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The 21-year-old with family roots in Ledgewood just solved a scrambled Rubik’s Cube blindfolded in 11.56 seconds. Here is how a kid who learned off YouTube became a world champion.
There is a single moment, right after the timer stops, when Tommy Cherry finally lifts the blindfold and lets himself look. Only then does he know. Earlier this summer, that look confirmed something remarkable: a solved Rubik’s Cube in 11.56 seconds, memorization included, done entirely blindfolded. It was a new world record, and it beat the previous best by just 0.11 seconds.
“It was a feeling of pure ecstasy,” Cherry said.
If the name rings a bell around Ledgewood, there is a good reason. Cherry was raised in nearby Stanhope until he was 11, but his grandparents have lived in Ledgewood since long before he was born, and he has been coming back his whole life. His grandmother taught for more than 40 years before retiring, so as Cherry puts it, the love for teaching runs in the family. When he is home on breaks from college, you might find him trying the local eats, out in nature, or at the bowling alley with his grandparents.
It started with a friend and a YouTube video
Cherry was 10 years old when a friend named Jonathan posted a tutorial on solving a 2×2 cube. Jonathan was the first person Cherry knew who could actually do it, and he wanted the skill for himself. So he bought a cube, learned from videos, and was hooked. Within weeks he had found his first World Cube Association competition.
Eleven years later, that first spark has grown into 15 world records, two World Championship gold medals, and wins at the national and continental level. For anyone curious, Cherry is quick to point out that most competitions have no requirement beyond knowing how to solve a cube, and he encourages anyone interested to sign up for one.
The part that sounds impossible
Solving a cube blindfolded is exactly what it sounds like. The solver studies the scrambled cube, commits the entire thing to memory, pulls the blindfold down, and finishes without ever looking again.
The trick, Cherry explains, is turning a jumble of colors into something the brain can hold onto. Speedcubers convert the scramble into a string of letters, usually around 20 of them. Then they use a technique called letter pairs, assigning a word to every two-letter combination. Every time Cherry sees the pair DG, he pictures a dog. BK becomes a book. Twenty letters turns into about ten words, and stringing those words into a quick story makes the whole thing feel closer to a sentence or two.
“I wasn’t really thinking about whether it could be a world record in the moment. If I thought about that too much, it would have distracted me.”
Tommy Cherry
During the record solve, Cherry could tell the scramble was a little easier than average, but he made a point of not thinking about the record itself. Getting comfortable in high-pressure moments like that, he says, has taught him lessons that reach far beyond cubing, all the way to sitting down for an exam.
More than a competitor
These days, competing is only one part of what Cherry does. He runs his own channels, with more than 20,000 subscribers on YouTube and over 10,000 followers on Instagram, and he coaches students around the world through his own business, the Tommy Cherry Coaching Company, with some going on to set national records in their home countries. He is also an Applied Mathematics and Computational Science major at Florida State University, on track to graduate in the spring. His sponsors, MoYu and TheCubicle, have helped him travel the world to compete.
His advice for the next kid
For any Morris County kid who just picked up a cube and is convinced they will never solve it, Cherry has been there. He remembers scrambling his first cube and feeling like he would never get it back. What got him through was perseverance and the right tutorial, in his case a video from a channel called RedKB. Everyone learns differently, he says, so it is worth trying a few approaches, whether that is a friend who cubes, another tutorial, a local cubing meetup, or a coach.
“You absolutely can solve it,” he says. “I was once in your shoes.” And if a kid with roots in Ledgewood can go from a YouTube tutorial to the fastest blindfolded solve on the planet, that is a pretty good reason to believe him.
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