How to Practise Deliberately

Playing more runs is not practice. Constraining a run so it isolates one skill is.

Most people improve by playing, plateau, and then keep playing at the plateau for a long time. The way past it is to stop playing full runs for a while.

Why ordinary play stops teaching

A normal run exercises everything at once: stacking, queue reading, speed, digging, decision-making under pressure. When it goes wrong you get one signal, which is that you died, with no information about which of those failed.

Deliberate practice isolates one thing so the feedback is legible.

Five drills worth doing

Flatness drill. Play without clearing lines deliberately, and simply try to keep the surface even for as many pieces as possible. Removes scoring pressure, exposes exactly which pieces you place badly.

Digging drill. Bury a hole on purpose in the first ten pieces, then dig it out. You will use this skill constantly and almost nobody practises it calmly.

No-hold drill. Play a run without using hold at all. It forces you to find placements for awkward pieces instead of deferring them, which is the skill hold was letting you avoid developing.

No-ghost drill. Turn the ghost piece off in settings. Forces you to build an internal model of the stack, which is what you rely on at speed anyway.

One-setup drill. Play a run where the only clears you take are T-spin doubles. Painful, and it makes spin setups automatic faster than anything else.

Reviewing

After a run that ended badly, ask a specific question rather than a general one: what was the first placement that was actually wrong? Not the last one, the first. Runs end several pieces after the mistake that caused them.

The unglamorous truth

The skills that raise your ceiling are queue reading, downstacking and finesse. None of them is exciting and all of them are boring to practise. The skills that feel most impressive, such as fast placements and flashy spins, mostly follow from those three rather than the other way round.

Read next

• The Nine-Column Stack and the Open WellFill nine columns flat, leave one open, and wait for the long piece. The standard shape for a high score.
• Six-Three Stacking and Why Some Players Prefer ItSplitting the board into two flat regions instead of one gives you somewhere to put the awkward pieces.
• Read the Queue, Not the Falling PieceIf you are deciding where the current piece goes while it falls, you are already too slow for level ten.
• Use Hold on Purpose, Not as an Undo ButtonThree good reasons to hold, and one very common bad one.
• Where the Name "Tetris" Comes FromA Greek numeral prefix welded to the name of a racquet sport, because the author liked both.
• The Arcade Versions and What They ChangedA coin-op cabinet has different incentives to a home console, and the design shifted to match.