How the Hold Slot Works

Park one piece for later, but only once per piece, which is what makes it a decision rather than an undo button.

The hold slot stores one piece for later use. Press hold and the current piece goes into storage; if something was already there, it comes out and becomes your active piece.

The one-use rule

You can only use hold once per piece. After holding, the slot is locked until you place the piece you are now holding.

That restriction is the entire reason hold is interesting. Without it, you could swap back and forth endlessly, effectively choosing freely between two pieces every turn. With it, each hold is a commitment: you are trading your current problem for the stored one, and you cannot undo it.

TETERI shows the locked state by turning the hold panel's border red, so you can see at a glance whether the option is available.

The three ways to use it

Storing an I piece. The classic use. Take the long piece out of circulation, build a nine-column stack with a well open, and drop it in for four rows when the well is deep enough. This is the single most common reason to hold.

Escaping a bad piece. An S or Z arrives when your surface cannot take one. Hold it, take whatever is behind it, and place the awkward piece later when the surface has changed.

Setting up a spin. Hold a T while you build the slot for it, then bring it back when the setup is ready.

The trap

The mistake nearly every player makes early is treating hold as an undo button, holding whenever the current piece looks inconvenient. That fills the slot with whatever was most annoying at the time and leaves you no hold available when you actually need one.

Better discipline: hold on purpose, for one of the three reasons above. If you find yourself holding just to avoid thinking about a placement, place it instead. There is almost always somewhere acceptable.

Getting it back

The slot unlocks when the next piece spawns. So the cost of holding is not permanent. It is one piece of lost flexibility, which is exactly the size of cost that makes a decision worth thinking about.

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