Bertie Seyffert

 

Where do I begin? My name is Albertus Stefanus (Bertie) Seyffert and I was born on the 10th of December 1986 in the Kempton Park hospital and lived in this house ever since. My house is in a town called Edenvale, about 20km east of Johannesburg. I went to school when I was six years old (I was in pre-school, but that’s not the important part) and was introduced to the wonderful game of minesweeper when I was about eight by my cousin. He was always the smart one in our family and lived up to his potential and now works as a computer technician and makes maningy mullah. But back to minesweeper. I took a natural affinity to the game because of my talents in math and science, but I didn’t play it much till about 5 years later when we got our first computer. It was a mere 486dx in a Pentium 2 world, so I didn’t really have much choice but to play minesweeper. It didn’t really take my interest that much, but I could at least say that I could finish most any inter board. Then came high school.

 

I was never really popular, but still I had a reasonable crowd of pals. Throughout my school going career I had gotten 80+ for math, but sat with an average in the low 70s. This wasn’t really a problem as I at least knew that I could do better, but the kids at the top of those ranks had no brow for my ‘puny’ efforts and well the same snobbish situation as in any other school developed. This didn’t bother me till they took it too far.

 

At the end of our 10th grade year we’d only done 65 pages of our 300+ page math handbook and they decided to call in our matric teacher to correct this problem, in two weeks no less. Seeing this little dilemma I decided I needed to beef up my logical abilities if I wanted to keep my 80+ record. I started to intensify my expert crusade, which I had started in about April that year (2002) in an attempt to break 80 as my average just to show those who doubted my abilities that I could be at the top of the class. By the end of those two weeks I finished my first expert level game at about 170 and was quite pleased with myself. This supreme study of our beloved game, coupled with the efforts of before mentioned teacher resulted in me acing that math exam with a grade of 98%. That rounded of a great year in which I took top honors on the top ten and proved my supremacy above all the other ‘mathematicians’ in my class.

 

After that 170 I just kept playing and the finishes started becoming frequent and my times kept dropping till they reached 115 in November last year. Then it dawned on me: why don’t I go and check for some sites on the net. This idea had two effects on the course of events. 1. I discovered, in shocking fashion, that I wasn’t good at all, and 2. I wasn’t great because I didn’t know about the double click. I immediately started playing with it, at first getting times of around 150 and slowly getting faster, till at last I broke 100.

 

It was 29 December 2003, quite late in the evening and I at last was fast enough to be able to feature on Damian Moore’s site after such a long time of aspiration. From there my times improved as follows.

 

99-98-93-87-84-82-82-80-76-75-68

 

The biggest time lapses between records were at 99 and 80. Since I broke 80 I’ve been there quite a lot (btw I broke 80 only a few weeks ago) and under 70 only twice, first 68 then (in the previous period) a 69. That was the first 69 I’ve ever had and it was great :D.

The inter records are also improving. At the moment I’m standing at 18 (also in the previous period). The real drama though is in the beginner arena. I had a 2 on XP, but had to post another good time on winmine98 for it to be allowed. This means that my beginner time of 4 is without the many hours put into the expert and inter times, I’m still improving that one.

 

I used to start a game in the corner because it is easier to make deductions from there, then I went on the web and afterwards started clicking crazy like. I’ve now started to click in the corner again after coming to the realization that the corner is actually better.

 

Well that’s all from me so cheers, and thanks for reading my profile and supporting the active rankings.