Matty Hiroto Inaba was visiting Japan with his mother in 2015 when a Rubik’s Cube caught his eye. His mother wasn’t sure her son would stick with the challenge of solving the iconic three-dimensional combination puzzle, and Matty eventually wore her down and returned home with a cube to Waimea on the Big Island.

With nine squares on each side, the squares can be arranged in seemingly infinite combinations of white, red, blue, orange, green and yellow. Solving the puzzle means getting all the squares of one color on the same side of the cube. It took Matty and his father “a good half of a day” to find the solution.

Puzzle solved, Matty got serious and over the next few years reduced his time solving the cube, from hours to seconds.

Matty celebrated his 16th birthday on July 29 as an internationally recognized speed-cube champion. In early July, at the Rubik’s WCA (World Cube Association) North American Championship in Toronto, he took top honors in the classic 3x3x3 Cube event (“3×3” is the sport’s term for the original Rubik’s Cube). His average speed was 5.62 seconds. His fastest speed was 4.27 seconds.

If it isn’t a trade secret, how do you get that fast?

The beginner’s method I learned first is doing the first layer, then the second layer, then the third layer. After about a year I learned a new method called CFOP. The C stands for “cross,” the F stands for F2L, or “first two layers,” the O for “OLL”, or orientation of the last layer, and the P stands for “permutation of the last layer.” Basically you do the first two layers at once and then you solve the last layer. You can learn the methods online.

How do you go from cubing at home to international championships?

When the COVID pandemic hit, they started having online competitions and that’s when I started to get faster. I really went up (in speed) because when you’re competing against the best, you kind of turn into them pretty much just watching them, and standards go way up. I went from a 6.98 (seconds) best average to 6.05, which was probably a jump of 20 or 30 world-ranking places and put me at around 10th place in the world at the time.

How much time does it take to stay in shape?

During the school year I do probably around 100 (solves) a day. Just timing the 3×3 (cube). During the summer, probably around 200 timed solves, but also probably an hour of just solving the cube and just figuring out how the cube works and how the pieces move around.

It sounds like a full schedule. Do you have time to do other things besides school and practice?

I played baseball pretty much the whole year after school. So, at 5 or 5:30 I’d come home, do my homework, and then 30 minutes of practice.

What’s next?

I plan to go to a competition, probably in October or November. And then next year … there’s going to be a U.S. national tournament, which hasn’t been held since 2019. And then there’s going to be the World Championships in Korea, which is going to be the first one since 2019 as well.

Is speed-cubing something that can become a profession — like video gaming?

I don’t do it because of that. I just mainly do it just to have fun and to compete, but some people can take it very seriously. I have three sponsors: Toribo is a Japanese cube retailer, Gan Cube is a Chinese cubing manufacturer and The Cubicle, a cube retailer in New York. And shoutout to the World Cube Association. They organize everything, all the competitions all around the world. Their competitions are the official competitions.

What’s the difference between a speed-cuber’s competition cube and a cube I could buy “off-the-shelf?”

If you handed me the worst-turning cube that you could find, I could still probably solve it in 10 to 15 seconds. But we use speed-cubes without the old-fashioned stickers, and with internal magnets that help line up the layers as they turn. We’re turning it around 10 to 15 turns per second, so you physically need an almost frictionless cube to turn.

Do you think you might eventually ­become a speed-cubing coach?

Yeah, I was actually thinking about that once I get tired of the competitive aspects of the game. I think I’m gonna make tutorials on ­YouTube.