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.