Counterplay, Mindgames, and the Long Combo

One way I used to take wins off players faster than me was to use mindgames and counterplay. I recall a game where I opened Long Combo, and my opponent immediately replied next round with a Long Combo of his own. But this round I went two T-spins into all-clear at 20, and nuked his Long Combo in 15 or so seconds, before it started breaking. Bam, round won.

Of course, mindgames, mixups, and counterplay are all predicated on knowing what counters what, and sometimes furthermore on what other people think counters what. On ladder play, many people assume that if you do something one round, you'll likely do it the next, and this is a pretty safe assumption for many players. A player named Windkey used to play Long Combo every single round, so if you had never met him and just countered what he did round 1, you'd come out pretty well against him and others like him.

But, what counters the Long Combo?


1. Long Combo them right back



This was what I was relying upon in my mindgame. If one is faster and knows it, one can simply build a slightly bigger, slightly more greedy Long Combo and win by breaking a few more lines. Of course, this opens one up to all the other Long Combo counters we can think of. Knowing that a lot of players think this way, and knowing other, harder counters, allows us to mindgame wins from some pretty tough opponents.

2. All Clears at 15 and 20

    

My personal favorite hard counter is to do multiple T-spins into an all-clear, getting around 20 damage on their screen. If they've done a greedy central Long Combo build this still kills them. Theoretically they can avoid death by building a T-spin or Tetris in the hole and breaking it either before our all-clear is done, preventing the all-clear, or countering the all-clear so they don't die outright. But even if they do this, they likely die to our next attack.

Of course, the issue with this is that all-clears are not reliable: we need the decks to come in the right order for us do them. But I personally didn't care much about this when playing someone I'd be lucky to beat otherwise given their speed--winning a large percentage of rounds was good enough for me. Maybe that's not good enough for top-ranked players playing someone much lower down, though.

3. Side Long Combo

    

I tried the above mindgame against Karaage (から~げ), then #2 in the world and now #1, last week. After I won round 1 with a  Long Combo opening, this was the response I got the next two rounds, which seems pretty wise to me. He built a right-side Long Combo, which, builds faster than a central Long Combo because the pieces mostly start in column 4-6 and have a much shorter distance to move. One can then simply out-greedy the central version. Here I think the plan against a central Long Combo would be to either build to 15 and start breaking, or start breaking a bit after the central starts. As long as we start breaking reasonably soon after our opponent, we won't top out before we win by out-greedying them. Of course if we go past 15, we will likely die before our greed pays off if they get ahead on breaks, which is very likely given that the central combo will break faster than the side given that pieces start close to the center.

Following the mindgame, I had switched to opening T-spin into possible all-clear at this point, but I didn't win either round. If you do this and come across a T-spin opening, you just start breaking at height 9 or 10. This is pretty safe--an Ace will only do 10 or 11 damage, and most T-spin openings will do at most 9 damage by the time you've built high enough. The side Long Combo may come out at slight disadvantage, but the disadvantage is small enough that a faster player can still win. This also should be good enough to stop an all-clear at 20 or 25: in the height-10 build above, first break was on piece 18 and third (to do the first line of damage) was at 20. The 9 is even faster, breaking at 16. Given the inherently faster placement and no soft drops, this should be well fast enough to damage T-spins + all-clear at 20 before the all-clear can hit. It might still be vulnerable to a 15, though. Besides a fast bop, we could try beating it from behind via multispin + Long Combo, relying on their forced break at height 9 to give us a win via us building a higher combo than theirs.

Also note that one can build columns 1-3 a bit higher than our chosen height, since they won't kill us. So one can dump a piece or two here to get a good starting sequence.

4. Ace them.



A basic Ace isn't so reliable, but if we hit, they can't build their combo particularly high. We could also flexible Ace and try to counter Long Combo them if we don't hit, which puts us at advantage on hit and equality on miss. Or we could do what's currently popular on miss, and quickly shift to a TetrisTea pattern, likely in column 6, but this seems markedly at disadvantage to me.

And of course if we double-Ace them, e.g. by acing with TSZ and getting an O to all-clear 5 moves later, they'll just die, same as with an Izzy15.

5. Quick T-spin openings--hit them fast enough.

  

This is largely our fallback if we miss our T-spin into all-clear. If we damage them fast enough, their combo can't be particularly high. Besides T-spin openings that lead to all-clears, we can do an OJ here, and get 11 lines of damage at piece 14, meaning they won't be able to build past height 9 if they're not past it yet. On the other hand, thinking about it, it takes 57 squares to get to height 9, or 15 tetrominos = two decks and one piece. So with even placement, they will be able to get here and even a little past it in our T-dropping time, especially if they're faster than us. Of course, we may hit them at an awkward point in their piece sequence which doesn't work for the combo.

My results suggest that of the five options, this is the weakest against some of the stronger current practitioners. But it certainly doesn't lose outright.


Conclusion

When I was a wee lad, I thought that quick T-spin openings with the threat of all-clears were sufficient to disincentivize Long Combos, but opening Long Combo is coming back into the vogue, and quick T-spins with all-clear possibility no longer seem good enough. And of course, our opponent can reactively Long Combo if they see our opening deck offers little in the way of good, all-clear-possible openings. So we need more than that.

What do I put my money on? I say, defaulting to T-spins with all-clear possibility, and doing the rightside Long Combo as counterplay/mixup against likely central Long Combos. Perhaps throwing in the occasional flexible Ace too. Some other players seem to have put their money on serving up a lot of Aces. I'll have to test things out a bit more.

Ridiculously greedy T-spin openings

Warning: the openings in this post are probably not good. Don't plan to use them in competitive play.

      
        

The most ridiculously greedy opening is to set up a 20-line Long Combo, then start breaking. This is actually seen in top level play when both players open Long Combo and try to out-greed each other. On the other hand, some greedy T-spin combos I've seen are a lot less relevant. Let's start with the one that inspired this post, played against me by Glitch432 from California.

1. Glitch432's Greed: triptripdub

    

The idea here is to set up two T-spin triples into T-spin double on the left with LIZS, ZL, then fill in the right. While not useful against many openings, the greedy triptrip counters the rarely-used side long combo opening, bopping it with 13 damage the moment it builds to 8 lines. That might have some use. Another fun but useless tidbit: after the first two trips, you can put an inverted J on top of the Z for another two trips. Triples galore!

Of course, this opening loses quite trivially to any 15 or 20 piece all-clear, a central Long Combo, and generally anything that puts 14 lines of damage on the board before it can play its first triple. Our next opening, played against me by Jonathon from New York, is less vulnerable.

2. Jonathon's Quick Trips: single + triptrip

  

Needless to say, Jonathon did not win the round with this one. But the opening isn't completely impractical; the quick single can prevent a loss to an all-clear, and one can instead do a T-spin double pattern in column 8 and just opportunistically do the Trips instead against an opponent intent on setting up an early side Long Combo. The biggest point against this opening is that the first-deck constraints on it means that you can rarely use it even if you want to, and when you can you usually want to Izzy instead.

To the mix, let me add a few of my own creations from my files:

3. Robert's greedy TetrisTea openings

    

I've ordered these from most to least practical. Let's start with the most reasonable one.

  

I used this opening to pass the Tetris versus Puyo levels in Adventure mode as quickly and easily as possible, since the computer opponent doesn't really fight back. We just build two Tetrises and a T-spin, hold an I, then do T-spin + Tetris + Tetris together in a combo when we see the T and I occur close to each other. Computer takes nearly a full screen of damage, level over.

It's actually sane to use this in real competitive TvP matches sometimes, though, if we open Tetris Tea and have good reason not to attack them earlier, for example if they waste their early pieces in a small break, or if their board appears to be very robust to an early attack. Here, it's not our plan to open greedy, but rather something we do responsively, as an option to counter our opponent's play.

    

This one is slightly more theoretically efficient, but unlikely to see much use as an opening in real play. We build a Left-O multispin on top of our column 7 Tetris, hold a T, and do T-spin + T-spin + Tetris together in a combo when we see T and I occur close to each other, again. We need to be pretty clever with the I, though. We can either get it in at the end by clearing the hook with a J or L, or I-spin it in via the AAB sequence.

The reason this wouldn't see much real play versus the above is the lack of flexibility. We're in a fairly awkward spot until the Left-O finishes building, so we'd almost always take the Tetris before setting up the multispin, at least when used as an opening attack.



Here's something I did while practicing transitions, which gives almost the most huge pure back-to-back combo you can get. You hold T, and magically happen to get two decks with their Ts near to each other and an I in the mix. Bam, you can do THREE T-spin triples with a Tetris. I wouldn't plan on doing this outside of Marathon or Free Play, though.

Conclusion

Really greedy T-spin combo openings aren't very practical. But though not so hot as main go-to tactics, they might still come up as counterplay. Really, though, their big selling point is being fun and awesome.

Minutiae: Izzy15 all-clear after WumbOJ20

Earlier, I discussed the WumbOJ and its all-clear on piece 20:

    

This is a No-I all-clear, and gives us an I in hand as we go into our fourth deck.

Not wanting to go into excessively deep detail, I only gave one Izzy15 I-fill all-clear we can do 15 pieces later. This is the one I use most:

    

But hey, I'm posting minutiae now! I should note a couple other all-clears I use here. This simple change swaps the position of I and JJ:

      

This can come in handy if we want to place our I on the O instead of on the S, which we may need to do for certain deck orders.

There's also this entirely different path, used if we get the O as the last piece in our fourth deck:

    

Here, we substitute a LIJ 2x6 for the O+JJ in the above variant, and instead place the O on the right after we've taken our T-spin. Depending on which comes first, we can place the first I either on the L or the Z. This one doesn't come up as much, but it's awesome to know.

If we have to place the I very early, e.g. with a fourth deck starting T, I, we can use one of these which place the I on nothing at all:

    

    

    

    

    

We only get one T-spin on these paths, but they're still pretty good.

One more which isn't part of my current repertoire. I learned this I-fill today from a game against Kirito (キリト), the current world #2:

    

This is nice because it leads easily into a repeated T-spin pattern if you miss the all-clear. In terms of option coverage, it handles needing to play the fifth-deck O very early, but has a lot of ordering constraints. I'm not sure it's that useful in this context.

While in my initial post on all-clears at 15 and 20 I discussed the most used Izzy15s, there are a whole host of them I skipped over, keeping it overview-level and giving the reader room to explore for himself. In a future post, I'll whip out more different variants from my files.