I've found death to be a place I stagnant a lot. But over the last few days I've finally managed to internalise something @KevinDDR says a lot (or at least I attribute it to him, I'm sure plenty of others say it too), slam the pieces down, it doesn't really matter where. I spent 4 months and 1 day from getting 500 for the first time to breaking the torikan. Since then I've broken the torikan only once more. Both times required lots of manual locking after 300 because I was getting there at about 3:05 for a good game or even later for an average game. So tracking my progress, my first step to improving at death was to clear lines. When @Sumez asked a long time ago in IRC how to improve I told him to clear lines, and I didn't explain it well at all. I mean clear lines aggressively. Don't just stack for tetrises, if it works out that way, then great! But singles are fine for death and make things easier to keep track of. If there is a line clear, you may as well take it. The next big step I had was through the carnival this year (2017 in case anyone reads it back in years to come and something gets buggered with the timestamps) when @Qlex pointed out just how slow the first section of death really is and you want to finish that section with a low stack to get out of it as quickly as possible, which I definitely don't do in my PB, but it may save you the two or three seconds you need to get below that 3:25. The third major step I've already mentioned, slam the pieces down. Don't be fancy if you don't need to, triple rotates are cool to watch but are slow, especially when you can just slide the piece along and flip it while moving. Now this is all well and good to preach, but I've finally managed to start putting the tips from the players who are significantly better than me into practice and it feels great! In case you're curious about the results, here is a video showing my PB from less than a month ago, next to a game I streamed on April 21 2017 Australia Eastern time. I hope someone can get something out of it, and feel free to give me tips too, I haven't even reached 600 yet! And special thanks to @MaryHadALittle for dropping by my stream occasionally and making me feel good about myself, it always helps to have someone who knows what they're talking about being supportive! Interesting footnote about the video. If you sit there spamming pause sometimes the times match, sometimes they are out by 0.01, which I'd expect, I didn't go to great lengths editing the video. But sometimes they are out by 0.02, which I didn't expect. I assume it's due to the way the frames lined up with updating the time.
