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.
Number 3 is definitely where I need to improve. I double-lock like crazy when I get above 300 on Death.
Hmm, what about "hallucination"? I find that if I play too fast, I would occasionally place a piece where I thought it would fit perfectly, but realize it doesn't exactly fit after getting the piece there. Hmm, it doesn't fit with poor strategy since I misjudged the field. Neither does it fall into technical errors since I performed what I thought was correct.
I've noticed that I tend to make a fourth type of error at higher gravity: My strategy is sound and I figure out a perfectly good place to put it, but I make an error in how to move the piece over, and it either gets stuck (usually with a T, or occasionally when the bottom block of a L or J gets caught), or I misjudge how it'll wallkick on a rotation.
Hmm, your description sounds like the third error ct described. You found a place but perform the wrong inputs to get the piece there. As for the T/J/L getting stuck, that is partially part of what I described as "hallucination." You thought the field looked a certain way and you'd be able to perform a certain maneuver, but in reality, the field is different from what you imagined and your maneuver failed.
