Yes! You are responsible for your own hardware in order to compete. Please refer to section 3 of the WCA Regulations for more information on what puzzles are okay to use in competition. If you have any questions, please reach out!

For the day of competing, WCA Live will have all of the results manually entered throughout the day. Once on WCA Live, scroll to the competition in question and you're good to go! After the competition, official results will be posted typically within a few days to a week after the competition happens.

After official results are posted after your first competition, your WCA ID will automatically be assigned to the account you used to register.

All ages are welcome, but in general, competitors are between 10 and 20 years old. Don't let this stop you though! Everyone can and should cube!

Nope! All cometitors compete in the same groups.

In order to be eligible to be placed on the competitor list, you need to pay your registration fee on the “Register” tab. If the competitor limit has been reached by the time your registration is completed, you will be placed onto a waitlist, which is listed in the order of when competitors pay. Registrations are accepted manually, so if you see spots open when you register, there is a a chance there were some other people ahead of you that had not yet been accepted. The automatic email you get when you first register does not confirm that you have been accepted. You will need to wait for the email that says your registration “has been accepted.” If you are not advanced from the waitlist before the waitlist closes (date found on “Register” tab), you will be issued a full refund.

Competitions are a ton of fun! Competitions are a great opportuity to meet new cubers, make new friends, and be able to compete and get official times recognized by the World Cube Association. Competitions can be as social of an event as you would like them to be. The communitiy is extremely welcoming and you can always sit at any table and strike up a conversation with another cuber. They are great places to try new cubes as well, just in case you are looking to get a new main cube! Once you walk into the venue, you will most likely see your nametag at a check-in table. If you are a first-timer, you will be asked to verify your information on your registration (name, DOB, country). Once you grab your nametag, go ahead and find a seat and start cubing! There will be a competitor/judge tutorial, which can be found on the schedule. After that, we will begin with the first event and will be calling events up by group. Your group numbers can be found on the back of your nametag. After you compete in an event, you will most likely also be expected to help judge another group (typically the following group). Competitions are very self-sufficient, so we rely heavily on the assistance from other cubers and parents like you!** Your assisgned helping groups should also be listed on the back of your nametag. Once you are done competing in your event, you can go back to your table and continnue to socialize! To see if you made it to the next round of an event, you can check your results.

Yes! Attending your first competition can come with a lot of nerves, so try and focus on having fun and meeting new people. If you aren't as fast as Max Park or Feliks Zemdegs, just remember that all cubers faster than you have been at your speed at some point! I also point people to Mats Valk's WCA Profile since he started competing when he averaged over a minute and now averages 6-7 seconds. People often do slightly worse in competition than at home too, so don't beat yourself up if you don't do as well as you had hoped! Once you lock in your first set of results, you'll have new personal records to break and goals to achieve at every new competition! If you plan on bringing any of your own puzzles, we highly rercommend marking them somehow (sharpie mark under a center cap or something similar) or keeping them in a box/bag. It happens far too often that many cubers bring a bunch of puzzles, put them on a table unattended, and accidentally take someone elses' puzzle, thinking it was theirs. It's easy to lose track of a single puzzle, especially since so many of them look the same at first glance!