Minesweeper Shining Moment!
 

Well here it is, finally I broke my old record of 89 seconds on Expert. :D :D :D

Not bad, not bad at all... what is yout record for beginner? My best is 7seconds

LoL, 5 seconds right now. And on Intermediate, its 28, and you already saw the Expert. Here are my Best Times Screen Shot.

Ill get you
 

lol I been working on this for 1/2 hour, got 5sec :) The intermidiate was done long ago, I need to get it down some

PS: to those who wonder how it got so low, its mainly luck, it took me 30minutes or so doing like 10games a minute

Wow! thats awesome !

My Records:
Beginner: 9 secs
Intermediate: 44 secs
Expert: 309 secs

Oh, it really is all about luck. Honestly, I always get 5, 6, and 7 seconds on Beginner, but on my old work computer I actually got 2 seconds once, and I was confused after I got it, because I didn't mark 1 mine, it was just that lucky.

The same really goes with Intermediate and Expert. I usually get in the 40's, and low 50's when I play, but every once in a while, you get one of those good boards, where there is no guesses, and all the sequences fit perfectly, making it really easy.

Expert, I've actually only broke 100 maybe 4 or 5 times, it just happened that the last time I did, I fucking demolished it! As you can see. :D

Oh, and in case you are wondering why my times are pretty leet, its all due to my first Co-Op (Paid internships set up through my University for 6 month periods). I worked at Lockheed Martin, which is a Naval Defenses company. Of course, I needed a security clearance. It goes Restricted clearance, which is the least access, Secret, which is a lot of access to sensitive material, then Top Secret, which is all the badasses you see on the Defense Committees on TV all the time that can't disclose anything. Well, for my job I needed a Secret Clearance. For this, they needed to do an intense background check on me. Well, this lasted for a little under two months, which is when I literally had NO work to do, as well as a group of about 10 or so of us in the same boat, so we all played Minesweeper all day and tried to beat each others record. I couldn't even beat Expert when I started, but after that two months, I was awesome. Figures.

I used to like minesweeper so much that I wrote it for my calculator. It started out simple, and got more and more complicated (the program). I was about to make the play area bigger than 5x5 when I lost interest (The play area was stuck at 5x5, because there are 5 full rows and columns of letter buttons; each square was marked with the letter to clear it.

I have a friend that is obsessed with that game. I think it's crazy. He says there no luck involed with him. He knows how to read the game. (i dunno)

Awesome. Did you use a TI or Casio calculator?

I used a TI calculator; however, it died. I have memory dumps, but I have no calculator to restore them onto

Well, once you play it enough, you realize certain sequences that always hold true. There are many patterns in the game and it is just a matter of time until you figure them all out. What I mean by luck is the boards layout, not the way I play. Sometimes board layouts have it so that you have no other choice but to guess (a 50/50 chance), where as others may not have any of those. I'd rather be able to use deduction to figure out what to mark as a mine, rather than luck.

I've seen streaming videos of people that hold the world records for this game (Yes, there are world records). They probably only mark about 30 of the mines in expert and can just see the patterns otherwise. It is quite extraordinary. I started doing that technique a while ago, but I still have to mark up on average 75-80 mines a game (Out of 99, obviously). That is the only reason people can lower their times, because they can cut out about 50 less mouse clicks than I. The record is like 49 or 50 seconds, something like that, which is fucking amazing!

For practice, I try to do expert extremely slowly, but not marking a single mine. It is very difficult, but I've learned a lot of strategy from it. There are a lot of methods to get better and faster times, but I'm progressing quite nicely.

What are your friend's best times?