Rosti's Guide To Multiplayer Tetris

[Rosti_LFC]

An Introduction

First off, this guide is hella long – it’s over 5000 words and it’s pretty much the entirety of Tetris knowledge that I could put into paper. It’s also something I started writing in June 2009 (a week or two before HD even came to be), and as a result there’s a ton of crap in here that’s somewhat outdated because it was written back when Blockbox was the main thing in the community, Tetris Friends was new, and Nullpo Netplay didn’t exist (AFAIK?). I stopped writing it for over a year, but I’ve recently finished it off, and here it is.

I started playing Tetris seriously on Tetris DS in 2006. The game doesn’t allow for really high-speed play, and on top of this I spent most of my time on 4-player with items, where targeting and random bulls*** could frequently screw you over. It was a mode where thought and strategy were needed far more than just brute power and t-spins.
Then I shifted to TGM, which is ARS and single player, but which also does wonders for teaching you how to stack properly. I also dabbled a fair amount in other games like Quadra, and I was one of the small handful of people who acted as expert consultants for Deniax when he made Blockbox. I’ve been in the Tetris scene on and off for nearly six years now, and I feel like I know my sh**. On the other hand, a lot of this is old and I’ve only edited it rather than re-written it, so bear with anything that’s now fairly irrelevant and such.

This is still in many ways a work in progress. If anyone has suggestions for a few more links to add that would improve the guide, or any fumen diagrams, then they'd be massively appreciated.

My aim with this is to be a guide for any people starting out who might have a few questions, or are looking at ways to improve quickly. I do use a fair bit of terminology, so the glossary on the wiki might be useful. I’ve tried to keep it somewhat interesting to read, and I hope people don’t find it too boring. And above all, I hope people find this useful.

Speed
Speed is an obvious plus-point. It is the main aspect which every player can always strive to improve. If you can do the exact same thing but faster, you’re guaranteed to be a better player. It’s also the region where most novice players need the greatest improvement, which is why I’ve started with it.

Rotate Both Ways
A large failing for most new players is that they come from games like Tetris Friends and Blockles which have a very poor default control system with rotate bound to the up key. The primary effect of this, seeing as there isn’t really any sort of second up key, is to put the player under the impression that only one rotate key is necessary. This is completely wrong. Unlike most of the rest of the stuff in this guide, using two rotation directions is not something which you should follow, it is something that you must follow. It is necessary for finesse and it is necessary for true high speed play. It’s also something you should start getting into the habit of doing as early as possible, because the longer you go with only one rotation the more trouble you’ll have bringing in the second direction.

I’d also advise using a 180° rotation button as well, though I found it too difficult to bother to learn myself. If you can bring yourself to use it, it’s an excellent tool and it’ll give you an extra edge over a lot of players, as not many people use it. 180° spins are also massively useful for clearing up mistakes.

Use SRS
This might seem a bit of a weird thing for anyone who knows me, seeing as I’m an ARS purist when it comes to TGM, and I am. If you’re playing TGM then play properly, leave SRS the F*** alone and use ARS instead. However, for 40 lines and multiplayer, or any other mode with no gravity, you should be using SRS. The kicks are screwed up under high gravity, but it has the highest potential for speed in low gravity, and if you’re playing a game with t-spins it’s a necessity. The level of finesse and therefore extra speed is far greater for SRS than ARS. On top of that, it’s the guideline, and if any rotation system is the most future-proof, it’s looking to easily be SRS.

Get DAS Configured Properly
DAS stands for “Delayed Auto-Shift”. It’s the gameplay mechanic that causes the pieces to zip to the sides when you hold down left or right. It’s a crucial part of high-level gameplay and something that should be made use of. Ideally you want to make the DAS as fast as possible, while being slow enough for you to still have complete control of the pieces. Having DAS configured to properly suit you can help speed massively. Having it configured badly can slow you down or cause mistakes all over the place.

The repeat rate controls how fast the pieces go once the DAS kicks in. Generally you want this set to either 60Hz (the piece moves one space to the side per frame) or instant, where the piece instantly moves to the wall once the DAS takes control. Most games have it set in frames per movement, so you’ll either want 1 for 60Hz or 0 for instant (Nullpomino specifically has a retarded nomenclature in the game tunings options, the number for repeat rate is called ‘DAS delay’).

The repeat delay controls how long you have to hold the button down before the DAS kicks in. It is this delay that allows you to tap the button and only move the piece one column, but which also slows you down when you want to use DAS, because you have to wait for the delay to time out. You want this delay to be as short as possible while never being too short to mean you accidentally DAS when you mean to tap. A good starting range for most players is 8-14 frames, with faster players being able to use delays shorter than 8 frames (I use 6).

Use The Force
To be good at Tetris, you must also become a Jedi. Relying on your eyes is bad for speed, and it’ll slow you down quite a lot. You have to let go of using your eyes and rely on feeling for where the pieces are. What I basically mean is that you have to practice enough to get to the level where you don’t need visual confirmation that the piece is going where you want it to go. Your hands should know the inputs needed to get the piece where you want it, and they shouldn’t need your eyes to make sure that it’s getting there.
A good way to train this is to turn the ghost piece off, stick a piece of paper or something over the screen so that it covers the top five rows of the field (or play 0G), then try to play. In doing this you have no way to see where the piece you’re moving is, and you have to rely on your hands guiding the piece to the correct place. It can feel unsettling at first, but if you’re going to be trying to play upwards of 150tpm you can’t waste time watching every piece to make sure it’s hitting its mark. However, I would recommend putting the ghost piece back on when you play, because it does help.

This effect becomes more apparent when lag causes inputs to be dropped, because you can no longer rely just on your instincts for the pieces to be in the right place, and as a result you have to slow down to let yourself check that everything is going where it should.

This is a skill that you’ll naturally acquire with practice, but I think it’s helpful to be aware that it is something which is going to start to happen, and to perhaps try and train a bit towards it. I’m pretty sure that none of the top players pay much attention to where the active piece is, and they’re letting their hands guide the active piece while their mind and vision are fully concentrated on the stack and where the next piece is going. At least, that’s how I feel when I get into the ‘zone’ and start to play at the fastest speeds I’m capable of.

Learn Finesse
‘Finesse’ is the term for making efficient piece placements with regards to key presses. There’s plenty of aspects of efficiency in terms of how you stack, but this is purely on the subject of key presses, and for reaching the top speeds it’s extremely important. Your hands can only move so fast, and the fewer inputs you’re having to mash in to get a piece somewhere, the faster you’re likely to be able to play. Finesse also tends to focus on tapping left and right. You can physically press two different buttons consecutively a lot faster than you can press the same one twice.
For SRS, there’s quite a lot of depth to the finesse, and it’s all outlined on the TC wiki. First thing to note is that they are for fast DAS. If you’re playing games with slow DAS (NES Tetris, or Tetris Friends with Level 1 DAS and ARR) then finesse breaks down somewhat, because it’s quite often faster to tap quickly than let the DAS do the work. But with quick DAS, finesse is extremely important for speed. To place a piece one space away from the wall, it’s usually faster to DAS to the wall and tap back one, than it is to press left several times to get there.

I’d say it’s fairly tedious and unnecessary to bother to learn the finesse for each individual piece placement, and I’m fairly sure that ingraining it into your muscle memory (which is what actually matters for high-speed) would take a long time and a lot of work. What’s more important is to know the fundamentals and how efficiency of button presses is fairly important. For example, know that with SRS rotating the I, S or Z pieces right will move them one square to the right compared to rotating left (as the pieces have four rotation states). This means if you’re moving right it’s beneficial to rotate right, not left. Practice a bit on single-player and just experiment with the rotations and movement and see if there’s any areas of your piece placement that can be made more efficient.


Why Pure Speed Doesn’t Really Matter
My next point can be demonstrated fairly easily. Open up Nullpomino 40 lines or some equivalent, and when the game starts hammer hard drop as fast as you can. What sort of tpm do you get? 400 tetrominos per minute? 600? Pretty impressive, except for the fact that you’ve topped out and died. A lot of people place a huge amount of emphasis on the number of pieces per second they can place, but ultimately, as this demonstration shows, there’s far more to it than that.

More Haste = Less Speed
With Tetris, this old saying definitely applies. If you’re trying to play out of your skin in terms of speed, and push yourself as fast as you can go, then you’re going to make mistakes. In 40 lines this is fine, you just kill yourself and have another go, but in a multiplayer game, making these mistakes will at best slow you down, and at worst make a complete mess of your stack and lose you the game. This is why trying to play as fast as you can is usually a pretty bad idea in multiplayer modes.
What you really want to do is find your comfort zone, which is probably around 80-90% of your top speed. You want to find the fastest speed you can play at where you’re making a negligible number of mistakes, because when your mistakes matter this will be your true fastest speed. I see a lot of players who are lightning quick and hugely erratic, mostly because they make frequent mistakes. They either get a mistake-free game and dominate with their speed, or they F*** up somewhere and lose. If you’ve got the speed to spare, it’s completely pointless to push for it all the time, because you can slow down a little and sacrifice some speed, but ultimately be far more consistent and win far more games in the long run.

Take Time To Think
If anyone ever watched lots of Jono’s 40 lines record (which most people won't have, because this is outdated and he's not the fastest 40L player any more) they’d probably notice his style was fairly odd. He’d have a small pause, then a burst of insane speed, then a pause, then speed, and repeat until he’d finished with a ridiculously impressive time. Those pauses aren’t necessarily required, but they can be extremely useful, and I’d more like to point out the fact that it’s possible to get extremely quick without racing out one piece after another, and in multiplayer this is even more important. If you have an awkward piece placement, then don’t worry about speed. Take a second or two, look at your piece previews, allow yourself to have a moment to think so that you make the right decision. Rushing a piece placement might save you a moment or two of thinking time, but it’ll almost certainly come back to haunt you later and you’ll most likely end up losing far more game time in the long run.

APM > TPM
Unless you’re playing against a complete retard, the chances are you’re only ever going to win if you can top them out. A fairly important point to note is that the number of lines you send per minute is more important than the number of pieces you place per minute. You can be playing at 240tpm, but if you’re only clearing singles then you won’t be sending any garbage and you’ll never win. This is another aspect of shifting your focus from placing pieces as quickly as possible to taking a bit more time to think, and to judge how you can place pieces as effectively as possible, to send as many lines as you can.
Another point that links into this, but is slightly different to APM, is that when playing defensively and clearing down, it’s more important to drill down quickly than it is to place pieces quickly. This is especially crucial because if you’re placing pieces quickly without drilling down through the garbage then you’ll actually be stacking up towards the top of the screen and doing the complete opposite of what you should be doing.


Drilling
Moving on now to some proper aspects of multiplayer strategy, I’ll first concentrate on clearing garbage, because it’s one of the most important things to be good at regardless of the mode you’re playing. Even if it doesn’t necessarily win you matches, it can definitely help stop you from losing them.

Withstanding Pressure
If you’re drilling down through garbage it’s quite easy to focus too much on just getting to the bottom, and in practice you’ll send very few lines. This is a really bad situation to be in, because if you’re not sending anything then your opponent has no pressure on him whatsoever, and can concentrate purely on sending more garbage to you. Drilling without sending garbage puts you on the back foot, and if your opponent is any good then you’ll probably lose pretty quickly.

What you really need to do is clear garbage effectively while also sending a fair number of lines to your opponent. This can be fairly tricky, because these key concepts of defence and attack tend to be fairly mutually exclusive, but it is possible. By sending lines while clearing you’re forcing your opponent to also defend, and to switch out of all-out attack. If you can effectively send while clearing then you can switch the focus of the game, from yourself being on the defensive to your opponent being on the defensive
As it’s fairly difficult to do both at once, it’s easier just to do either one or the other, depending on how things have shaped up for you. As a note, this mostly applies to games like Blockbox and TetriNET where the garbage is highly scattered, unlike games like Tetris DS or Tetris Friends where it mostly lines up.

If your garbage has holes that are closely packed together, then it’s going to be a b**** to deal with quickly. The very worst scenario is trilled garbage, where the holes alternate between two adjacent columns from row to row. Packed garbage is pretty much impossible to blast through quickly, which is why it’s best not to bother. If the holes are packed, then you’re usually better off stacking up a few lines and then clearing each row of garbage with a double or triple. It’ll take longer to clear down, but you’ll at least be sending a few lines to your opponent with each line.

If your garbage is disperse, then don’t bother sending lines too much. Just work on effectively drilling through it, and if you can trying to send lines through combos. If you’re good at drilling then scattered garbage should take very little time to burn through, and you should be clearing a line every two or three pieces on average.

Do Look Down
This is a huge point for most beginners, and I find it really irritating to watch people who seem to just hold blatant disregard for anything below the top line or two of their stack. Garbage holes are so much easier to deal with if you don’t stack tons of sh** on top of them, because you don’t have to clear as much to uncover and fill them.
It’s not hard, but it’s a fairly crucial and basic point that people don’t follow. Just do your best not to place stuff on top of holes. If you’ve got a load of garbage holes to the left, then try and stack on the right. Just avoid making placements that put extra rows on holes if you don’t have to, because you’re most likely just going to be making it harder for yourself when you inevitably have to dig it all back up.

For a more detailed and far better guide: http://harddrop.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=3863


Stacking
Knowing how to stack is sort of the bread and butter of Tetris, and it’s extremely important in multiplayer to be able to stack well.

Keep It Clean
A fairly obvious point, but extremely important. You should aim to have a stack that’s fairly flat, with a few features for S and Z pieces to lock onto. The flatter it is, the easier it is to manipulate and keep under control. It’s also far easier to deal with when you start getting put under pressure at the top of the screen. If your stack looks a castle wall then you’re going to be in trouble fairly soon without a very lucky piece sequence. It’s also fairly important to keep any deep wells to a minimum. If you’ve got a well that’s 3 rows deep then you’ve either got to make a hole or use an I-piece to fill it, and really you want to be keeping those for Tetrises. Stacking doesn’t make a huge difference to how you affect your opponent, but bad stacking can put a lot of extra pressure upon yourself which you’d be better off without.

For more on generally good stacking, try this guide: http://www.ryanheise.com/tetris/tetris_stacking.html

Holes
Holes aren’t always bad. Or at least, there are situations where they are unavoidable, and it’s not always the end of the world if you know what you’re doing. The key aspect is to make holes that you can easily dig bag up. If you make a hole which you can then fix a few pieces later, then you’ve not really hurt yourself too much, and it’s usually preferable to make an easily-fixable hole than it is to create some sort of difficult stack or awkward overhang which, in the long run, will probably give you far more grief.

Leave Space For Skimming
Make sure you keep a rough funnel around the area you’re placing your hole for Tetrising. If you’ve got it on the right, then make sure you’re keeping the rest of the right-most columns fairly low, especially the one just away from the wall (column 9, if you count from the left). Giving yourself the ability to skim lines away from the top is a crucial defensive aspect of stacking. It’s a well-known aspect of Tetris that you’ll never get an I piece when you want one, and doing this means that it doesn’t matter, because you can just stick another piece down there and take some lines off your stack height without waiting for a Tetris. You can use this for countering garbage, or just for giving yourself a bit a bit more breathing space when you feel you need it. It’s also got the massive added bonus of making it far easier to shove an I piece down the side when you get pushed into the top few lines of the screen and space is tight.


General Tips

Know Your Weapons
There are dozens of different Tetris games out there which have multiplayer modes, and they’re almost all different. They will have different rules for t-spins, combos, garbage patterns, gravity behaviour… pretty much anything that you can really change without it ceasing to be Tetris. There are people who just choose a game and stick to it, but what matters is that you know the rules of the game you’re playing, and you know how to tailor your playing style to suit it. It’s all well and good to try and be a good player whilst ignoring t-spins and combos because you don’t like them, but ultimately if you want to be a good player you’re going to have to understand them, know when to use them effectively, and master them. They are weapons which are there to be used, and if you’re passing them up while your opponent is seizing them, then you’re just handicapping yourself for no real reason.

Most games these days use t-spins. Learn them, practice them, and make sure you’re using them as much as possible, because they’re far more effective for sending lines than Tetrises. If the game uses all-spins, then learn those. The same also applies to combos, but I’d rather avoid stressing this point because 4-wide combos are a fu**ing boring way to play

Watch Your Opponent
This is such a huge one, and it’s a point that a lot of players really don’t seem to follow. In versus you are playing against someone else, and it doesn’t help to only concentrate on your own playing field. Taking a fraction of a second every now and then to see how your opponent is doing is extremely useful, or even just seeing how high their field is in your peripheral vision. For 1v1 games, you can get a decent feel for how your opponent is doing just from the flow of garbage into your field, but those glances across are still invaluable. You can see if they’ve misdropped and you should apply pressure, you can see if you’re about to get a ton of garbage and should maybe brace for impact. Most importantly, you can see if your opponent is near topping out. So often I see players stacking up from the bottom to send nine or ten lines at once, when their opponent is actually only maybe three or four lines away from being pushed over the top. If you can see what you need to do to kill your opponent and win, then you can do it, and you don’t need to waste crucial seconds building up unnecessary lines and giving them time to recover and stay alive.

Stack Low, Except When Stacking High
The only thing you should really fear in Tetris is the 21st row. You top out, you lose, and that’s pretty much the single thing that matters in versus matches. If you can stay away from that 21st row, then you will win, so stack low. Sure, sending two or three Tetrises in quick succession is nice, but ultimately it doesn’t make much difference compared to sending some earlier, rather than building high and firing them all at once. If you stack high, then you risk your opponent being able to push you over the top with fewer lines sent, and if you F*** over your Tetris column or a t-spin, then you’ve basically just stacked up a dozen lines of garbage underneath your screwed up top few lines.

Things get a bit different later into the match, and stacking up high is definitely worth it if it means it’ll kill your opponent. Stacking up high to send a Tetris rather than a single is quite often an effective strategy, providing you’ve got the space to do it, and you’re not going to get pushed through the top (checking your opponent’s field before stacking is usually a decent idea). At the start though, unless you’re going for combos you really have no reason to be stacking high, and it’ll only give you more potential grief than it will cause damage to your opponents.

For games with three or more players, stacking low is especially important in the first stage of the game before people have started being knocked out. Garbage is usually far more unpredictable and you can easily get f***ed over by getting sent a ton of lines at once, so keeping your stack low and just making sure you defend well and survive the initial phase of the game is usually the best strategy, and then open yourself up once it’s down to just 1v1.

Reduce Lag
Part of the issue with playing quickly and letting your hands guide the pieces is that you’re assuming that every action your hands make is reflected in the game – something which isn’t always the case. When playing games in a browser, set the processor affinity for your browser (and/or the plugin container, if it uses one) to high. It won’t make a huge difference, but it can potentially reduce lag, and every little helps.
If possible use a keyboard that is connected by PS/2 instead of USB, and PS/2 keyboards give inputs to the CPU faster than USB (almost regardless of whatever fancy USB refresh rate your gaming keyboard might claim to have). If you minimise the time between when you see something and when your input gets through then you play faster, and at really high speeds even the small input lags can make a noticeable difference. (In-built laptop keyboards are PS/2, btw)

Use Hold Properly
Excessive use of the hold function will slow you down, because you’re wasting time making inputs that don’t actually place pieces. That said, the hold function is definitely not something you can ignore, and it’s an incredibly useful tool when used properly. Playing with heavy t-spins or combos absolutely requires using it, but even outside of that it can be useful to help keep a cleaner stack, or to save up an I-piece to help spike an opponent.

Use Previews Properly
There’s not a huge amount to really say here other than “you should be looking at the previews”. Don’t take each piece as it comes; know what’s going to be coming up and plan ahead. Typically you’ll only really be using the next two to four previews constantly at a high level of play, but if you have more previews then it can be helpful to look further down the sequence. For example, if going for a t-spin setup it’s usually fairly important to make sure you have a t-piece coming soon, because needing to wait six or seven pieces for one will typically screw up the balance of the stack. Knowing whether you’re going to get an I-piece soon can help with decisions for whether you need to skim or whether you can afford to wait for a Tetris. Make good use of the information that you’re provided with.

Know The Randomiser
Most games these day use 7-bag randomisers, meaning that you can be assured a fairly even distribution of pieces. You’re not ever going to go more than 13 pieces without seeing one of the pieces, and if you’re keeping a vague mental note of when you last saw a certain piece you can predict the likelihood of when you’re going to get it again.
The 7-bag randomiser also allows ST stacking (which isn’t that advisable in VS usually, unless you’re bloody good at it) or perfect clears to be a bit more predictable. It also allows you to…

Have An Opening
At the start of every game you will have a blank field (unless you’re playing with maps), and on a 7-bag randomiser you will be given one of each piece in a random order. With the width of the field and with hold, this means that for most piece sequences you can actually place your first seven pieces in the exact same way every time. This then means at the start of every game, by the time you start your second bag of pieces, you can be in the same place every time. You can place those pieces in a certain placement as well. You can have a highly tuned and practiced start to every single game, before garbage starts to screw around with you.

There are two benefits to this. The first is that you can tune your start to something that sends a high amount of garbage, such as a more complex t-spin setup or something like the TKI-3 opener that sends back-to-back doubles. The second benefit is that you can practice the hell out of this, and get it so that you have it completely nailed down and absolutely know it by heart. It lets you make setups quickly that otherwise might require a bit more brainpower and time.

There’s really no reason not to have an opening, and they can be an extremely powerful way to start off the game and instantly put your opponent on the defensive.

For more on Openings: http://harddrop.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=2519

Play To Your Strengths
Fundamentally most of us aren’t good at everything, or we’re at least better at some things than others. Knowing what you are and aren’t good at is an important thing, because as well as letting you concentrate your practice on improving your worst areas it also lets you adjust your playing style to make the most of your strengths.

If you’re not so great on speed, but good with t-spin setups, then make absolutely sure that you never miss an opportunity for one and keep your attacks per line high. If you’re awesome at downstacking then be a bit more confident to take risks when your stack gets a little high, and go for those extra Tetrises knowing you can burn down to the bottom when you need to.

Play To Your Opponent’s Weaknesses
This applies a little bit more to high-level tournament play, but if you watch your opponent carefully then you can use it for regular online games as well. If you’re against a player who favours downstacking and staying at the bottom over sending lines, then be aggressive and know that you’re not likely to receive garbage so long as he has stuff to clear through.

The same goes for minimising your opponent’s strengths. If they like to open with 4-wide combos then make sure as hell that you’re sending as many lines as you can off the start to try and limit the field he has to make one in (and know that you’re not going to get any garbage for the first 10 seconds or so).


Above All…

Observe & Absorb
Unless you’re in the handful of people right at the top, there are going to be people who are better than you, and they’ll be better than you for a reason. If you watch them play attentively, then you can find that reason and learn from it. You might learn setups that you’ve never seen before. You might see them make a placement when you’d have done it differently, and analysing why they did what they did instead of what you’d do can be a useful tool.

Test Yourself
Don’t settle for just smashing scrubs all day on Tetris Friends. Winning is fun, but if you’re constantly winning then you won’t improve quickly. Find opponents who can test you, who can put you under pressure, who force you to play the best you can every game to even have a chance of winning.

Never Give Up
Don’t ever stop playing a game until you’ve topped out. The number of games I’ve won from epic recoveries when I was one line away, or even one bad next piece away, from being killed is absolutely massive. Be tenacious, and don’t give up on games just because you’re under high amounts of pressure or because you made a bad misdrop. And carry that mindset through to practicing and getting good. If you want to win, and you’re motivated to win, then you can.

Practice makes perfect
This guide has a lot of tips for improving and playing well, but fundamentally there’s no replacement for practicing. Knowing something isn’t enough – you’ve got to do it by habit. So much of high-level Tetris play goes on at a subconscious level of the mind, or in muscle memory. You can read all you want on finesse, but you won’t ever get to 180tpm without practice. Most of us have been playing for years to get as good as we are, and there’s no shortcut to that level of experience.

Have Fun
It’s unlikely that anyone is ever going to be able to earn big money or widespread recognition for playing Tetris, so if you’re not in this for yourself then there’s really no reason to be in it all. Fundamentally you should do what you enjoy, and concentrating on getting better and putting in tedious practice is still second-place compared to doing what you like doing. If you get bored of a mode, mix it up and go play something else for a bit. If you want to play 6p Tetris Friends with maps and items, then go do that. And go kick a** because of the things you read in this guide

[meow]

Excellent guide! It shows a huge amount of skill that dedicated players have worked on. Many of these tips, especially basic ones, escape us when trying to give advice to newer players, but the guide manages to give a good overview. It's a great starting point for players to find an area to work on.

[Rosti_LFC]

I just realised the bloody forum software cut off my Zoolander reference in the topic comment

[Alexsweden]

Very good guide Rosti! I got learned a couple of smaller things and got reminded of loads of good things - well worth reading!

Hopefully it will be helpfull for newer members too, I do belive it will

[ZeroT]

Great guide!!! I want to become a tetris jedi!

[ohitsstef]

thanks Rosti!  
now to use your guide against you

i demand a vs tonight!

[Paul676]

Great guide - I've added it to the most useful threads in its own section

[StS]

Great guide! Very all-rounded, and provides sources for more in-depth information/other guides where required.

[XaeL]

Not enough pictures. Please refer to any teamliquid strategy guide.

(This is not a troll, this is legitimate advice)

[Kitaru]

If you're playing games with slow DAS (NES Tetris, or Tetris Friends with Level 1 DAS and ARR) then finesse breaks down somewhat, because it's quite often faster to tap quickly than let the DAS do the work.

Minor note since it is not related to multiplayer in any way, but (unless you're a tapping god like Thor or Dan Z), you should be skillstop DASing almost 100% of the time in NES Tetris. Tapping resets DAS charge, but returning the d-pad to neutral or changing directions during entry delay sustains momentum. So, instead of DAS to wall -> tapback as you would in two-step finesse, you should DAS exactly to where you want the piece to stop or use wall finesse (i.e., DAS to wall -> neutral -> rotate).

Like I said though, that's completely minor. Excellent guide Rosti, thanks for writing it.

[Rosti_LFC]

Not enough pictures. Please refer to any teamliquid strategy guide.

(This is not a troll, this is legitimate advice)

I agree that some parts need pictures/fumen, and I intend to add them in, but your "refer to any teamliquid strategy guide" is bulls***.

http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=297764
http://www.complexitygaming.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4456
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessag...topic_id=163299

Not only are all of those in the TL "SC2 Strategy Recommended Threads" stickied post, but they contain zero pictures and are almost certainly not the only ones to do so - I just clicked on a handful of random ones until I got three with no pictures and it didn't take particularly many.

For specific scenarios or things which are hard to visualise, pictures are extremely useful and important. For more general rules (as with most of the things in this guide) picture examples are far less necessary, because they can only be examples anyway.

[caffeine]

Great work. Definitely should be a recommended reading for any player, as it's very "in-breadth."

[Ravendarksky]

... how did I miss this thread? I'll have a read through

[tjenyao]

[!--quoteo--][div class=\\\'quotetop\\\']QUOTE[/div][div class=\\\'quotemain\\\'][!--quotec--]The 7-bag randomiser also allows ST stacking (which isn't that advisable in VS usually, unless you're bloody good at it) [/quote]

Hi Rosti, may I know why ST stacking isn't viable in VS usually? :O Thanks! (I'm just a newb, learning and catching up, bear with me )

[Pikiwedia]

Hi Rosti, may I know why ST stacking isn't viable in VS usually? :O Thanks! (I'm just a newb, learning and catching up, bear with me )

Since the middle of the stack tends to be quite high, it makes you higly vulnerable to attacks, you'll simply get KO'd. You can't really keep up with doing ST-stacking because of all the garbage you receive, and need to clear.