This Week in Tetris

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...

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...