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The WCA regulations, explained

Guide · about 9 minutes

The full WCA Regulations run to dozens of articles. Perhaps six of them will ever change one of your results. This is those six, in plain English.

Inspection

You get strictly less than 15 seconds to look at the puzzle before you start solving. The clock starts the instant the judge lifts the cover, not when you pick the puzzle up.

During inspection you may hold the puzzle and rotate it freely in your hands to see other faces. You may not apply a turn to it. Rotating the whole puzzle is fine; turning a layer is not.

The judge calls out "8 seconds" and "12 seconds" as those points pass. This is not a courtesy — it is part of the procedure, and it is worth training yourself to hear it, because at your first competition you will be concentrating hard enough that a spoken number can fail to register at all.

What happens if you run over

• Start between 15 and 17 seconds: +2 seconds added to your time.
• Not started by 17 seconds: DNF. The attempt is gone.

Fifteen seconds is much shorter under pressure than it is at your desk. Most people who blow inspection at their first competition were not being deliberate — they were stuck on a cross solution and lost track. The fix is not to inspect faster, it is to have a habit: if you have not found it by the 8-second call, commit to something imperfect and go.

Starting and stopping the timer

Competitions use a Stackmat timer. The sequence is fixed: place the puzzle down, put both hands flat on the pads, wait for the light to turn green, then lift both hands to start.

The timer will not arm until your hands have been still on the pads for long enough. Rushing it produces a false start, which costs you far more time than you were trying to save. To stop, release the puzzle and bring both hands back down onto the pads.

The +2, and what actually counts as solved

This is the rule people argue about most, and it is simpler than the arguments suggest.

When you stop the timer, the judge looks at the puzzle:

• Solved, with every face aligned or misaligned by less than 45 degrees: no penalty. Slightly crooked is fine.
• One turn away from solved — a single face misaligned by more than 45 degrees: +2. A half turn away still counts as one move, so it is still a +2.
• More than one turn away: DNF.

The practical consequence for a 3x3 solver: a last layer you did not quite finish turning is a +2. A slice off — where two layers are misaligned relative to each other — is a DNF, because it takes more than one face turn to fix.

It is worth internalising that a +2 and a DNF are not the same order of disaster. A +2 on a 14-second solve gives you a 16, which in an average of five is usually survivable. A DNF may not be.

How your result is calculated

This is the part that changes how you should think during a round, and most people never sit down and work it out.

Average of five

Used for most speed events: 3x3x3, 2x2x2, 4x4x4, 5x5x5, 3x3x3 One-Handed, Clock, Megaminx, Pyraminx, Skewb and Square-1.

You get five attempts. The best and the worst are dropped, and the remaining three are averaged.

So with 12.4, 15.1, 11.8, 13.2, 20.6 — the 11.8 and the 20.6 go, and your average is the mean of 12.4, 15.1 and 13.2, which is 13.57.

The strategic consequence is large: you get one disaster for free. A single DNF counts as your worst attempt, gets dropped, and your average still stands. A second DNF means there is nothing left to drop and the whole average becomes a DNF.

This is why panicking after a bad first solve is exactly backwards. One bad solve out of five costs you nothing at all. Treating it as a catastrophe and rushing the next four costs you the round.

Mean of three

Used for 6x6x6 and 7x7x7.

Three attempts, all three counted, nothing dropped. A single DNF makes the entire mean a DNF.

Big-cube solvers are correspondingly conservative, and they should be. There is no safety net, so the correct approach is a controlled solve you will definitely finish rather than a fast one you might not.

Best of N

Used for the blindfolded events, where only your single best attempt counts and the others are ignored entirely. 4x4x4 and 5x5x5 Blindfolded use best of three. As of January 2026, 3x3x3 Blindfolded gives five attempts rather than three, but the ranking is unchanged — still your single best.

Here the incentive inverts completely. Since failed attempts cost nothing, the rational strategy is to push hard on every attempt, because a cautious solve that succeeds is worth less than an aggressive one that might.

Cutoffs and time limits

Two different things that sound similar.

A time limit is the point at which an attempt is stopped and recorded as a DNF. If a round has a 10:00 limit and you are still solving at 10 minutes, that is the end of that attempt.

A cutoff applies to longer events with a combined format. You get a first attempt or two, and only if one of them beats the cutoff do you continue to the full set. If the cutoff is 2:00 and neither of your first two attempts is under it, your round ends there with those attempts recorded. It is not a punishment — it is how a competition fits 7x7 into a schedule.

Both are published on the competition page in advance. Check them before you register for an event you are marginal at.

The scorecard

The scorecard is the official record of your result, and it beats your memory, your phone, and the display on the timer.

The judge writes the time. Then you check it and sign, and the judge signs too. Once you have signed, you have certified those times as correct, and correcting them afterwards ranges from difficult to impossible.

Read every line before you sign. If a time is wrong, or a penalty was applied that you do not think should have been, say so before signing and ask for a delegate. Delegates exist precisely for this and will not be annoyed.

Delegates

Every WCA competition has at least one WCA Delegate. They are the on-site authority on the regulations, and their ruling settles the matter.

Ask for one whenever there is a dispute, an unclear penalty, a timer malfunction, or anything you and your judge cannot resolve between you. This is not escalation and it is not confrontational — it is the intended process. Judges are volunteers, mostly other competitors, and "I do not know, let us ask" is the correct answer for them too.

Practising the rules, not just the solves

Reading regulations is not the same as having them enforced on you. Most first-timers know that inspection is 15 seconds and still lose an attempt to it, because knowing a number and having internalised a rhythm are different things.

The competition simulator enforces all of this: the inspection window with the 8- and 12-second calls, the penalties, and the scoring — including working out what a DNF does to your result under the actual format of the round you selected. Run a full average of five and watch what one dropped solve does. It is a more convincing argument than this page is.