This Week in Tetris

As the month draws to a close and CTWC gets closer, we're starting to see the field widened and our assumptions challenged by big upsets. Challengers is finished, the CTL season is shaping up to be a great one, and one of the most anticipated brackets in Masters history is looming. It feels like anything could happen. I'm introducing line scores for this week's matches using something I'm calling "slash notation", loosely inspired by how cricket scores are communicated. Please let me know if you find this helpful or confusing; I put a key at the bottom of the post. The numbers next to the player's names refer to the April 2024 Premiere Poll rankings, not tournament seeds. As always, positive and negative feedback is encouraged. if you like this, let me know, and if you see any inaccuracies, let me know what I got wrong. CTWC Dallas Underground This was a fun little event where four top Texas-based players ( 3 PIXELANDY , 4 DOG , 9 MYLES , 17 SODIUM ) me...

Tetris fans were treated to an overstuffed calendar this week, as a busy CTL season gets going in earnest, two Masters brackets are played out, two sets involving top-25 players are completed in Gauntlet, and a big-time in-person matchup happens in Paris. Numbers refer to the April 2024 Premiere Poll rankings , not tournament seeds. As always, let me know if you liked this, if you notice any errors, or if you have any suggestions for improvement. CTWC France Regional The Paris event had the full weekend to stretch out into, letting them have a flat bracket (you can view it here ) and best-of-seven matchups in the last four rounds. This coming weekend will be the premiere of the Dallas Underground, with four top players ( 3 PIXELANDY , 4 DOG , 9 MYLES , 17 SODIUM ) taking each other on in a round-robin in-person tournament on April 27 at 2200 UTC.  CTWC 2024 France Regional Finals 12 DANV def. 5 BLUE SCUTI (4-1) Not a lot of killscreen play on this one, though every game made it t...

We've made it to the second installment of This Week in Tetris! I'm going to normally put these out on Tuesday, but I might finish a bit early once in a while. As always, feel free to engage with me to tell me if you liked this or if I've goofed anything up. The new CTL season kicked off with the draw and opening night last week, so this week I'm including a preview of the new first- and second-tier divisions in addition to the match recaps. Classic Tetris Monthly  CTM didn't slow down at all after the conclusion of Mega Masters, with the Orange Bracket of the April edition of Masters and two Challengers brackets being played. CTM April 2024 Masters Round 1 (Orange Bracket) 2 ALEX THACH def. 21 COALBUCKET (3-0) Coal had a hard time getting anything going, topping out early in the first two games. In game 3, Coal had a 1.1 into 29, but he was playing Alex T so he was down almost 200k anyway. Twitch CTM April 2024 Masters Round 1 (Orange Bracket) 12 DANV def. 7 GER...

Putting together my Premiere Poll rankings for the past couple months, I found it hard to keep track of the details of all the different matches between top players across all the different tournaments in the Classic Tetris scene. To help sift through all of them, I'm going to try to give a short recap of all the major Tetris matches in the previous week. (Sometimes the recaps might get a little longer, but I'll do my best to make them roughly tweet-shaped.) This is mostly going to be targeted at people compiling the rankings, but sometimes I might showcase other matches that I think are noteworthy or worth watching. If you like this, get some sort of use out of it, notice an inaccuracy, or want to argue about anything, feel free to reach out to me, either in the comments here or on Discord (username "nikvo"). Getting your feedback and engagement will help motivate me to keep doing this in the future. The numbers before the players' names refer to the April Premie...

Classic Tetris has a thriving competitive scene based on the 1989 NES version of the game. There are quite a few different competitions, a lot of which attract top-level players, and it can be a bit difficult to keep track of it all. If you want to watch some Tetris or start playing it yourself (some of the tournaments are open to players of all skill levels, including you, no matter who you are), here are places to check out. You can find a more complete list of Classic Tetris Discord servers here . Classic Tetris World Championship CTWC is the place where it all started. It's the most prestigious tournament, a huge in-person event where the world champion is crowned every year. The team behind it also organizes a large number of in-person events throughout the year, which are a lot of fun to attend. You can find the full schedule on their Discord server. Twitch | Youtube | Discord Classic Tetris Monthly CTM is the most prestigious online-only competition. Their marquee tourname...

 I am part of the panel that determines the Premiere Poll, a ranking of the top 25 Classic Tetris players currently doing their thing. Here's my submission of the April version of the poll, with a little blurb explaining my reasoning for each. The numbers in parentheses are a player's position in (the March 2024 Premiere poll overall | my ranking for March). NR stands for "Not Ranked". The names are the ones used in the Classic Tetris Match Database and Elo Spreadsheet. 1 FRACTAL (1 | 1) Fractal is the back-to-back CTM champion and hasn't dropped an Elo set yet in 2024. He's 100 Elo points clear of the #2 player. Both Alex and Andy pushed Fractal to a decider this MM, but he keeps showing everyone what he's made of. 2 ALEX THACH (3 | 3) Obviously the world record is huge, but Alex T has also has had some big comp Ws lately -- he was runner-up to Fractal in Feb Masters and put together a near-flawless game record in a very tough CTL div. And the rematch w...