A Quick Primer on Classic Tetris Tournaments

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 tournament is the Masters Event, a sixteen-person monthly tournament that features most of the current top players playing for sizable prize pools. They also hold the Community Tournaments, which are open to anyone. The CTM Discord server is by far the largest in the scene and serves as a community hub -- if you have a question regarding Classic Tetris, this is the place to ask it.
Twitch | Youtube | Discord

Classic Tetris League
CTL is a round-robin tournament featuring many of the top players of the scene, with a new season starting every two months or so. CTL's league format means there's a lot of Tetris to watch, including intriguing matchups that wouldn't come up in CTM that often, and there's a promotion-relegation system in place to up the stakes.
Twitch | Youtube | Discord

Classic Tetris Gauntlet
Gauntlet is a team event, with a regular season and playoff structure that reflects the norm in the eSports world. Most teams contain two or three top-ranked players.
Youtube | Discord

Classic Tetris Wars
CTW hosts one-off events in a bunch of different formats, but the common thread is that eight players compete at once. Maybe not for absolute beginners, but players who have about a 600k PB and up can find this a lot of fun to participate in.
Twitch | Youtube | Discord

Tetris for the Non-Pros
I'm going to make sure I spend every opportunity I get plugging TNP since I help run it :) TNP is a round-robin league for absolute beginners up through people whose PBs are around a maxout. Like CTL, TNP also has a promotion and relegation structure to make sure you're playing folks who are are around the same skill level as you, and those who get promoted from the uppermost TNP div can go play in CTL.  The server also hosts other events, such as the Sub-Maxout Cup, a knockout tournament, and Fast Lane, which showcases some of the best players in the league as they vie to bypass working their way through the divisions to go play in CTL. It's a great community and we'd love for you to join.
Discord


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DAS Wrapped: 2024 Edition

Image
Sonic (@sonicthescrew) is a staff writer at This Week in Tetris, the main editor of the DAS Statistics Project, and a math graduate student who likes playing with numbers and computers. It's no secret that 2024 has been a huge year for NES Tetris. Over the course of the year, TWiT has covered many open playstyle tournaments, featuring rollers, tappers and DAS players, but one huge change in the landscape has fallen outside our coverage -- that of DAS-only matches. The DAS playstyle has seen a huge revival this year, with multiple new DAS-only tournaments popping up after the announcement of the Jonas Neubauer Cup at Portland in September. With this we saw the rise of many players who haven't had the spotlight before and are now garnering accolades for their abilities in the DAS playstyle. We began the year with five DAS 1.3 players (Tristop, Tugi, Mark Migas, Nenu, NGC Man), and ended the year doubling that count (adding PixelAndy, Matt Martin, Giovanni, Valor and Meme, who g...
Read more

Premiere Poll October 2024 Cheat Sheet

This post includes, to the best of my knowledge, all open-playstyle Classic Tetris matches in September that may be relevant to Premiere Poll panelists, with links to the Twitch VODs and This Week in Tetris writeups, if they exist. Remember that the final scoreline may not tell the full story. Numbers next to names refer to September's Premiere Poll rankings. For daily updates, and to be informed when new TWiT posts are released, be sure to join our Discord server . There are bound to be a few errors on this list, so if you notice any, please let me know. Classic Tetris Monthly Masters Event AUG MASTERS FINALS (Sep 3) | Bracket 5 SIDNEV def. 7 THEDENGLER (3-2) | Twitch | TWiT 2 BLUE SCUTI def. 1 ALEX THACH (3-2) | Twitch | TWiT 5 SIDNEV def. 2 BLUE SCUTI (3-1) | Twitch | TWiT SEP MASTERS GREEN (Sep 9) | Bracket 7 THEDENGLER def. 5 SIDNEV (3-1) | Twitch | TWiT 6 MYLES def. 20 MEME (3-0) | Twitch | TWiT 7 THEDENGLER def. 6 MYLES (3-2) | Twitc...
Read more

My Rankings for the May 2024 Premiere Poll

Numbers in parentheses refer to the ( Premiere Poll ranking | my ranking ) for April. NR stands for "Not Ranked". 1 FRACTAL (1 | 1) What does it take to beat Fractal, the newly-crowned Mega Masters champion? Thanks to Andy, we now know: not only do you have to already be one of the best players in the game, you also have to play one of the best sets of your life. 2 DOG (4 | 5) Trying to separate players two through four in this list is giving me a headache if I think too long about it, so I'm going to go with my gut and put Dog in second, whose 29 play has looked absolutely terrifying this month. He was a force of nature in his back-to-back sweeps of Gerald Freeman and Alex T to win CTL Season 24, and he put up 2 million points on his way to take the 39 killscreen world record in his CTL match against Somalian. 3 ALEX THACH (2 | 2) When Alex T isn't busy innovating in the space of messy celebrations, he's racking up big wins (this month's victims include B...
Read more