colour_thief
08-12-2007, 11:02 PM
At the 2007 Strasbourg meeting, there was some point late one night, I believe it was on the second or third day, where I was talking about the way I practice Death Mode. I was saying that there were only 3 things that could kill me, and I would make a mental note which of the 3 it was every time I died and work on improving whatever was killing me the most. At the time, between jetlag, too little sleep, and an over-abundance of Tetris, my brain was so fried I wasn't actually able to remember what those 3 things were. Of course, I can easily remember them now:
1. Lazy Previewing
This is when you aren't finding a place for the next piece fast enough. You could be pausing before looking at the next piece, or maybe you're looking at it and pausing before thinking of placement options. No matter what, though, you're giving yourself too little time to decide where to place the next piece. The symptom is when pieces often lock automatically before reaching their desired destination.
2. Poor Strategy
This is when you make poor decisions on where to place the pieces. You're actually keeping up with the speed, and perhaps even locking, but you aren't thinking well enough about the placement of pieces. Symptoms include makng lots of holes, and especially failure to recover from holes.
3. Technical Errors
This is when you fail to place a piece because of incorrect or mis-timed input. It's definitely the easiest to recognize and correct.
And that's how I practice... 2 and 3 can be worked on any time, but if you've been playing too much Tetris I swear there's a part of your brain that is exhausted and performing poorly at 1 can't be helped. A small, say, ~1 hour break will help things but even then you probably can't sustain performance for long. In general it's simply better to play a moderate amount regularly then irregularly binging.
1. Lazy Previewing
This is when you aren't finding a place for the next piece fast enough. You could be pausing before looking at the next piece, or maybe you're looking at it and pausing before thinking of placement options. No matter what, though, you're giving yourself too little time to decide where to place the next piece. The symptom is when pieces often lock automatically before reaching their desired destination.
2. Poor Strategy
This is when you make poor decisions on where to place the pieces. You're actually keeping up with the speed, and perhaps even locking, but you aren't thinking well enough about the placement of pieces. Symptoms include makng lots of holes, and especially failure to recover from holes.
3. Technical Errors
This is when you fail to place a piece because of incorrect or mis-timed input. It's definitely the easiest to recognize and correct.
And that's how I practice... 2 and 3 can be worked on any time, but if you've been playing too much Tetris I swear there's a part of your brain that is exhausted and performing poorly at 1 can't be helped. A small, say, ~1 hour break will help things but even then you probably can't sustain performance for long. In general it's simply better to play a moderate amount regularly then irregularly binging.