Sortega

Sortega is my approach to make 2x2x2 solving as 2-gen (using only R and U turns) as possible. Depending on your perspective, you can see it as a variation on either Ortega or Guimond. The name comes from Ortega, of course, but both methods are a good stepping stone to learning this one. This can be a pretty decent method on its own, but it's also useful as just one method in an advanced 2x2x2 solver's "toolkit", used only when it's convenient. Lucas Garron published this method on the SpeedSolving forum along with a link to a page of algs.

As an interesting note, this method seems to be really good at nearly-optimally solving lucky 2-gen scrambles. So it might actually be easier to correctly solve very easy scrambles with Sortega than with other methods.

I call this step 0 because you usually don't have to do anything. Simply get two adjacent colors of the same color on one side. Bruce Norskog has calculated that this step takes an average of 0.0424 moves, if you're color neutral. Thus, you should always be able to plan step 1 in inspection, and often step 2 as well.

Hold the bar on the bottom left, so that R and U moves don't disturb it. You now want to orient the remaining 6 pieces without messing up the bar - note that the blue stickers in this image represent "either white or yellow", yellow being the color opposite white. Lucas Garron has found that it's always possible to do this in 10 moves or fewer if you restrict yourself to R and U, but some cases can be done much quicker if you allow other moves. For instance, case 1-3 on Lucas's page can be done with y R U R' y'.

Like step 1, this can always be done with only R and U moves (or in this case R2 and U). If the first move is an R2, you can combine that with the last move of Step 1 to save a move, although you'd have to lookahead a bit to notice that. Unlike Guimond, since the left half of the bottom layer is always sorted already, you don't have to worry about rotations or D moves to finish this step.

Ah, PBL. This is the same final step as many 2x2 methods - Ortega, Guimond, SS, SOAP, OFOTA... There are only five algs to learn, and since this is such a common step, you probably already know them. If you don't, the SpeedSolving wiki has a pretty good collection of algs for this step.