Ethan Crislip, 14, has a special talent. The high school freshman has been an expert "cuber" for the last two years. It has taken him around the country and soon the world.
"I went on YouTube and looked it up and it was pretty addicting. So I just stuck with it," Ethan said.
Solving a Rubik's cube is more systematic than you might think. Ethan follows a pattern; always the same colors on the same sides. And it takes him longer to explain it than it does to solve it.
"First I build a cross of four edges. Then I build two edges and corners together and you build the first two layers like that. The last layer is just two algorithms," he said.
So I sat down with Ethan to watch him work his magic. I scrambled a Rubik's Cube and then handed it off to Ethan. He always gets 15 seconds to look it over and then we watched him solve it.
In our time with him he got it down to under 9 seconds. He thought that was still too high, compared to his record 5 seconds. And even though he makes it look so easy, I learned it's really not.
But more than the prizes, Ethan most values his chances to travel and make friends.
"What a chance to do something so great, you know to travel like that," his mother, Annette Crislip, said.
"I've met foreign people already that have traveled to the U.S. for competitions and for the world championships. I'm really looking forward to meeting other cubers I've heard of but they're thousands of miles away," Ethan said.
He'll head to Bangkok, Thailand in October for the world championships.
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