Hmm, I guess I should post the rest... so that the drafts I made won't go to waste.
Moving on...
Part 5. Fight!
So I jump into the fray.
I am totally amazed an astounded by how dismally bad the bronze players are (no offense to them, the ones who actually talked in chat were okay).
Everyone made holes everywhere, and I don't think anyone made a tetris for like 5 games.
Even with just plain tetris stacking, everyone suddenly just seemed to die, apparently, too fast for them that they would start leaving one by one.
If I tried and t-spinned every hole I could think of, a lot of the time, almost everyone would leave.
I felt bad doing this, so I just threw every game after everyone was near death by minociding... until I got bored (after a couple of hours
), realizing that this was almost no different from sprinting, minus the minocide. So I decided to level up to people who are my match.
I literally shot straight to gold ranking.
And then finally, I actually found myself being decently attacked (wow, garbage lines!)
It was then that I noticed something strange.
There are games that I would lose (felt like everyone was attacking me), despite me KOing a lot of people, and almost always sending the most lines in the game.
I was dumbfounded. I KNEW I was the strongest attacker, where did I go wrong?
(I was also starting to have suspicions that TF sent the lines to the strongest attacker i.e. the handicap system)
Soon I figured out a few things:
-
I just keep attacking, which is wrong. Even halfway up the screen with garbage, I kept building tetrises and t-spins, only to realize the opponent has cleared his screen, and hurry-up garbage (or even a single decent attack) will kill me. I decided, I REALLY need to learn how to downstack. This is a completely separate skill from stacking that I never learned, which everyone else seems to be better at me than.
- For this, I again recalled some things I read on the forum:
to play dig race and dig challenge. A LOT.- Also, I realized that single attacks (at least, in TF) usually results in clean garbage the opponent can tetris straight back at me (and everyone sends it back to me). I decided that I needed to pack a bigger punch.
I started building up more powerful attacks, like b2b tetris, or 5-4 tetris stack with a t-spin on top (I think this is common...? I'd try 6-3 but I still didn't have the stacking skills back then for a decent 3-width column).
With most of my attacks being massive spikes, this increased my KO rate by alot.
Although it also seemed to make the target stay on me more.
I realize that the above may not be applicable all of the time (or even most of the time) but it worked for me for the time being... especially since I sent single attacks (like a single tetris or a single t-spin) less often, which weakened the attacking power of most of my opponents (a lot of whom were just sending my lines straight back to me). I realize this may be a newbie strategy, which may only be applicable to non-expert rooms with handicap, and are not applicable to decent platinum games, but it seemed to work for getting me the win.
But I wanted to go further than such short term goals as gaining simple wins.
Thus, I quit TF for quite awhile, and
focused on learning to downstack.
I finally got sub-1 after TONS of near misses (I think my 1:01-1:02 games number in the hundreds already....most of the time caused by suddenly misdropping the last piece due to panic, and having to wait for 3+ more pieces to get that last line).
Also, I can't believe that I am actually already platinum at this level (and that I can even beast quite a few level 16-18 players).
Funny thing though, once a level 19 comes into the room, he's guaranteed to almost always win (the only way I've managed to steal wins is from combo-starters, if I target them and send a DT cannon opener spike purely at them).
And that a level 20 is guaranteed to KO almost everyone in the room. :/
That's not even considering that level 20's have an entire tier ranking altogether.
What a long way to go...
And I don't think TF is the way to go if I ever want to be the same level as the sub-30 uber-pros that can obliterate legions of TF level 20 players...
Some random tetris noob, Chronicles on my journey to (hopefully) being a pro
Jul 10 2011, 06:14 PM
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