Canada-wide FMC event crowns one Fewest Moves winner

The fastest event of FMC Canada 2026 was the one where speed mattered least. On June 6, 62 cubers across multiple Canadian cities all tackled the same 3x3x3 Fewest Moves challenge, and Ibrahim Quraishi finished first with a 25.67-move mean. In a sport usually defined by stopwatches, this was a countrywide race in planning, notation, and restraint.

That format was the point. Speedcubing Canada ran the competition as Canada’s official WCA regional organization, and the event page made clear that competitors were split across several locations with one overall winner. Registration opened March 19 at 6:00 PM PDT and closed May 29 at 6:00 PM PDT, with a location-change deadline of May 29 at 9:00 PM EDT. Competitors had to name their city in the comments field when they registered, location limits were enforced independently at each site, and anyone whose chosen venue filled up was placed on that location’s waiting list. No on-the-spot registration was accepted, and the base fee was 15 Canadian dollars.

Fewest Moves is built for a very different kind of cubing instinct than 3x3 speedsolving. The WCA gives competitors up to one hour to search for the shortest solution they can find, and a valid attempt has to stay at 80 moves or fewer, excluding rotations, or it is recorded as a DNF. That structure rewards solvers who can hold multiple approaches in their head, prune bad lines quickly, and turn notation into clean optimization under pressure. It is less about execution speed than about solving discipline.

The podium reflected that specialist skill set. Thompson Clarke took second with a 27.00-move mean, and Ben Bergen placed third at 29.00. With only one event on the schedule and 62 competitors listed, FMC Canada 2026 was not the biggest gathering of the week, but it was one of the clearest examples of how the Canadian scene can stretch a single competition across the country without losing the feel of a shared result sheet.

That is the odd beauty of Fewest Moves: across multiple venues, the same cube, the same rules, and the same hour still produced one champion. At FMC Canada, the winner was not the fastest turner, but the cuber who found the cleanest path through the puzzle.