How the 3x3 cube works

Before learning any moves, it helps to see that the cube isn't 54 loose stickers. It's 26 pieces, and each piece always keeps its own stickers together. A 3x3 cube is often called a Rubik's Cube®.

Three kinds of piece

• Centres (6). One in the middle of each face, with one sticker. Centres never move relative to each other: turning a face only spins its centre on the spot. So the centre is the colour of its face. If the centre is green, that face will be green when the cube is solved.
• Edges (12). Two stickers each. They sit between two centres.
• Corners (8). Three stickers each.

A piece is in the right place only when every one of its stickers matches the centres next to it. A white-and-red edge belongs between the white centre and the red centre, and nowhere else.

The colour scheme

On a standard cube:

• white is opposite yellow
• green is opposite blue
• red is opposite orange

With white on top and green facing you, red is on the right.

What "solving" really means

You never "move a sticker". You move pieces, and a turn always moves edges to edge places and corners to corner places. That's why solving methods work piece by piece:

1. Build the first layer.
2. Then the middle layer.
3. Then the last layer, without breaking what's done.

Common mistakes

• Thinking about single stickers. Ask "where is the white-red edge?", not "where is that white sticker?".
• Using the wrong centre. The face colour is always its centre, even if most of the face shows another colour.