1,007 rounds of Zemdegs and McNeill

Cubing has no fixtures. There are no leagues, no seedings that force the best into the same bracket, no governing body deciding who meets whom. A competition is simply announced, and whoever registers turns up. Any two competitors who keep finding themselves in the same hall are there because they both chose to be, independently, again and again. That is worth holding in mind while looking at the number that follows.

Feliks Zemdegs and Jayden McNeill have appeared in the same round of the same event 1,007 times. No other pair in the history of the sport comes close.

Some introductions, for readers who do not follow the sport. Zemdegs, from Melbourne, is by most measures the greatest competitive cuber there has been: the database credits him with 104 world-record results across singles and averages, and for most of the 2010s he was the fastest human alive. McNeill, also Australian, is what the sport would call an elite amateur: a top-few-hundred solver in the world at his best (his 3×3 ranking peaked inside the top 300), a national record holder, and never a world champion. On paper they are a generation apart in ability. In person they have shared a scoresheet for fourteen years.

It began at Melbourne Summer 2012, when both entered the same 3×3 round. Zemdegs, already the world's best, posted an 8.30. McNeill, then a newcomer, managed 14.03. That gap, nearly six seconds, is roughly the distance between a world champion and a promising club solver, and on that day there was no reason to think the two names would ever be linked. What linked them was geography and persistence: two Melbourne solvers on the same competition circuit, week after week, year after year.

The bars above show the relationship season by season, and the shape rewards a careful read. Each bar is the number of rounds they shared in a year; the red portion is the share Zemdegs finished ahead. Through the early years the grey band is visible: McNeill took nearly a third of their shared rounds up to 2014, catching the champion on off days and in his stronger events. The towering bars of 2017 and 2018, over 180 shared rounds in each year, mark the peak of both careers and of the Australian circuit itself. Their meetings span every kind of event: 3×3 most of all (210 rounds), then 3×3 one-handed and 2×2.

Then the shape changes. From 2023 to 2025 the bars shrink and turn entirely red: seventy shared rounds, and Zemdegs ahead in all seventy. Read coldly, that is dominance. Read against the fixture-free way these meetings happen, it says something warmer: two people at very different points in their careers, one half-retired from the top, one never quite of it, still independently choosing the same weekends in the same halls, a decade and a half on. The most recent shared round in the database is from this month.

shared rounds in which Zemdegs finished ahead. The other 204 belong to McNeill.

The database cannot see friendship. It has no field for it. What it can count is proximity: who stood in the same room, on the same afternoon, at the same table, with the clock running. By that measure, the closest pairing the sport has ever produced is not two rivals for a title. It is the greatest solver of his era and the friend who kept showing up.

Shared rounds counted where both hold a ranked position in the same round of the same event, across 14 seasons. Recomputed nightly.