Speed is the name of the game

Speed is the name of the game, and the name of the game is speed.

A wise man once said, regarding a different puzzle game, "If you're not making mistakes, you're not playing fast enough." If someone plays twice as fast as you, they can do twice as much damage, and will win by the time you've hit them with 20 lines. If someone plays slightly faster, their advantage will still accumulate over the course of the game. Of course, this assumes they play just as well. In reality, we trade off the quality of our play for the speed.

How can we go faster? Let's make a list of ideas, and we each, on our own, can consider how much our own play is affected by each idea.

• Use hard drops as much as possible. (Potentially: prefer setups that can be done in pure hard drops other than the T-spin; prefer to not require other special spins when cleaning up the board.)
• Rotate and move pieces less. (Potentially: prefer setups which allow us to hard drop lots of pieces without moving/rotating, like IZ in the Izzy and LST in the Left-O; rotate the I piece to the right when placing on the right and to the left when placing on the left to save a move; optimize our T placement when we have a choice of the position to T spin from; etc.)
• Rotate pieces faster. (Potentially: input the rotate as soon as possible after the previous piece was hard-dropped, practice our down+triple tap+up in the left-O to happen as fast as possible; practice our double tap to invert L and J (while moving it to the right place at the same time!) to happen as fast as possible; get our S/Z spins down to a science so we can always get them rotated and fast-dropped to the right position without pausing, etc.)
• Move pieces to the right place faster. (Potentially: prefer setups which allow single move/tap, such as inverted-J on Izzy, make good use of hold-down left/right when applicable, think about hold-down versus multitap in our positioning.)
• Hard drop pieces sooner. (Potentially: practice our movement to the point where we are confident the piece is going to the right place without checking. Practice our single-tap to hard drop motion to happen as fast as possible. Practice our hold-down to hard drop to happen as fast as possible while getting the piece to the right place.)

So, that's ideas. What about us who want to be the l33test of the 3l33t? There is such a thing as perfection. Let's think about it, as we strive towards it.

Suppose you knew the best setup to do every time, at least according to our current theoretical understanding of the game. Maybe it's to hard-dropped OL-trip-dub for a given starting deck  (personal jargon explanation: do the OL setup, follow up with a T-spin triple at 14, follow that with a purely harddropped-other-than-T T-spin double at 21.) Suppose our first two pieces are the O and L. What is the earliest point we can get the O to the place we want to hard drop it? What is the earliest point we can hard-drop it? What is the earliest point we can place the L after hard-dropping the O? Another way of phrasing this is: what is the first frame? For you see, like most games, Tetris advances frame by frame, and if we can enter an input on the first possible frame, we have entered the input as fast as possible.

Given this, we can, in the style of a DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) player, execute a "Perfect Attack" on our openings. We can try, perfectly, to place every piece in the correct place at the earliest possible frame. Another way of looking at it, for those who like speed runs, is that we can speed-run our openings. We can try to play as close as possible to the TAS (Tool-Assisted Speedrun) where every single thing is done on the first possible known frame.

We can figure out the fastest we can possibly execute the opening, measure our speed, and figure out how many frames behind perfection we are. We can replay our own openings, frame by frame, and see where we are losing time. And we can work on our weaknesses, finding where we are slowest, and improve them. Until we are perfect, which will never happen. But such is the dream.

As I'm writing this without reading what's out there, I'm not sure what existing resources we have for data on frame-by-frame perfection. But, dear reader, feel free to link me to some. If they don't exist, well, we can create them ourselves, and play evermore closer, day by day, to the perfect game.