Firstly this is a DETAILED fumen based Tetris friends marathon playing guide. For basics there are already good video guides, but I wanted something much more in depth, for you guys and for myself.
I aim to beat a score of 1000000 and hope to help some others do so too!
- Why bother?
Many people may ask, why bother? Well marathon playing requires you to do a lot of thinking. Playing marathon for high scores will help you master twists, Tspinning and efficient digging. It FORCES you to make mistakes on purpose thus creating setups you may not normally encounter, especially in online play.
So today lets start with a detailed look at scoring on Marathon:
****SCORING****
In marathon the object is to get the most amount of points possible in a limited number of lines. This means that you need to maximise your points to lines cleared ratio. For the sake of reading/typing all scores are referencing to marathon level 1 unless I say otherwise.
Firstly lets look at the basic moves you should all be familiar with:

Now on first appearance it looks like all the moves give you the same points and this is true (100 points per line each), but lets look at what we can follow up most of these moves with:
Moves which require previous states

This shows that to maximise our points/line ratio we want to do as many Single Combo 1s as possible. The best way to do this is to do a single line clear followed by a single combo line clear.
A tetris clears 8 lines for 800 points so a tetris + combo 1 gives 950 points
but with these nine lines we could have done 4 singles + 4 single combos for a total score of 1000 points.. and that's in only 8 lines.
This might not seem like much but it mounts up very fast at higher levels to huge score multiplier differences.
You might ask, well what about combo 2 one line clears? Unfortunately once you combo higher than one it starts counting as more than one line cleared which negates the bonus you are getting from the extra 50 points.. I didn't want to clutter up the guide with more numbers than it already has... feel free to check if you don't believe me

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Now playing marathon isn't just all about doing singles and 1 combos.... you may have noticed that when playing marathon clearing a level will always start you with full lines on the next level. Ie when you beat level 1 you always have 10 lines to clear for level 2, when you beat level 2 you always have 15 lines to clear for level three, etc.
We can take advantage of this fact to score big. Lets say we have 1 line left on level one. You could do a Tspin triple for 1600 points and it will only count as one line clear! Or even better, if you have three lines left you can do a Tspin mini single (200 points and 2 lines cleared) followed by a B2b Tspin triple (2400 points) for a total of 2600 points for your last three lines of each level.
So for each two lines of a level we can get 250 points (*level) and for the last three lines of each level we can get 2600(*level). This is a perfect scoring mechanism for any level which has an odd number of lines (Multiples of 2 + 3 end lines). For other levels we will have one line left over. The best thing to do with this line is clear it immediately when you start a new level... thus giving you a single 1 combo 150points. More on this later.
This gives us the max scoring for each level:
Level 1: single -> combo 1 single -> t spin mini single -> b2b tspin triple
Level 2: combo 1 single -> (single -> combo 1 single) * 3 -> t spin mini single -> b2b tspin triple
Level 3: (single -> combo 1 single) * 6 -> tspin mini single -> b2b tspin triple
Level 4: combo 1 single -> (single -> combo 1 single) * 8 -> t spin mini single -> b2b tspin triple
Level 5: (single -> combo 1 single) * 11 -> tspin mini single -> b2b tspin triple
Level 6: combo 1 single -> (single -> combo 1 single) * 13 -> t spin mini single -> b2b tspin triple
Finally it is possible to gain more points by hard dropping pieces and by soft dropping pieces.
Soft drop points: 1 per line, max of 19 per piece (assuming no elevator piece usage... see:
http://harddrop.com/forums/index.php?showt...mp;hl=elevators and yes it is possible to abuse this for extra points... but it would take you a LOOONNNG time and be very obvious in your replay. )
Hard drop points: 2 per line, max of 38 per piece.
In this section of the guide we will not be going into details of exploiting these extra points, lets just say simply that to get the most points you should hard drop pieces if you know where you want them to go and hold down soft drop if you don't. Only don't press anything if you need time to think.
Below are some fumen diagrams of the first few levels played 'Perfectly' (in terms of points, I've made them a little messy on purpose to give it a more natural look) to give you a better understanding of what has been discussed above.
LEVEL 1 SCORING:
LEVEL 2 SCORING:
Here is the points chart for a 'perfect' move game.

The following players on TF have scores higher than seem possible, but that is because of soft drop/hard drop points.
1 S0N1C 1059783
2 Atsu 1055892
3 sane788 1054796
4 phatti 1048589
5 Fara7 1047011
6 holdnext 1046829
****Starting Out****Now it would be foolish to dive straight in and try for 1000000. We will build up to this in a series of tasks which I will break down below:
- 1 Line Combo mastery
- Tspin mini setups
- Mistakes, when to accept them and which are least costly
- Avoiding unintentional line clears
- Platforming
- Tspin triples
Lets look at 1 line combo mastery.
There are four scenarios where you will want to 1 line combo.
- Building 1 line combos
- Digging 1 line combos
- Building to Dig
- Tspin triple -> 1 line combo (for even levels). We will focus on the first three.
- Building 1 line combos
In an ideal game you will mostly be playing with the bottom four rows of the screen. This gives you maximum time to think as well as rewarding you the most for your soft and hard drops. During this stage of play you will be setting up 1 line combos by building incomplete lines and then clearing them in succession.
At a basic level the idea is to make an incomplete line with only a single notch gap and then clear a line ontop of it leaving that notch free. This is the best possible outcome because a single gap can be filled with I, Z, T, S, L or J
Of course it isn't always possible to do this, and the next best outcome is to leave a two notch gap, as you can drop an O, L, J, (S OR Z) into it, giving you four peice options for your combo clear.
Fortuntly however we can make use of the hold que to make a more general play method. What I try and do is create most of a line, then hold a peice to fill the rest of the gap, then stack ontop so that that peice can be dropped for a second line clear. Ideally you do this in a way that lets you use other peices too, if your stacking is going wrong. Playing like this generally results in a flatter stack and shoudl keep you playing at the bottom of the screen.
As you can see from these fumens, the I block is the best for covering gaps and keeping the stack above those gaps flat. This gives you the max options for piece placement and will also come in handy later when we are doing T spin Minis. The I spin is also very useful for plugging unwanted gaps which we may have created which make comboing more difficult. Having an I in hold is always a good idea. They generally lead to one combos with the most options and flatest stacking.
....Well that's all I have time for today! Next time we will look at digging 1 line combos.