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.

Comeback post! Edits and minutiae to come.

I took a bit of a break from this blog while my Switch was warranty repaired. As I come back to Puyo Puyo Tetris, the first things I want to write are actually edits to existing posts.

I came back to a new set of people in the top 10, and in one of my first few games, played Mahoroa (マホロア), current world #1. He did this Ace against me: (Sequence: JSZ)



This works by doing a double S-spin to get the S into place, then doing a Z-spin to fit the Z. I hadn't thought of that before. I added it to the Ace post.

While practicing transitions, I came upon the asymmetry of the hook I-spin. Example:

    

On the left, we need to hook spin from the third state with B, so we do AAB.
On the right, we need to hook spin from the first state with A, so we do ABA.

Note that we need a two-high hook on the right, since otherwise we can't bellyflop spin into the first state. On the left side, a one-high hook suffices. It's kind of epic that you do exactly the opposite thing on the left side and the right side. I plan to edit a more filled-out step-by-step into the Spins post.

I also did a bunch of experimentation regarding the T-block Ace, particularly the 20 piece all-clear. I actually ended up really liking this opening because the midgame it transitions to feels very smooth. One thing I noticed on the T-block20 is that you can end up with the T in hand going into the fourth deck after the all clear. I'll have to think about what openings are good for taking advantage of this. My current thought is that one might be able to do a 10-piece Basic Ace with much higher frequency, since the T makes for numerous epic ways to all clear. And then, you end up with a T in your pieces next deck, for a quicker followup. I also have an inkling this might give a high-percentage Jail15, with a fallback to two quick T-spin triples if missed.

Most of my posts up until now have been in the realm of Epic Important Information In Overview or In Depth, but I think perhaps I'll take a hiatus from that and do a bit of more frequent posting of minutiae that isn't so important for winning lots of competitive matches. There's lots of very beautiful stuff in Tetris, and talking about it is fun.