Perfect Clears: Emptying the Board Completely

Clear every block on the field at once and the bonus dwarfs everything else in the scoring table.

A perfect clear, also called an all-clear, happens when a line clear leaves the playing field completely empty. Not tidy: empty. Not a single block anywhere.

The reward

It is the largest single bonus in the game. In TETERI it adds between 800 and 2000 points times your level on top of the clear that produced it, and in versus it sends ten extra rows of garbage, enough to end most duels outright.

Nothing else in the scoring table comes close.

When they actually happen

Two situations, and the first is far more common than people expect.

At the start of a run. The board is empty, so it is already in a perfect clear state. Certain opening sequences of the first ten or so pieces tile the bottom rows exactly, clearing everything. Because the seven-bag guarantees which pieces are coming, these openers are learnable and repeatable.

After a deep dig. Occasionally you clear your way to a nearly empty board and the last few blocks happen to be arrangeable into complete rows. This is mostly opportunistic: you notice it is available rather than plan it.

Spotting one

The habit worth building is a quick check whenever the board gets low: is the total number of filled cells a multiple of ten? It has to be, since every row is ten wide and you need to clear whole rows with nothing left over.

If it is not a multiple of ten, a perfect clear is arithmetically impossible from here and you can stop looking. If it is, count what shapes would fill the gaps and check them against your queue and hold.

The risk

Chasing one is dangerous. Perfect clear setups usually require leaving specific gaps open and placing pieces in specific columns, which means declining placements you would otherwise take, and building a stack shaped for one outcome.

If the piece you need does not arrive in the window you have, you are left with a deliberately awkward board and no plan.

The sensible rule: take one if it is nearly free, and do not contort a healthy board chasing one.

Read next

• The Super Rotation System, ExplainedFour defined states per piece and a table of fallback offsets, which is what lets a piece spin into a gap it should not fit.
• Wall Kicks: Why Your Piece Moved When You Rotated ItA blocked rotation tries a list of nudges before giving up. Knowing that list turns a quirk into a tool.
• Lock Delay: The Half-Second That Saves Your RunA landed piece does not lock immediately, and nudging it restarts the clock, up to a limit.
• The Ghost Piece and Why It Is Not CheatingThe outline showing where a piece will land removes arithmetic, not difficulty.
• The CPU Opponent and Its Three DifficultiesHow the computer player decides where to put things, and what actually changes between rookie and nightmare.
• Seeded Randomness: Why Both Players Get the Same PiecesA small deterministic generator, one shared number, and two identical bags on different machines.