Help for a beginner

[JoshK]

I'm pretty new to minesweeper. I've played a game here and there since the late 90's but haven't really tried to figure it out until recently.

In fact I just found out about double click clearing recently. It's actually became a bad habit of mine I think where I only use double click to clear and never left clicking.

I still lose many games to bad board reading and mis-flagging.

I was wondering if you guys could check out my current best score on expert 184 and let me know areas to focus on.

I'm also having difficulty scoring better than 9 on beginner and 60 on intermediate.

Maybe there is some sort of practice method that would be slower times now but would lead to <100's in the future?

Thanks for any help / suggestions.

Joshk

[EWQMinesweeper]

36s chord!
56s missed 3 solvable squares (advanced patter though, notheless very usefull)
62s solve that from the top. fewer squares -> usually easier to solve
94s this is actually solvable
135s very important pattern - this should come without thinking (you can apply this pattern almost everywhere)
156s try not to leave unsolved areas

overall: you're using a lot of double clicks and clicks in general (an eficient solve is 200-250 clicks, on such a low 3BV board even <200). you could try to improve your efficiency and try to use less clicks to solve a board (ie try to solve 2 or 3 squares with every double click). this is difficult to learn, takes relatively long and imho not that much fun. my suggestion is to make use of your habit to make many double clicks: if the mines are correct you can't blast on a double click. so click the hell out of your mouse. try to increase your clicking speed, esp. double clicks. double click everywhere and see what happens. this is a lot more fun, doesn't force you to change your tactic, might lead to fast improvement in relatively little time and will teach efficiency as well (efficiency imo only comes with experience and for that you just need to play a lot) .

other than that i only have some general tips (the same i would tell any sweeper with >70 on exp): learn the patterns in general, try to avoid hesitations, think one step ahead (don't think about your next click - while doing a click you should already have an idea of where to click next), try to use fewer mines, try to solve several squares at once using double clicks. and last but not least: play a whole lot.

[JoshK]

Thanks a lot for your suggestions.

I'm going to spend today working on IOE. Is this the most active minesweeper community?

[EWQMinesweeper]

minesweeper.info aka the Authoritative Minesweeper is the biggest and most active worldwide minesweeper community. most activity is the the msinfo guestbook and not in this forum though.

if you want to work on your ioe, here's an example: http://www.minesweeper.info/articles/Ef ... olving.pps

[JoshK]

Yeah I read that last night and again just a few minutes ago.

I switched to using arbiter and played a game on intermediate very slow.

I had IOE of 1,05 and the ThroughPut was 1,05 does that mean I was 100% efficient?

[EWQMinesweeper]

1.05 IOE and 1.05 throughput means that you had 1.00 correctness.

IOE is 3BV / total clicks
correctness is the ratio of your total clicks that were not wasted. 1.00 correctness means that 100% of your clicks had an effect and somehow did something.
thorughput is the IOE of those non-wasted clicks.

IOE = throughput * correctness

correctness is limited to 1.00 and should not vary too much when you're playing for speed.
throughput is a good indicator for how well you know the patterns and how efficiently you can solve them.

1.05 throughput means that you managed to solve several squares at once with only 1 click on a few occasions. sup1 IOE (IOE > 1) is already quite good. now try to get 1.2 IOE on int and sup1 IOE on expert

[JoshK]

Got my scores down to 39-166 which I'm happy about. Granted intermediate was super easy board 3bv-39.

Still working on the IOE stuff. It's difficult to do w/ any sort of speed.

No clue how you guys do <5 on beginner that seems ridiculous. I'm stuck at about 9.

[EWQMinesweeper]

just the video