So right when we look at this problem, we notice that we have a nucleophile, which would be in this case, terbutoxide. And we have a leaving group, which in this case is an alkyl fluoride. So what that means is that this is a perfect situation to use the flow chart. Okay? The flow chart that I use for substitution and elimination reactions because right away, we don't know exactly what this is. We're going to need to identify it first. So let's go through the flowchart. The first question is my nucleophile negatively charged or neutral? And in this case, because I have a potassium, that's going to leave as a spectator ion, so it is negatively charged. So that means I'm going to go down the left side of my flowchart and I'm going to go to 2. 2, do I have a bulky base? Yes, I do. In this case, this is terbutoxide and terbutoxide is one of my bulky bases. So what that means is that I'm going to say yes here and that's going to indicate that I have a certain type of E2. I have an E2 and it's going to be Hoffman. Why is that? Well, my flowchart tells you that, so in case you just wanted to use the flowchart, you could. But on top of that, you know that it's Hoffman because of the fact that we have a bulky base and bulky bases prefer that kinetic product or the one that's easiest to form. Okay. The one that's fastest to form. So what that means is that if I have more than one option possible, I'm going to go with the less substituted option. Alright? So now we have to go ahead and identify beta carbons and we have to see how many different ones there are. So this is a beta carbon here, I'm going to call that beta and this is a beta carbon here.
So now my next question is do both of these beta carbons have at least 1 beta hydrogen on them? Yes, they do. Both of them do. So then my last question is, do they have hydrogens in the anticoplanar position? And now it turns out that I don't need to ask that question in this case. Do you remember why? Because I have not been given stereochemistry of the alkyl fluoride. So it says no chirality given. K? And since there's no chirality given, I don't really have to worry about if the hydrogen is in the anti position or not because I don't even know what position the fluoride is in. Alright? So it turns out that that last question I can ignore. I can say that I'm going to get both of these products. Now it's saying that I provide the major and minor products and the mechanism for this reaction, so I'm going to go ahead and draw the mechanism for what I think is going to be the major product and then I'll draw the other one as well.
The major product is going to go along in the less substituted direction, so it's probably going to be this H right here. Okay? So let's go ahead and draw our arrows. It's going to go basically terbutoxide looks like this. Okay? And I'm going to do the following. I'm going to grab the beta hydrogen, make a double bond, kick out the fluoride and what I'm going to get for that blue product is this. Okay? Cool. But now we also have another product that's possible. If it would have attacked the red position, then I would have gotten a double bond that looked like this. Okay? Now I just have to figure out which is going to be major, which one is going to be minor. So I look at how substituted each double bond is. This one is disubstituted. This one is trisubstituted. How did I know that? Actually, wow, okay, I messed up. This one is not disubstituted. This double bond only has one chain coming off of it, so it's actually only monosubstituted. Sorry about that. And then the red one is trisubstituted because it's got 3 different branches coming off of it. So one is way less substituted than the other. This is going to be my Hoffmann product and this is going to be my Zaitsev product. And when I'm using this base, which one do I prefer? I actually prefer the Hoffmann, so this is going to be my major. Okay? And then obviously that means that this is my minor. Does that make sense, guys? So really we haven't changed anything from the E2 mechanism, it's just that now we have a name for it. When you do an E2 with just an alkyl halide and a base, called dehydrohalogenation. Alright? Cool. So I hope that made sense. Let's go ahead and move on to the next topic.