GG Hoffmann

Lena Hoffmann practised as an oncologist in Hamburg for nearly thirty years and left medicine in her fifties to play and teach full time. She was fifty when she took the game seriously, and one of Europe's most respected players a decade later, which nobody else in the top tier can say. She wrote the German-language cube primer that everybody in the country learned from, and she has coached the national team ever since.

She plays positionally and almost without variation, at the same tempo whether the position is winning or lost, and she does not speak during a match. Opponents find that harder to sit through than any amount of aggression. Thirty years of telling people the truth about their odds, she says, was better preparation for the cube than any amount of study. She joined the Federation because her national squad is in it, and she is not in the habit of sending people somewhere she has not been herself.