Stephan Bechtel
Interview
Active Ranking: Today,
we're going to interview Stephan Bechtel. Stephan, please tell us some facts
about your person!
Stephan Bechtel: I’m a 26-year-old guy from
How did you get in
contact with Minesweeper?
My father got a PC in 1991, I think, a
wonderful 80386/33 with 40 MB hard disk and Windows 3.1! There were only a few
games, thus, I checked out Minesweeper as well. Of course, it needed some time
until I finished my very first expert board in 353 seconds. My times in 1993
were at 10-85-326...
And when did you find
out about the existence of some community?
In September 2001, I searched the web for
minesweeper sites as – like everybody else – believed that my records (
So, you were just in
time for the AR?
Yes, I got a member of the yahoo group just in
time so that I didn’t miss anything. That’s why I was able to be listed in
every AR period since its beginning.
Maybe you should tell
the others what your function within the AR crew is!
Sure. Since May 2002, the AR files have been on
my server space as my university provide some free space to each student. I’m
also making the statistics as I like statistics very much. Finally, I could
reserve the nice domain active-ranking.de.vu for
free.
Can you provide some
information about your way down to your current records and your playing style?
Maybe some statistics as well?
When I started, there was no (or I didn’t know
of) double-click feature. I flagged all mines, even the unnecessary ones, and
came down to 138 in expert with this technique. My former math teacher told me
that he doesn’t flag at all, so I learnt how to do that. Since then, I always
have been playing non-flagging (nf).
Most likely, this is the main reason for my unusual record development in
expert: 95-88-83-73-65-55-52. I don’t finish many games, but if I finish a fast
board, a large gap is possible. By now, as far as I know, I’m #3 in the world
of non-flaggers. In intermediate, I’ve always played nf, and my non-DB 12 seems to be
one of the fastest nf times around.
What system do you
use? Any special mouse? Only with
music?
I’m playing the old 3.1 version on an Athlon 1800+ XP computer. It’s good enough for playing
smoothly while Camtasia is recording. About my mouse:
I probably have the crappiest mouse on earth with a nearly destroyed left
button. But this is the main advantage of this special Mitsumi Classic Mouse,
as it allows to click without any noise and, even more important, with little
pressure. Sometimes, I listen to music, sometimes to TV, but I always
concentrate only on minesweeper.
So, you said you like
statistics. Can you give us some examples?
Er, I don’t know what might be of special
interest. I can only recommend watching the minesweeper section of my website
(http://www.stephan-bechtel.de) where lots of statistics are available,
including frequencies, 3BV, and 3BV/sec. Thanks to Sorin,
Benny, and Yoni who did a lot of influential work that was and still is helpful
for statistics freaks like me.
Finally, please tell
us a link to any non-minesweeper website that others might find interesting!
That’s difficult as most of my favourite sites are German ones. So, maybe http://www.vivisimo.com might be interesting, even for fans of google. It’s a search engine, but the results are clustered by keywords. Other sites that I find interesting are http://www.biathlonworld.com as it’s a nice site for passive sportsmen that like statistics ;-) Also, not to brag, but I know that Minesweeper isn’t the only standard Windows game, so I have created a Solitaire ranking website. You can find it at http://www.solitaire-ranking.de.vu
Thanks, Stephan!