During the past couple of weeks I got a bit addicted to online 2-player "ranked matches" of Carcassonne on my XBox. After a few humiliating losses against the local sharks, it became obvious to me that optimal strategy is probably not to concentrate on building your own features, and hope you come out ahead in the final points tally; but to aggressively trap the opponent's meeples in disadvantageous, or preferably completely inescapable, positions - until your usable men outnumber theirs enough that you can dominate the game. That's if they haven't managed to trap your guys first, of course!
My problem is that I have a hazier idea of what constitutes a good trap than what some of my better opponents do. I'll be thinking "aha, you'll never find a tile with three road sides and one city side", and obviously they draw such a thing straightaway. Conversely, when they see me making an obvious attempt to block one of their guys in, they'll quickly box themselves in in such a way that it's easy for them to draw the right piece to escape.
So: is there a list of the different tiles in the basic game of Carcassonne? What positions are impossible to extract a meeple from, and/or what are the easiest spots to draw a good tile to escape from? Help me become as evil and dastardly a Carcassonne player as my opponents!