Perth hosts Netflix speed cubing star Feliks Zemdegs at national titles

A hush spreads over the auditorium, broken only by the loud clacking of plastic Rubik’s Cubes, as “speed cubing” champions put their skills to the test.

While it may not be the most obvious spectator sport, elite performers attract thousands of followers on social media and the concentration was palpable as Australia’s best battled it out at the national speed cubing titles in Perth over the weekend.

Contestants included former world record holder Feliks Zemdegs, the Melbourne-based star of Netflix documentary The Speed Cubers.

Also showing off his moves at the tournament held at Swanbourne’s Scotch College was Queensland’s Ming Dao Ting — known as “Tingman” — who has more than 705,000 YouTube subscribers.

Zemdegs, 26, who boasts more than 475,000 YouTube subscribers and 134,000 Instagram followers, was stopped frequently by fans asking him to pose for photos and sign autographs.

Now sponsored by speed cube manufacturer GanCube, he set his first world record for completing the Rubik’s cube at the age of 14 with a time of just 6.77 seconds.

While he later pushed that down even further, to just over 4 seconds, the current 3x3x3 world record holder is China’s Yusheng Du with an astonishing 3.47 seconds.

The 3D puzzle invented by Hungarian Erno Rubik first took the toy world by storm in the 1980s before the craze waned.

There are now 17 different configurations of official speed cube competition categories, including square-1, skewb, one-handed and blindfolded, but the peak category is still the standard 3x3x3 layout of the original Rubik’s cube.

Zemdegs first got hooked on solving cubes as a teenager when he saw a YouTube clip.

Asked why speed cubing had become so popular, he said it was “pretty addictive”.

“When you start out and learn how to solve it, there’s so much more to learn and practice,” he said.

“You improve pretty quickly, and that keeps going and going, so that’s the really fun part of it I think.”

Now working in finance investment, Zemdegs said he planned to keep competing for a while longer.

“A few years ago I was practising and travelling and competing a lot more than I do now,” he said.

“Now I guess it’s a bit more of a hobby than something I’m doing super-seriously.”

Speed Cubing Australia president Kerrie Jarman said interest in competitive cube-solving had “exploded” in the past few years, with nearly 300 registrations for the Perth event.

While open to all ages, the average competitor was around 13.