Hey guys, I'm looking for some advice on what I should work on next. I recorded a video of a typical training session for me, which is posted below. My short term goal is to get GM in ~10:30, and improve my overall consistency. It usually takes me a couple warm up / throwaway games at the beginning before I can get GM. Any thoughts, critiques, or advice? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8lSvhV0mvc
Okay! Just watched everything thinking I would only watch 10 minutes of it. So! I don't think I have enough time to make a full review out of it (which by the way would be my pleasure), so I'll just go ahead with random advice. First, the good things : Your speed is alright, when it comes to speeding up I think you've got what it takes to get a 10:30-ish run. Good reflexes, for the most part. Some reads were interesting, especially some parts where you come back from hell. The pre 20 G part is not a mental block, I saw some really neat 2:10-2:15 0-200 sections, I think you got the hang of it. Besides, I remember in your TAP thread we were talking about not IRSing but waiting so that it makes placement faster, and I see a lot of these fine moves! Overall, it looks solid. As for the things to make better : 20 G doesn't look fluid enough to me. There are some parts where the J and the L triple rotate, whereas you could just put them with a simple IRS the other way. You should train in order to see those things, it makes stacking and complicated overhangs easier (but that's my opinion). Also, sometimes I could swear the tetromino could be put with a DAS + rotation, and I see IRS + DAS + stop 1 frame before it's too late. If you want to do things fast, especially in training, it's alright, but you have to be fast with a move that's the simplest, or you will be exhausted and misdrop at some point. From my point of view, this is what leads to misreads and misdrops, so I strongly recommend you correct a bit of these moves, it may make the game significantly cleaner. Sometimes, there's a move that can get you out of here and you don't see it, which is normal, but sometimes, when things were a bit too complicated, you closed a hole, then closed a hole of a line that covered it, and so on. This sometimes leads to either death or minutes of prayers, but you lose a lot of precious time for that in any case. Sometimes, you keep holes and don't cover them, which implies they get deeper and require a line piece to get filled. I would say this requires that you slow down at all costs to analyze what's best for you. If you find an exit that could make 4 singles in a row, I think that you should take this chance, but (and I don't know if you are actually thinking that, it's just a general piece of advice) don't make tetrominoes DAS right or left thinking "I'm in a bad situation so I might as well give this up right now, I'll recover it in a while" if you're not exactly sure what you are losing. If it's not good for your actual game to slow down and examine an unusual situation, it will be for your next games. I think essentially that you are trying to get consistent enough so that you can play your game for 10 minutes straight (which in my opinion would be an amazing feat), which explains some irregularities here and there (sometimes you have gorgeous reads, sometimes you put a block in the air and turn it around the worst possible way). If I'm not mistaken, you will succeed eventually, 10:30 is not a problem for you, and you should practice just more. A pleasure to watch anyway. Keep it up, you can do it!
07:54 this is exactly the kind of mistake you need to avoid in pre-20g when you are not sure where to place a Z or an S, there is no hesitation: flat at the right side of the screen then stacking, then double line clear. I improved a LOT my time when I realised this: the more I keep on pressing down, the faster. More tomorrow, need to sleep
I think I've been watching waaaay too many videos of SAL and KAN lately. The both have some amazing non-linear preventive / recovery moves that they pull off all the time, which I've been trying to incorporate more into my play. Just for instance, I really like how Kan [in the top left] stacks S and Z pieces vertically on the right side to be cleared later with an L piece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6q4cvxdakI&list=PLAF950370EC8E4C83&t=2m51s And SAL has some ridiculous near-death recoveries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9zrBd26s0Q I actually spent a good 3 months focusing purely on sections 0-200... I still need to cleanup my 200+ in places (the non-linear speed curve in 400 throws me off sometimes). So far my best 0-500 is about 5:10, but I typically get somewhere around 5:25 - 5:40. A lot of that is probably force of habit. You're right, though. I think there's still a lot of unoptimized moves that I'm still doing. I'm also starting to notice that I'm hesitating a LOT at times, mostly in 20G, and especially when I need to rotate a piece over the stack. There was one instance in my last game where I paused shortly while moving a T piece into a hole on the left side... I specifically remember looking at the next piece preview, to determine where I wanted to put it. I'm not sure which specific instances you're referring to, but a lot of times I try and leave room to fix holes / mistakes, and if I don't get the pieces I need fast enough then I bail out and start stacking on top of the mistakes. I'm not sure if the solution is to make fewer mistakes, or get better at fixing them. Yeah, that move was horrible. I don't think that was where I was trying to place the piece, though. My early games are usually a train wreck. I have neuropathy [nerve damage] in both my forearms, and it usually takes me a few games to warm up. A lot of times I'll accidentally press a button when I don't mean to, or my hand will slip off the joystick and it will bounce back hitting the opposite direction. Some good advice, I look forward to hearing more
