First World Championship

June 5, 1982

The first world championship took place in Budapest. 19 cubists of different nationalities took part in the event.

The cubes were scrambled by computer, then brought on the spot in sealed cases. The cube was placed on a pad with a photo sensitive diode at the bottom. The competitors had the possibility to examine the cube during 15 seconds before starting to solve. The results were:

1. Minh Thai (USA) 22.95 s
2. Razoux Schultz (Netherland) 24.32 s
3. Zoltán Lábas (Hungary) 24.49 s

Minh Thai's time, 22.95 seconds, is the official Rubik's cube world record. But it can be hard to admit that it is, for several reasons:

Firstly, the best time of this championship could have been far better and maybe held by someone else. Indeed, the contestants had to use non-lubricated new cubes and hence in no way adapted to speedcubing. So the times suffered from it and the cubists using some methods requiring a lot of movements (but maybe less waste of time between the algorithms) were disadvantaged. Furthermore there are two sorts of existing cubes with a different color arrangement. But in the world championship all the cubes had the same color arrangement, which means that competitors accustomed to the other arrangement of colors were disadvantaged because, in speedcubing, it is necessary to make extremely fast decisions which involve the colors.

Secondly, since this event, the record was beaten in official competitions (17.04 s, established by Robert Pergl during the Czechoslovak Championship, 1983), but the official record remains the one of the world championship, 1982.