Some random tetris noob, Chronicles on my journey to (hopefully) being a pro Options

[randomtetrisnoob]

Hi there.
I'm quite new to this game (you might've seen me lurking around in Nullpo's netplay, or in random platinum games on TF, watching how pros play).

I've been planning to post this topic for awhile but never got to it...anyway...

I'm just some random tetris noob, and here in this topic, I will tell my story on how I got into this game and how I am improving, which will hopefully be of some help to some other newbie soul out there.

tl;dr; warning, wall-of-text coming up
Summary: I suck, I'm a noob, and it's probably not worth reading unless you're bored.

Part 1. My induction to tetris

Some backstory... You see, I semi-regularly read the webcomic xkcd, and one day, I saw this comic:
xkcd: Heaven


As per my usual habit, I went to the xkcd forums to read about the current comic.
And I read that it had a counter-part comic, "Hell".

Sadly (or not), the poster did NOT link the comic. If he had, it would've ended there.
So I went to google and searched for it.

And lo and behold, I was greeted with the video: "TGM HOLiC aka Jin8 playing TGM3" (Invisible tetris).


I was dumbfounded.
I immediately did a google search for "TGM HOLiC" (or something similar, I can't recall ).
And then... I found harddrop.com as the first search result.

I went to the homepage, which had the top news as LapSiLap's new WR.
I watched the video, and I was again dumbfounded.

And excited and exhilarated.
Something ticked in my mind... it was saying: "this is a learnable skill!!".

Let me explain... I'm a skill-monger. I collect seemingly "superhuman" skills.
I am a (sorry if some of these don't make sense):
- sub-20 speed cuber (i.e. I can solve a rubik's cube in less than 20 secs)
- I can lightdash on Tekken (i.e. I can do 4-5 crouch dashes per second, and I can regularly perform crazy stunts in TTT like EWGF_ws+2, TGF)
- I can perfect any official DDR song (from 1st mix to supernova only, not yet at the 100% marvelous level though, but quite close... when I quit )
- I play MSP or combofiend on MvC2 (and love stuff like Mag's ROM combo or slide infinite)
- I also play O2JAM. Never made it to uber-pro levels though (like CH.Free's perfect Earthquake run) since they cancelled O2JAM in our country quite a bit after I started playing, but I made it to a level where I can consistently perfect V3 hard ...
- etc. etc.

So seeing a site full of "superhuman" tetris players, I could not resist the desire of being among the ranks of such people. I immediately jump into the fray.

[randomtetrisnoob]

Yeah, I just use that to practice finesse.
But when I want to see how fast I currently am, I switch back to standard-zero.

About DAS delay, I never touched the tuning in the options, I instead set the DAS before the game starts (after picking a mode) to 6. I tried setting it to zero but it feels the same? ...or am I not fast enough yet to notice?

I also always use 180 on nullpo, I actually abused it back when my tetris stacking was still really bad, usually doing something like:



But then playing a bit of TF knocked that habit right out of me.

Anyway, sorry for the lack of updates.
I actually had most parts of this "story" already written out, but suddenly, I'm having some radical changes that is totally changing the way I play, and it's making me rethink a lot of the stuff I've already planned out to write.

e.g. (wall-of-text, I tried this around the time Xael recommended high BPM songs)

I tried to memorize a game's bag just to feel how being pro at 40L would be, and to check my current physical limitation (by factoring out the mental limitation part, i.e. thinking). While the idea was ripped off from the thread about becoming korean sub-25, I usually do this to level up quickly (i.e. back in DDR 3rd mix days, I memorized the first part of Afronova SSR, and my note-reading skill jumped from slow songs like AM-3P and Wonderland, to being able to read any song in that game [I couldn't read fast songs at the time]).

And the feeling was insane. It made me feel that I just had to drop a piece ASAP (or else I would lose precious time). The parts that had very quick drops (e.g. hard-drop x3 quickly, or hold DAS to one side and multiple hard-drops) felt awesome. I started to feel why you would need IRS in such situations (whereas I never even though about needing it myself in the past) rotate-then-drop 3x is sooo much slower than hold rotate, DROPDropdrop.

So I tried doing that in a normal 40L run (drop ASAP, if I can't think about where to place the piece, just put it anywhere good enough, even if I make a hole), and my stacking turned to absolute crap. Especially since I sometimes couldn't even get a decent glance at the previews since I was focusing at the matrix so much (probably due to lack of experience).

I made tons of holes. And I used 118 pieces (instead of my usual 103-105).
And my record jumped to 1:04 from 1:15.
It's insane... I feel like I'm learning bad habits in exchange for speed, I know I should stop but it's just too awesome to play like this. Gives quite an adrenaline rush. And it exhausts my brain very quickly (I blank out after about 5-6 games, can't even think where to place a piece, it gets quite bad).