — the top 16 players with the quickest finishing times were eligible to compete in the second and final rounds.
Aussie Greene (B.S. ‘24), founder and co-president of the Cube Club, expressed gratitude for the club members he worked alongside to organize the event.
“Our event ran very smoothly, and the only reason is because we’ve had a large group of people excited to volunteer, just for the love of solving, showing up and spending their time,” Greene said.
According to Greene, the competition featured competitors as young as 7 and as old as 50. The average age of the competitors was about 14 or 15.
“We have competitors from all over the world, a lot from the other side of the country, flying into Nashville to try to get world records or times on the three by three of under five seconds. So you have brand new beginners and some of the best in the world all in the same event,” Greene said.
The winners of the pyraminx, 3x3x3 cube, 2x2x2 cube, 6x6x6 cube and blindfolded 3x3x3 cube were Marcus Kamen, Luke Griesser, Matias Marcantoni-Nunez, Vishwa Sankar and Micah Morrison, respectively.
Daniel Hong, senior and treasurer of the Vanderbilt Cube Club, described the club’s efforts to host the competition as a way of giving back to the Middle Tennessee cubing community.
“The Vanderbilt competition, to my knowledge, is the only yearly, regularly recurring competition in the middle Tennessee area,” Hong explained. “There just really aren’t all that many opportunities for competitive speed-solving in Middle Tennessee. People come in from all over the southeast — some even fly in and travel really long distances to come here.”
Marcus Kamen, senior and co-president of the Cube Club, as well as first-place winner of the pyraminx event and one of the organizers of the competition, shared his hopes for the future of the competition.
“A lot of the people that were working on the competition are seniors,” Kamen said. “I’m hoping that the younger members of our club that were involved come back and are excited to organize next year’s competition and so on after that.”