FUNDAMENTAL TETRIS GUIDE

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To consistently get good at anything you need to understand what being good even means.

To be good at something there are two main parts:

  • Knowledge/Understanding (includes intuition)
  • Execution/Mechanics

Now you know how to get good, how do you get better?

  1. Identify your weaknesses
    1. This might be knowledge gaps or mechanical errors
  2. Identify how to improve your weaknesses
  3. Mindful practice
    • talk about how people can accidentally/naturally get better

Tetris fundamentals:

Fundamentally, Tetris is a game about arranging blocks. That's literally it. Forget everything you know about "t-spin setups", combo, "upstacking", "downstacking", and let's just talk about the basics and build up from there.

How does one play Tetris well?

Doing anything at all, requires you to think. So your thought process is very important.

Thinking about Tetris can be divided into 3 parts: Rules, Objectives, and Planning.

Planning

Planning is the act of visualizing different scenarios, and the picking the best option available

This is also divided into two parts: your ability to visualize, and your judgment.

The best option will depend on your objective:

Objective

Your objective might vary depending on the specific game and mode, such as Sprint (clear 40L as fast as you can), Cheese (clear 100L of cheese as fast as you can), VS (Top out your opponent), etc.

You can also create self-imposed objectives as well.

You must understand your objective clearly before you can properly plan for it.

Rules

How you can achieve your objective depends on the rules.

Understanding SRS, T-Spin detection, and the Attack Table is important for playing VS. Gravity, das might be more important for classic tetris.

Understanding what each rule does and what it affects is very important.

Planning

Visualization/Vision

Before you can actually make a decision, you have to have something to decide on.

Visualization is when you imagine all the placements you can make with your pieces, in the order they arrive in.

You can imagine a sort of decision tree with each placement being a separate branch:

Intuition, Pruning, Heuristics

Obviously it is infeasible to try every single possible arrangement in your head, so humans have many methods of reducing the number of things they need to visualize. Skipping certain placements because they are "obviously" bad (that's called a heuristic), or using existing pattern knowledge to skip steps.

Just keep in mind that your intuition and heuristics are not perfect. So you should not be afraid to try new things, and revaluate what you think is good.

Patterns

After a lot of practice you will start to notice certain good patterns and arrangements of blocks. Knowing many patterns can speed up your visualization, since instead of visualizing two pieces separately, you can visualize them together as one shape.

There are some drawbacks to overreliance on patterns, since you are less likely to explore new shapes, might take sub optimal choices, and might stagnate.

Objectives & Rules

I will elaborate further at some other point, but just try and understand what your true objective is:

ie. If you want to improve your cheese efficiency, focus on getting the least blocks.

And then understand the rules and how they can help you accomplish that goal.

ie. 7-bag randomizer makes consecutive 4 high perfect clears more consistent

Interaction rps:

Accept when clean and safe

Block cheese with clean

Send cheese when opponeent cant block

Send clean when the opponent cant ds

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